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Marketing your Spreadshirt Shop: A Guide on SEO

by Justin Dean

PART 2

ON-SITE OPTIMIZATION

<Back to Part 1

Will Optimizing my Site Really Make a Difference?

SEO is just as much about the design and optimization of your site as it is the links to your site. You can have a great link profile, with tons of relevant and quality links to your site... but if your site itself isn't optimized properly then you'll be nowhere to be found on the SERPs.

Every web page has many attributes that can be altered to target your keyword phrases, and learning how to make the appropriate changes to optimize these atrributes can give you a huge advantage over your competition. Even if your competitor has a better site overall, you can beat them on the search engine results just by making a few changes that they didn't do.

You don't need to know web design or html coding to make the necessary changes to your website, but getting scared off at this point is not a good idea. The steps to follow are absolutely essential.

Naming Conventions

Optimizing your site using your target keyword phrases starts with the name of your domain, and the name of each page within your website. If you don't already have a domain name for your site, then be sure to pick one that is simple, short, easy to remember and that incorporates keywords that easily give away what your site is about. For a t-shirt site is should be as easy as the brand name and the word tshirt, such as BlueFishtees.com, or Nekkidtees.com. Even if your domain url just forwards to your spreadshirt shop url, I highly suggest purchasing a domain name.

Spreadshirt has gone way out of their way to make sure the urls and names of each page within your Spreadshirt shop is properly named to ensure great SEO. If you have pages on your website that you created and host somewhere other then with Spreadshirt, then be sure to follow these tips when naming your pages:

Use your keyword phrases in the naming structure of each page. Use a structure that makes sense to you, and that is easy to follow.

Here's a good example: www.tshirtsite.com/guys-tshirts/tshirtname.html

Try to use hyphens when connecting two words, and avoid under scores (guys_tshirts). Combining the phrase into one connected word (guystshirts) is not bad, but search engines can read it better with the hyphen.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are attributes within the html code of a webpage that tell search engines about the page, and the keywords associated with it. They are the key to the optimization of each page of your website. We'll go over how to change the meta tags of each page within your Spreadshirt hosted shop, and how to change them on a regular web page that you host somewhere else.

Below is the meta tag data for the current page you are viewing:

Let's go over each type of meta tag and what to include in each, then we'll explain how to edit them on your site or Spreadshirt shop.

TITLE

Each page has a title tag and the contents of the title tag will display at the top of the window in your internet browser. The title tag looks like this:

<title>Spreadshirt t-shirt shop help, templates, tutorials, t-shirt designs and more from SpreadsterZone</title>

You want to choose a title that makes sense to the visitor, but that also uses your keyword phrases. Start the title with 3 or 4 of your top phrases and end it with the name of your website or brand. Don't stuff it with keywords, write it in as complete of a sentence as possible.

DESCRIPTION

The description tag is the chunk of text that a search engine will use to display in the search engine results for your website. Because of this, its your chance to sell the visitor and entice them to click and visit your site. It should definetely use your keyword phrases, but more importantly it should tell the customer what they will find at your site if they click to visit. The description tag looks like this:

<meta name="description" content="SpreadsterZone - Spreadshirt t-shirt shop help, custom templates, t-shirt designs, vector conversion and tutorials." />

It should be simple, and no more than 2 sentences long or 140 characters and should be written in complete sentences.

KEYWORDS

The keywords tag is where a lot of site owners go overboard. Its merely a tag that tells search engines what keywords they can find within the site. Don't overstuff your keywords tag as this can really hurt your rankings. Keep it short and simple, use your top keyword phrases that we chose earlier, and seperate each phrase with a comma. Any keyword or phrase thats used in the keywords meta tag that isn't also found throughout your site will be considered useless, and a search engine may even penalize you for keyword stuffing since its not relevant to the site. A keyword tag looks like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="spreadshirt, t-shirt shop, help, tutorials, templates, t shirt designs, vector conversion, vector designs, tshirt shop templates, how to sell t-shirts online" />

Avoid using the same word over and over, even if the word repeats in each of your keyword phrases. The word "t-shirt" can be spelled different ways (tshirt, tee shirt, t-shirt, t shirt), so each time you have to use it, spell it differently.


