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Optimize Your Headings – A lot of e-commerce websites do not realize the importance of having a good heading which can be the difference of having your product listed on the search engines to not being found at all. To understand this, I will be showing you how to place your keywords using heading tags that can be easily implemented. Since there are already many articles explaining what the tags are, I will let my friend Nicolas Prudhon explain it to you:

Did You Get Your Heading Tags All Wrong? – Our focus will be optimizing the product and category pages within an e-commerce store. Do remember we are trying to optimize your e-commerce store so that more traffic is driven to your products that will lead to a sale. It is not as important to optimize other non-product pages such as your about us and contact us pages.

Optimizing Your Categories Page – The most important aspect in optimizing your categories page is aiming to get the title of the category in a tag. For example if you are selling Apple iPods and the main category they fall under are “MP3 and Portable Players”, and the sub-category is “iPods”, then you want to have the following:

- MP3 and Portable Player
- iPods

It is as simple as this and too often we overlook all this. The next part we will look at is optimizing the products.

Optimizing Your Products Page – More than likely the search engines will find products on a website first, which are more relevant to a customer’s search. Therefore it’s crucial to optimize your products pages well to capture the traffic and ultimately create a sale.

What we want to achieve is to have the title of your heading containing the details of your product. For example you will want to have the following tags in place:

- Apple iPod nano 4 GB Silver (3rd Generation)
- Apple iPod features
- Apple iPod specifications

Hopefully you can see how important it is to have the right tags in place within your products page. If we want more traffic, we need to optimize these pages for the search engines to find us and ultimately we will generate more sales.

Telling Search Engines You Have An XML Sitemap – Informing search engines that you have an XML Sitemap is the best way to help them index your content faster. It won’t necessarily help you achieve a higher ranking, but it will definitely help you get onto a search engine’s crawler.

There are two ways that you can create an XML Sitemap, manually or dynamically. Most e-commerce packages or solutions have a built in option to generate the XML Sitemap dynamically for you and all you have to do is have a webmaster account with the search engines. On a regular basis you will need send an update to the search engines to get them to crawl through your site to add your updated products and categories to their index. Ask your e-commerce software provider to find out more.

Manually, you’ll find several downloadable sitemaps in the Internet. Once you’ve chosen one, download it and save it to your server directory. Once done, it’s all set up.

As your inventory changes, you’ll have to re-generate XML Sitemaps. Take what I have showed you and apply it to your e-commerce website and watch your traffic improve.