Write web-enhanced copy

IMPORTANT: Think about how your target customers would find your store. What type of words would they use to find a shop like yours? Once you have come up with a list of key words and phrases, ensure that the writing on your site makes use of these phrases whenever possible.

If you are using Google AdWords, then you can check the popularity of various search terms yourself—simply put them forward as potential target keywords and check on their stats, which Google provides before they are added.

For example, if you are selling cellular phones, and you wanted to make the phrase cellular phone a term that you rank highly on, then instead of writing something like:

This product can be used to call other people, you should write:

This G1 super cellular phone, can call any other cellular phone from wherever you are.

In other words, without destroying the readability of your website copy, fill it with relevant search terms. In this example, your copy went from not containing a single key phrase to containing two, without damaging the readability of the sentence in any way.

Use meaningful file names

While this is not as important as the first point, it certainly will help to have everything named meaningfully, because search engines do look at file names. Instead of naming a page product_1.html, you should name it something like G1_cellularphone.html. Don’t go overboard on this because it is not too important.

Use meaningful anchor text

IMPORTANT: Search engines, in particular Google, place a large amount of emphasis on the anchor text used in links. As a result, make sure all your links have meaningful text associated with them. For example, you would rewrite the following sentence:

Buy our new G1 Cellular Phone <a href ="<yourlink>">here</a>.

to:

Buy our new <a href ="<yourlink>">Cellular Phone</a> here.

The reason for this is because the word here is not particularly meaningful to a search engine, even though humans can easily make the connection. For the sake of your rankings, simply move the link to the key phrase Cellular Phone to place more emphasis on it for the search engine.

Write meaningful metatags

As many people will tell you, metatags have become less and less important as time goes by. However, they are still useful, and you should at least go to the effort of filling them out properly. The two metatags that you should consider making use of are the keyword and description tags. For example, the following shows a possible tag for a cellular phone store:

<meta name="keywords" content="cellular phones cellphone phone mobile">

Metatags have been the subject of some abuse, and you should view the W3C consortium’s guidelines for their usage: http://www.w3.org.

The Header Tags Controller community contribution might be of interest to you here because it allows you to specify the title, keywords, and description on a per-page basis. You can find it at http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,207.

Manage your links

IMPORTANT: A high level of importance is placed on the perceived popularity of a website. Search engines can judge the popularity of a website by looking at how many links there are to the site, and how popular the sites that link to it are themselves. For this reason, you should ensure that you link to and link from only sites that you feel are suitable partners.

Effectively, you should search for as many relevant reciprocal link pages as possible, or actually speak to the relevant sites to determine whether you can provide mutual links. The more links you have from popular sites, the better your ranking will be. You can also try to get one-way links to your site—these are also rated highly by search engines

Write meaningful alt tags for images

Search engines don’t see pictures like humans do, so there is nothing you can do about images... or is there? Instead of naming your images 02_03.jpg, you might consider giving them names like G1_cellphone.jpg. Don’t stop there either. Instead of adding an image like this:

<img src="G1_cellphone.jpg">

write it like this:

<img src="G1_cellphone.jpg" alt="New super G1 cellular phone">

Use meaningful URLs

osCommerce comes with several contributions that convert the standard osCommerce URLs into being more meaningful and search-engine friendly. If you decide to implement these, be sure to do so on your development machine, as the forums indicate a large number of problems associated with these contributions for highly modified sites.

You might try http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,2823.

Submit your site to search engines and online directories

Make sure your site is listed wherever possible. Most hosting packages provide an automated SE-submission facility, which will automatically forward your site to search engines for indexing. Otherwise, look for other SE web page submission tools, or search out your own lists and directories to become part of.

Read up on lists, forums, and online tutorials

There is a lot of helpful information out there. Make sure you do your own research and come up with an SEO policy that is right for you.