Let’s welcome my first guest blogger, and dear friend Amy of Simply*Creative!

Welcome to today’s lesson on Search Engine Optimization, also commonly referred to as SEO. Tell me if this sounds familiar? You’ve got a great website and great products to sell. Problem is you need customers. Word of mouth and referral business only go so far. If you’re going to make it, you need some help from search engines, such as Yahoo and Google. So how do you get good search engine placement so that potential customers can find you?

Here are 5 easy tips that will get you started:

Text, Text, Text!
Search engine robots can only read text. Repeat after me, search engine robots can only read text! They cannot read content embedded in images. They cannot read content embedded in Flash. So if you want your site to place well with search engines, you need to give them lots of relevant text.

Keep it Fresh!
Update your site often, especially your main page. This gives the search engine robots a reason to come back and re-index your site.

Use those Tags
If you have an e-commerce site or one that was built with CMS software, most likely there is a place where you can specify meta tags (title, description and keywords) for every category, subcategory, product and informational page. Use them or you are wasting SEO opportunities!

Ditch the Splash/Flash

This goes back to my first point that search engines cannot read Flash or images, which is typically how intro pages are created. Get rid of it! You want the first page that loads to be filled with content that gets updated regularly.

Incoming Links
This is probably the quickest way to improve your search engine rankings. Search engines rank sites based on the amount of relevant links that point to a site. Kind of like high school all over again, if a popular site links to your site, your search engine rankings will go up. My advice is to get out there are start networking.

So there you have it. You now know the basics of SEO. There is much more that can be done to increase your site’s visibility, but following my advice here is a good start. Watch for follow up articles on this subject with more tips and tools to help you better optimize your site.

OK, OK… maybe not the actual picture is worth $1,000. But, if a great picture helps you sell $1,000 in products, I would say it’s worth a lot. Pictures will make or break your website. Especially an ecommerce website. Just as if you were in a brick and mortar store, the presentation is key. Even more so on a website. The product picture is what will sell your product. I HIGHLY recommend having a professional take your pictures. Especially for high end items. You may even find an aspiring photographer at one of the local colleges or high schools to take some pictures for a decent price. (Yes, even the high schools have photography classes. I started taking classes in 10th grade… and we won’t mention how LONG ago that was.) However, if this is not an option, you can try these tips.

While I could go on forever, I have decided to treat this as a series. Today, I am going to run through a quick tutorial on how to take clothing pictures… with a little bonus ‘intro to Picnik‘. And, in the weeks to come, I will touch on how to snap some great shots of other kinds of products.

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