The best way to get people to visit your Startershop is to tell them! Like any other business, the more and better you promote it, the more successful it is likely to be. You should send out emails with a link to your Startershop, put your Startershop’s web address on your business cards, adverts, flyers and brochures and promote your business by distributing all these things as mailers, newspaper inserts and by attending networking events.
Having said that, people often look for goods by using sites like Google, Lycos, Alta Vista, Hotbot and many others, generically known as ‘search engines’.
We have included various search engine optimisation (SEO) features into Startershop, to help you obtain higher search rankings and increase the number of customers which visit:
- Page titles: Search engines take more notice of more imporant text on the page, and the page title is the most important of all. Startershop automatically includes your product or page name, as well as your Shop’s tagline, in the title of the page.
- Internal links: Search engines like to see links with relevant keywords which point to your product. Startershop automatically links your categories and products using the title you chose for them. A Startershop’s internal links include the "breadcrumb" trail at the top of the page, the section tabs and the section features on the homepage. (A "breadcrumb" trail is the small set of links you may have seen on some sites, they show the visitor where they are within the site structure, e.g.: "home > section > page".)
- Image "alt" attributes: Search engines can’t see images, they just read text; so Startershop creates a text alternative for all your product images (this is called an alt attribute) so that your products can be found more easily with searches. (This one’s not just for search engines, blind and low vision users also rely on alt attributes.)
- Choose your own URLs: (URLs are the web addresses for each of your pages.) Search engines and human visitors both prefer compact and readable page addresses, with Startershop you can choose to have keywords relevant to each page within it’s URL.
If there’s any other way you think that Startershop Ltd can help you, we’re always open to suggestions.