How to Get Customers for Free

There's no shortage of ways to spend money promoting your online shop - and certainly no shortage of people willing to take your money! However, search engines can be sending you qualified customers all day every day. How do you get a piece of this traffic? It's estimated that 70% of people stop at the first 10 results in most search engines and over 90% don't go beyond the first 30. If your shop isn't in the top of the search results, you're missing out. We'll go through the five steps to getting you higher in the search engine rankings.

Choose the right keywords
You need to decide which search term(s) you want to be top for. This might not be as obvious as you think. Firstly, you need to know what people are (and aren't) searching for. Being the number 1 result for a search term no one uses is no good. The Overture keyword selector tool can show you what people are searching for. Take some guesses as to what people are looking for, try them out and see what the tool says - you might be surprised! Do a Google search for a possible keyword. If, for example, you see 5,000,000 results returned you have to consider: can you beat 4,999,990 of them? You might be better off getting a number 1 position for a lesser keyword than a number 200 for a big one. Be careful not to be too ambitious - that keyword with the most traffic might be highly competitive in the search engines. If you are competing against a multi-million dollar online shop you're unlikely to win.

Make sure your site is search engine friendly
The goal here is to make sure the search engines like your shopping cart site. You might need some help from your techies with this.

• Create a sitemap pointing to all your pages, or all your key pages. This helps the search engines find all your pages.
• Include your keywords in your HTML title tags in all your key shopping cart pages.
• Include your keywords in a h1 tag.
• If your shopping cart or CMS uses session IDs in the URL, turn this off, or change to a different tool. You can usually tell if you have this turned on if you URL looks like http://www.widgets.com/products/page.php?product=2329&session=29dha9198yfka8129fnv0. The big long session number is the dangerous part.
• Make your HTML code clean & validated - most search engines prefer this.
• Make sure your keywords are included in the copy on your site.

Some shopping carts such as Erol or osCommerce (with an add on module) provide excellent search engine optimization tools.

Get links
It's no secret - most search engines love sites that have lots of links pointing at them. Get your customers & suppliers to link to you. This is the single most important thing you can do. There are companies that specialize in helping you get links - look them up if it's important to you.

Watch your traffic
If your web host provides you with web statistics, then check them closely. Probably the most popular web statistics software is AWStats. This provides information on what people are searching for when they arrive at your site. This data is gold. Find out what people are looking for, and make sure that they can get it - easily!

Content, content and more content
Search engines love content - the more content the better. Detailed product descriptions, articles relevant to your product line, whatever, the search engines love it. So start writing, it's not as hard as it looks!

Lastly, be patient. Search engines operate in their own time and results can take months to show. If this is an important area for you, consider enlisting a professional which can save you a lot of time. However, there is a lot of helpful resources and if you want to do the work yourself, roll up your sleeves, work hard and watch the customers pour in every day.

Mark Baartse is the founder of Shopping Cart Reviews, the webs most comprehensive Shopping Cart information site.

---

Traffic Generation Tutorials - Article 1 of 10 Bi Weekly Articles

This article will be continually updated with your feedback and... Read More

Costly Link Exchange Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

When you are trying to promote your website, you want... Read More

Catapult Your Traffic With These Web Site Add-Ons

Having a website is great but, if the site doesn't... Read More

Baxter Grabber - Advanced Landing Page Strategy

What you are about to read is the strategy for... Read More

5 Points to Remember While Placing or Accepting a Link Exchange Request

All we webmasters know the importance and procedure to exchange... Read More

Using Traffic Exchange Programs Part 3

(Continued from Using Traffic Exchange Programs Part 2)Hello again!In the... Read More

Greetings! From the Island Outlaw:

I just had to get into the fray! I'm new... Read More

Links to Success

Did you know that web linkage is responsible for a... Read More

How to Identify Bad Link Exchange Transactions

Now that more emphasis (to get better ranking in SERPs)... Read More

How to Increase Backlinks and PageRank of Your Website? Bring Buyers Traffic on Your Website!

Search Engines Optimization:Your website must be good optimized by various... Read More

The Importance Of Incoming Links And Reciprocal Links

Building a web site is only the first step in... Read More

You Dont Have TIME to Sit and Wonder When The Traffic Will Come!

There is so incredibly MUCH you can do to successfully... Read More

Increase Your Tourism Web Traffic & Sales ? Guaranteed

Web sites are a major part of the tourism marketing... Read More

Link Building That Makes Sense: Who To Link To

When you are building links to increase your link popularity,... Read More

Planning For Your Websites Future- Get Search Engine Traffic

Five tips to effectively schedule your content.In order to get... Read More

How To Generate Traffic Using Public Domain Works

A websites profitability depends solely on directing visitors to that... Read More

5 Ways To Get Other Websites To Link To Yours

In-bound links from other web sites to yours provide two... Read More

10 Proven Ways to Breakthrough Web Traffic!

Here are 10 great ways to boost your web traffic:1.... Read More

15 Link Exchange Tips

Establishing inbound links through reciprocal link exchanges is a very... Read More

A Simple Guide to Analyzing All Those Web Traffic Ideas - Part 1

There will be a lot of people unhappy about what... Read More

Web Site Marketing: Discover 10 Sneaky Ways To Prolong Your Visitors Stay At Your Website

The longer your website visitors stay, the more they will... Read More

Free Traffic Programs and How to Use Them

I try to use as many free traffic programs as... Read More

Free Tips to Generate Traffic for Webmasters

Starting a new website and developing a traffic base if... Read More

Create Laser Targeted Traffic to Your Online Home Based Business With These 7 Traffic Builders

If you are only looking at Search Engines too send... Read More

The Old But Reliable Ways of Attracting Free Online Traffics

Every home business owner should know that your WEBSITE TRAFFICS... Read More

My Top 12 Web Site Marketing Strategies - Part 2

Part 27. Ezine Ads - create an ad for your... Read More

Using Traffic Exchange Programs Part 1

I have an ingenious concept in store for you!I am... Read More

Key Words to Build Traffic

Much has already been said about having a content rich... Read More

Web Traffic Wonder: Are You Using This Free List Building Tool?

Yes, if need more web traffic, this free list building... Read More

10 Tips on How to Increase Your Website Traffic

Not so long ago I had read an article about... Read More

Web Coach Tip: 3 Proven Steps to Increase Traffic to Your Website

#1 Make sure your business card includes a persuasive "FREE... Read More

Referral Traffic

The subject of referral traffic may be a bit elementary... Read More

How to Build a Website that Get Free Traffic

How to get FREE traffic and vistors to your website... Read More