You had a great idea for an ecommerce site. You did your research and you checked out the pricing, the market and your competition in the virtual marketplace. You got a great shopping cart program and merchant account in place. You paid through the nose to get your website designed and you have hot flash animations and graphics that are cooler than anything your competitors have and you've been online for a while and you notice that when you look on Google and Yahoo, your site isn't in the top 10. Matter of fact, you went down through 20 pages of return search results and your website isn't showing up there either. No wonder people aren't visiting your website, they can't find it!

Yes, it is a frustrating scenario, but one that occurs every day. What you didn't know is that the robots that do the text indexing (called "spiders") for the search engine websites such as Google and directories such as Yahoo don't give a flip about graphics and flash animations. Matter of fact they give them the same relevance as a doorway page.

So, you need text and lots of it (also called web content) to make your page appealing to those spiders. If someone walked up to you and said, "Okay what is your website about?" how would you answer them? That is the type of content you need to have on your website. Keep your cool graphics and your spiffy flash animations but add lots of descriptive content about your service or your products. Give those spiders something to feed on and you will soon find that your web traffic will increase and more and more people will be able to find your online store.

Now that you know the basics, update your site with some good web content and get yourself found by the search engines.