18 May 2010
Well there is of course lots you should do to optimise your website for keywords but it depends on your skill-set and the tools you use to modify your site code.

So to keep things simple here are my best 5 Tips for Seach Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the beginner.

1) Know what keywords you want to target for a particular page - and don't have too many - e.g. if the page is about "ladies silk blouse" then make sure this is the key phrase you use.

2) Always have the key phrase in your TITLE tag (this shows up at the top-left of the browser... if you have no tools or HTML skills for this then you may need professional help. Buts it's mega important !!

3) Have the key phrase at the top of the page too as a heading (in your main H1 headline tag.

4) Get as many in-bound links to your site or page from other related sites, e.g. fashion directories, fashion blogs, reviews and articles about the fashion / clothes industry. You need lots of links to your site.

5) Submit an XML sitemap of all your page URLS to Google via their FREE WebMaster Tools service - http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and read their excellent tips.

Hope that helps for now ? It should get you going but to do SEO properly needs a fair bit of knowledge and experience. Good Luck

18 May 2010
As suggested by DIWD above, in addition to that the very basics:

1. Make sure that crawlers can access all public areas on your website that means: no frames, no flash navigation unless you have another navigation, no JS menus that crawler cannot access.

Nice to Have:
1. URL Rewriting or call it friendly URLs. You may need a programmer to do this for you.
2. RSS Feeds for new products, RSS Feeds for product reviews. Again a Programmer might be needed for this.

20 May 2010
HI Joana

There are many simple and small things you can do, which all contribute towards your Search Engine Results, most of the main factors are mentioned above, you could maybe also look at doing work away from your site, such as social marketing on Facebook, Twitter, BT Tradespace and even YouTube, you can add relevant Keywords into each of your profiles which will help search engine find your profile and also drive traffic to your site.

20 May 2010
Hi

All I could add to the above comments is:

Consider setting up a Google product feed, this will ensure your products appear when people search using Google Shopping.

Always use original and unique content, do not copy and paste from another website. The search engines do not like duplicate content so always write product descriptions from scratch.

Setting up a blog using Wordpress then linking it to your website will help to increase your brand visibility in the search engine and increase the relevancy of your ecommerce website. Use the blog to discuss fashion topics, products and to post photos, look to the Topshop blog as an example. Further to this try to link and comment on other fashion blogs...

As someone else said use social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Polyvore and Flickr to get as much of your brand content and products out there!

Good luck!

23 May 2010
Well there are two types of search results that appear on google when you search the first is ad sense links which appear at the top of any search result. This is a great a cost effective way to bring traffic to your web site. By using ad word you select where you want your links to appear on google under any keyword. You have to pay PPC (pay per click)(e.g. 0.05 p per click of the link) google allows you to set a Max amount in 1 day so you don't have to spending to much money. I would recommend this because it is a great way to bring quick traffic in.
The second links are organic links these are free links that appear under the ad sense links and are links that people have built up over time through page rank. Google ranks your page due to the amount of back links to your web site. So simply if you want to increase your traffic increase the number of back links to your web site. This can be simply be achieved by adding your web site URL to posts that you make on topics in online forum. This is a very effective way in which to increase your page rank. Find out what your page rank is by going to google and search fro page rank checker.

Hope this helped

1 June 2010
If I were you, I'd transfer over to a CMS (content management system). A WordPress site is highly capable of becoming an eCommerce site. WordPress also offers some amazing SEO tools. All of the work you're doing or could end up having to do, the WordPress CMS can handle for you automatically. Managing your who site must be difficult. I used to manage a couple of eCommerce sites in addition to my own. I sat down to learn WordPress and I'm never looking back now! Time is money and WordPress has saved me so much of both in the long run.

2 June 2010
I agreed with most of the options above, just make sure you don't over do anything, Google, Yahoo, etc do penalize for over SEOing.

Ask a professional for a quote to do it professionally if you want to be sure, but link building and ensuring links are properly formatted would be great.

