SEO
From i.STAR Help
Websites don’t enjoy the advantage of foot traffic to bring shoppers in like physical storefronts do. Ongoing marketing and management is crucial to building and running a successful e-commerce business. You may have the best looking site selling the best products for the best price, but if your site has no visitors, or those visitors are not coming to buy product, sales will not materialize.
- i.STAR-specific statistics are available for your site at /admin, under the Statistics tab. For example: www.yourwebsite.com/admin
- Weblog statistics are available for your site at /stats. For example: www.yourwebsite.com/stats
Both areas require your admin login, provided during your site implementation.
In this day and age, online shoppers are not going to find you unless they are looking for your site specifically or you are returned somewhere on the first page of their search results … the latter is what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are all about. Sometimes, these terms are used to include more than just optimization and marketing.
- Initial SEO efforts (submitting your website to directories and engines, announcing your arrival, etc).
- Ongoing SEO efforts (continually optimizing your site for search engines to make it as easy and likely as possible for them to find you organically)
- Marketing and promotion (social media and blogging included)
- Advertising (including pay-per-click, Google AdWords, etc)
- Strategic partnerships
- Local business marketing to ensure your brick and mortar locations are included in online business listings and reviews.
- Regular site maintenance and updates to stay current (products, design, SEO enhancements)
- Monitoring and managing your site traffic patterns and efforts through a combination of i.STAR stats (both /admin and /stats) but probably more importantly Google Analytics and similar tracking systems.
- Pursuing alternative channels for your product including Google product search and similar services.
Additional Articles and Resources
- Tips and FAQs : Information about traffic to your site, ranking, organic SEO and more
- Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs : What Google has to say.
- 7 Must-Read Webmaster Central Blog Posts : Articles from Google's Webmaster Central blog with answers to relevant topics.
- Sitemaps : Information on sitemaps
- Robots.txt file : FAQ on setting up, purpose and common mistakes
- Open Directory : Adding your site to Open Directory
- Google : Optimizing for Google
- Bing : Optmizing for Bing
- Other Search Engines : Optimizing for Other Search Engines
- GetListed.org : Help with small business listings
SEO Professionals
- Third_Party_Resources : References for SEO firms
