To be able to list your web site in a result, a search engine first has to find your web site.

There are two ways to achieve this: you list your website directly with the search engine, or the search engine discovers your web site when it indexes another web site which mentions your web site and links to it.

You will find resources on how to do achieve this on the page "SEO Tools for web site promotion".

Shopping cart software such as ShopFactory will list you with sites such as santu.com to help search engines discover you, as these sites are regularly indexed by search engines.

However you should always also list your web site directly with search engines as well as get more web sites to link to you. After all, without either of the two occuring, you may have your website on the Internet - but search engines will not know about it.

This is not a complex task at all, but it can take some time. Resist using automatic tool for this, as these can lead to you being banned by search engines, and resist the urge to constantly relist your website, because you can not yet find it in a search engine, as this can also get you banned (relisting once or twice becaus you become impatient doesn't count). 

Once a search engine knows about you, it will send small software programs called Spiders to you, which index or "spider" your web site. From then on, your results can be fouond it the search engine.

Unfortunately it can take weeks and sometimes months before a search engine starts listing you, a good reason not to rely only on on SEO web site promotion as your only promotional tool.

First, make sure you pick an SEO friendly shopping cart software or e-commerce solution such as ShopFactory.

This ensures that, when you build a web site, it will be optimized for easy indexing by search engines.

Not only does your solution have to make sure that all the pages can easily be found when following the links through your website, it also has to provide certain information, which makes it easier for search engines to weigh the content of your website.

An e-commerce solution such as ShopFactory for example will automatically create site maps for search engines and ucreate and pdate robot.txt files - small files used by search engines spiders to navigate your web site.

After all, you want to make sure that as many of your pages as possible will be indexed, when the search engines check out your website.

This is an important basis for a good ranking in search results.

The process of a search engine indexing your website is called spidering.

Little software programs called robots visit your website and follow all the links they can find, to locate as many pages as possible. They don't care which e-commerce solution you have used to create your website. They simply search for information.

The more SEO friendly your shopping cart software is, the more information the robots will find for the search engine to analyse. The more information the robots can extract from your web site, the better for you.

After all, the analysis of this information will decide the ranking of your page in any particular search result.

The better your web site matches a search term entered by a search engine user, the higher your website will rank in the result pages created.  

Getting your web site as close to the top of the results for a particular search term as possible is called search engine optimization, or SEO.

To be able to properly do SEO web site promotion however you first have to find out, which search term to optimize for.

What is the most likely term potential customers will enter into a search engine, when they are looking for products and services you want to sell to them?

In the early days, people searching the Internet would enter a single word when using a search engine to find a suitable web site. Today most people enter a combination of words, to get the best results.

Of course the easiest way to find out is to ask customers, if you can. But there are also tools desiged specifically for search engine optimization, which can help you do this. 

We have listed some on the page "SEO Tools for web site promotion".

And many companies have specialized in SEO work, to help you with this, too.

When you build a web site with your e-commerce solution, many different pages will be created. The most important page when it comes to a search engine is your home page; the first page visitors will see when they go to your Internet address.

Information on this page is valued more highly. But pages are not the only items on your web site, which are treated unequally.

The most important information is the content of the HTML Title, the title which appears in the blue bar at the very top of a browser, when you visit a web site.

Differently sized headlines will also be valued more highly.

What this means is that this information is more important to search engines, when they rank your website, and therefore should contain the search terms you are optimizing for.

A good e-commerce solution will allow you to easily enter and adjust the information which is relevant to search engines.

When you make your own website, integrating the best search terms right from the beginning will help your ranking in search engines. Limit the main optimization to only one or two terms, as otherwise the results will not be worth it. 

You SEO friendly e-commerce solution should help you integrate the search terms - and if possible do some of the tasks automatically for you.

ShopFactory for example will automatically populate your HTML title field of your web site pages based on your website title and allows you to override this for each page. The titles of the page and the different products and paragraphs are automatically turned into different types of headlines, to make them more valuable.

So you should ensure that your search terms are used in page titles and product or paragraph titles.

Also make use of Meta tag fields, which any SEO friendly shopping cart software should give you access to. While many search engines no longer use them for indexation, they still review them. Google often displays the Meta tag description in its search results.

Be careful your optimized text doesn't sound awkward. There is no point in having a website which is so optimized, that it is no longer of interest to people trying to read it.

After all, you are not selling to the search engine.

Some shopping cart software solutions also allow you to change the file names of the pages generated. Using the search term in the file name may also help improve rankings.

Google is the biggest search engine there is - and they are spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that the search results they return are relevant to the searcher.

After all, the quality of these results is what has made Google so big.

Don't use hidden text on your web sites, don't repeat the same search terms again and again at the bottom of your web page or in the Meta tags. Search engines know all the tricks, and many of them are automatically discovered, without a human person becoming involved.

Once you have been caught, you may be banned from the search engine. Depending how much your webssite depend on search engines, the results of this can be bitter.

Check out the Google Webmaster Guidelines for search engines. Since Google is the biggest player, their guidelines basically rule.

To make your life more difficult, websites which are mentioned on other websites are regarded as more reliable by Google.

It will give them a higher rankingin in the results. Other websites listing you and linking to you therefore can help boost your rankings in the search results.

But not just any other web site can do this.

Google will check, if the web site linking to you is related to what you are doing.

If many web sites link to you, which are not relates to your business, Google may regard this as an illegal attempt to boost your rankings, and will penalize you by letting you drop in the search results.

So there is little point in paying for solutions on the Internet, which promise to list you on thousand of websites in return for a small fee. You could end up paying them for sabotaging you !

On the Page "SEO Tools for web site promotion" you will find some web sites which will list you and will positively affect your rankings. Some for free, some in return for a fee.

No one and no e-commerce solution can realistically promise to put you on top of search engine results for popular search terms. The competition for these terms is fierce, and there are many website owners who constantly tweak their websites to stay on top.

There are no magical quick fixes or free rides.

Search engines today try very hard to make sure their search results are relevant to the searcher. They do not care about your website.

They only care about returning the best possible search results.

This means they apply selection processes, which make it harder for you.

For example older websites are regarded as more trustworthy. Web sites, which are mentioned on many other web sites, are regarded to be more relevant.

While there are ways to move to the top, you should not regard search engines as the only way to market your web site.

Remember: Marketing isn't just done on the Internet. Even if your customers buy from you online, they aren't online all the time.