3 June 2010
Seeking Professional Help is always Better !
Still I got easy stepwise SEO Tips which definitely would help.

. Title Tags
The title Should contain keywords and keyword phrases that is important to your site. Our recommended maximum number of characters for this tag is 60.
Also when counting your characters remember that spaces are considered as well.
Titles should appeal to the reader otherwise even a top position will lose a lot of clicks.
For example, "fashion,modeling,models,fashion website," is unlikely to induce a click. What may induce a click would be like:
Fashion - More about Modeling and Fashion Design.

2. Description
The maximum number of characters I recommend for this Tag is 150. Any longer than this and it will only be cut off and may count against your site being listed high in the search engines. Try to repeat your keywords that you used in your title in a proper sentence and in 3rd party. Advoid I, Me, Myself etc

3. Keywords
keywords My recommended maximum number of characters for this tag is 250. Any more than that may be considered spamming. Keep your keywords focused upon what your site is about.
Don't think that if I use an assortment of different keywords that your site will be a seller. Targeted marketing is associated with your keywords.

4. Keyword Nesting
Description: A term used in searching to indicate the sequence in which operations are to be performed
Enclosing words in parentheses identifies a group or "nest." Groups can be within other groups.
The operations will be performed from the innermost nest to the outmost, and then from left to right.
keyword nesting is nesting your top 5 most important keywords in the html page that the public will see. I would recommend using the keywords that you've used in your title, description.

5. Head Tags not to be confused with (head) tags def.
HEAD or HEADER (of HTML document)
The top portion of the HTML source code behind Web pages, beginning with and ending with . It contains the Title, Description, Keywords fields and others that web page authors may use to describe the page. The title appears in the title bar of most browsers, but the other fields cannot be seen as part of the body of the page. To view the portion of web pages in your browser, click VIEW, Page Source. In Internet Explorer, click VIEW, Source. Some search engines will retrieve based on text in these fields.
Head Tags should be a repeat of your title tag. Most webmasters put their head tag right after the body tag. A head tag will look like this (h1) (/h1) with the ( and ) being replaced with < >

6. Anchor Links
Anchor Links is one of the most important html tags that your site needs to gain search engine page rank
especially in google and msn.

6 June 2010
I agree with all the above answers and I have 1 more tip to add to that, make sure your website validates in the W3 schools validator. You can find it easily on Google.

I found that another way to drive traffic to your website is to send out a monthly newsletter advertising your offers (if you have any) and the lastest designs that have coming in to your store for instance, or even fashion advice and tips.

There's some great websites out there that allow to you send nice looking HTML emails for free and track the peformance of your email campaign.

I would sign up, I love fashion!

17 June 2010
Something that nobody has mentioned so far, but in our opinion is THE most important factor of all..

Make sure that all your pages have good, valuable content.

For every unique product that you sell, have you included enough information about it? Take a look at your pages and ask yourself - "Is this page doing a good enough job of selling my product?" If not, then why not?

Google likes descriptive information on a page, and by making sure that each of your products has detailed content, you'll start to rank for a lot of long-tail keywords.

If you only have 1 or 2 paragraphs of information about each product, then try to expand on this. Don't go silly and overload the page with text, but make sure there is enough original content on them for your pages to stand out from the rest, and do a valid job of trying to convert the customer into a sale at the same time.

21 June 2010
Hi Joanna

I've been reviewing this just this month for a UK based client of mine who sells car parts and found a solution that's fully customisable.

What's difficult though is finding a solution that fits the following requirements...

Easy to maintain for the client
Easy to use both for the client and the user
Allows full customisation of the SEO
SImple and effectiuve
Robust
Flexible

It took me a couple of weeks to tick all the boxes but we have a solution in place now that just needs to be implemented.

1 July 2010
Take a look at our blog, www.firstfound-blog.co.uk for some ideas on how to optimise your site.