Increasing awareness of your storefront

In May 2012, Google announced their plans to remove consumer products from organic search results, and help shoppers by promoting a 'shopping engine'.

Since then, most online sellers and all successful ones have found new ways to sell online. It is almost impossible to survive on the basis of free, organic search engine traffic.

On this page we suggest ten things that a storeowner can do with AspDotNetStorefront to increase sales:

1) Make maximum use of your category descriptions - this is a very real opportunity to use 'keywords'  to describe the products you sell. Try never to let a category page be published without a well thought out description.

2) Use topics to publish articles that are both fresh and unique. Information is king and no matter what you sell, there is information about it that you can author.

3) Consider your URL structure carefully. The ability to create modern URLs allows you to be extremely SEO-friendly.

4) 'Feed' your products to shopping engines like Google and Bing.

5) Consider using 'names' for your images instead of the default numbering system. Use keywords as part of your filename for SEO impact.

6) Name your categories carefully. If you call a category "Womens" or "Parts" then you are missing a really significant SEO opportunity. Use your keywords "Women's sportswear" or "Jet-ski parts" is going to make a world of improvement. 

7) Use header tags plentifully. The search engines like Google and Bing take more notice of words that you mark as 'headers'. AspDotNetStorefront is already working hard on your behalf under the hood - product names and category names are already using header tags, but with a little online reading, you can insert headlines into your descriptions and articles (topics) to good effect.

8) Learn all about the items in this page by investing in the AspDotNetStorefront 500+ program.

9) Never neglect the importance of 'brand'. Whether you are a manufacturer, or affiliated with a single brand, or selling a collection of known names, the 'brand' which your shoppers will attach to your products should be well projected. Use the 'manufacturer' pages to great effect - populate the descriptions with images, keywords and unique content about the brand itself.

10) Increasingly, the all-important shopping engines are using the UPC code (GTIN) to identify products and classify them. AspDotNetStorefront encourages you to input and store the GTIN on both the variant and attributes of your products - don't let these fields stay empty if you care about being 'found' online.