>When a search engine finds consistency between the title, description, keywords and the content of the pages within your site, then your site will be ranked higher.

 

Changing Meta Tags in your Spreadshirt Shop

Every product that you create in Spreadshirt has an option to include Keywords. The keywords that you enter will appear in the meta tag code of the particular page of your site where that product can be found. Be sure to fill in the keyword box with descriptive keyword phrases that are relevant to the exact product.

You can also change the title, description and keywords meta tags of the shop pages. You do this by editing the header of your shop. Log into the Spreadshirt admin and go to Shops > Shop Layout > Header & Footer. In the box under Shop Header you can add your own meta tags. Use the layout of the sample above, and plug in your own information.

Changing Meta Tags on your Hosted Web Page

To change the meta tags of your webpages that are not hosted by Spreadshirt, you will need an HTML editor like Dreamweaver, or you can simply open each html page in Notepad.

Locate the <head> tag of each page and enter your meta tag info (use the sample above as a template). Be sure that your meta tag info is between the <head> and </head> tags. Change this for every single page on your website.

Keep in mind that every page of your website can have different meta tags. Its not a big deal if every page uses the same tags, as long as your keyword phrases and description is broad. But its a lot more accurate if you tweak the keywords and description to fit with the content of each page. This will make sure that your meta tags are completely relevant to every single page and will make your site that much more optimized.

ALT-TAGS

Alt tags are meta tags that are not found in the header of a page, but rather are embeded in the code of each image on your site. You won't be able to edit the tags for images on your Spreadshirt hosted pages, but if you have your own hosted web pages you definetely want to include alt-tags.

When you insert an image into a webpage it usually does not automatically include alt tags. To change or add the alt tags of an image you need to open the web page in an HTML editor or Notepad. Find the code that pertains to the image, it should look like this:

<img src="img/front.jpg" width="760" height="175" alt="spreadsterzone header" />

Edit the information between the quotes after alt=. Use keyword phrases that pertain to the site but that are relevant to what the actual images represents. You can make an alt tag as long as you want, but its best to keep it short and not over stuff it with keywords.

In Conclusion

That's all the basics you'll need to know to get your Spreadshirt shop properly optimized and ready to be ranked and indexed by search engines. Don't expect better results over night. It takes awhile for search engines to crawl you again and notice a change. Your rankings also rely heavily on the competing sites in your market. If another t-shirt site with content similar to yours is also very well optimized they may rank higher than you if they get more traffic, if their site is older, or if they have more quality links than you. Don't get discouraged and just keep optimizing your site.

Re-evaluate your chosen keywords phrases from time to time. If after awhile you notice that you aren't getting good results for a certain phrase or keyword then maybe that keyword is just too competitive for you right now. Try focusing your efforts on keywords that are easier to rank high on. For example, "funny t-shirts" is very hard to rank high on because there are many highly trafficked and optimized sites that aggressively target that phrase.

Ideally you should spend an hour a day working on the SEO of your site - this means constantly being out there on the social networks, forums, and blogs promoting your site by participating and engaging with your customers. This also means studying your competitor's websites and making sure that you are always one step ahead of them, and that you are targeting the keywords that are going to get you the best results. It also means researching SEO and being in tune to the latest changes and techniques. The internet changes daily, and search engines are constantly updating themselves to make sure their results are the most accurate and relevant that they can be. You could optimize your site today and start getting great search engine rankings, but leave your site as is for 6 months and I guarantee that your site won't have nearly the same rankings.

What we've given you here are generalized and basic concepts to get your shop optimized quickly and without any cost. SEO is a monster and there are a lot of other techniques that you should definetely look into - some will cost you money, but most will not. Below is a link to a list of SEO tools and resources that we suggest you take a deeper look at. However, a lot of the techniques you'll read about pertain to websites that you have complete control over. Operating a Spreadshirt hosted shop has its drawbacks in that regard, as you don't have complete control over everything. I wouldn't be too concerned though, as they really do spend a lot of time and resources to make sure their pages are optimized properly.

Good luck!

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