At the moment I run a business on eBay, which is going really well. I'm looking to expand and set up my own online store in January, next year. I'm currently not in a position to open a store and market it properly. So just wondered if there was anything I could do with the site to improve SEO before I open next year. Your thoughts would be greatly apreciated.
My advice is to register your domain and put up some pages asap. ... age is a key factor in optimisation. Once the site is up with some basic pages get a few inbound links if you can, adding a signature on your DP profile will help in this regard. Also start your research on keywords for your business, build these into the content of your website (go to the search engine optimisation area KEYWORDS of the forum for advice on this). good luck
Age is a key factor for Yahoo, google doesn't put that much weight into age, but some does exist. I would suggest getting a domain name easy to remember and related to your inventory. Make sure not to submit your site until it is complete, but google\msn\yahoo\etc might crawl it before hand anyways. You'll want to build back links with the anchor text of the keywords your aiming for. If your site is about pc hardware, have you anchor text be pc hardware. Also, consider making a budget to advertise on adwords or a cpm network, sometimes you must spend money to make money. Once your site is complete, register it with google.com/webmasters and submit your XML standard sitemap, also place a link to this sitemap on your homepage, then create a robots.txt linking to your sitemap and allow all agents to view your site. Also submit your sitemap when you add new content. Don't forget to do the same with yahoo at: siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Study as much as you can about search engine friendly website design. If you build your site incorrectly, or on the wrong platform, you SEO efforts will suffer. My take is - SEO is used as one part in a many part effort. Just like making a long island ice tea, if you forget the VODKA, the drink is not going to taste good. Print advertising, email marketing, banner placement, conversion analytics, search engine optimization, pay per click, conversion funnels should be thought of and budgeted before the launch of your site and/or marketing campaign.