While the Shoppe Pro cart is designed to be search engine friendly, search engines may not index your site right away. It often can take up to a few months for your site to get crawled by the search engines. There are some things you can do to speed this up and further optimize your site for search engines.
1) Read our blog post regarding Search Engine Optimization.
2) Make sure you completely fill out the Meta Keywords, Meta Title, and Meta Description fields of all your pages, products, and categories within your store admin area. Separate keywords or keyphrases with a comma; (i.e. hairbows,hair bows,hair accessories,boutique clothing) For your meta title, DO NOT add <title> or </title> to the Meta Title field. The system does this for you automatically. Enter the text only.
3) Manually submit your site to search engines (Do not pay a company who promises you you'll be listed at the top of search engines. Most of these companies are out to scam you). My best advice is to sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. You will probably be asked to "verify" your site by placing a bit of code on your site. If you need help with their "site verification" process, we are more than happy to help you. Just submit a ticket to our support desk.
4) Link Exchanges - Exchange links with a friend, sign up for link exchanges, top site lists, directory listings, or anywhere you can get your url listed. The more search engines see a link to your site, the higher up on the list you'll get.
5) Put a link to your site in your email signature. You'd be surprised how many referrals you can get this way. Whenever you send email to family, friends, acquaintances, customers, etc, with your signature, you're helping spread the word of your existence and naturally your site will see more traffic that way.
6) Change your site's content often. When googlebot starts crawling your site, it's going to be looking to see if it's different than it was the last time it was crawled. If your content is fresh, the googlebot thinks your site is more important, it will visit your site more often, and your site is more likely to move up a notch in the rankings. Not to mention your visitors... They're going to want to see something new and exciting on your site as well!
7) Blogs - blogs are a great way to help increase your traffic, especially if they are updated often. We recommend Blogspot or Wordpress. Add a quick easy Wordpress Blog to your site.
