When someone is looking for a product or service, chances are they will look at Google before they even think to crack open the Yellow Pages. In order for your ecommerce store to be found by potential customers, you must be listed in the various search engines and directories.

Search engines send out text indexing robots called "spiders" and those spiders have the job of crawling the web. When a spider arrives at your website it will read and index every piece of prose on your website. Now you know why web content is so important even over fantastic graphics and the best flash animations. The spiders don't bother with those. They want text to index.

Make sure that your site has a good amount of writing on your index page that tells what you sell and your products. If you have a latest news page, put a blurb on your index page. Spiders will read and index all that text on those pages. The way it comes together is the more you write about your products on your pages, the more relevance the search engine spiders give those pages. When someone goes to Google and looks up a search word that relates to your site, the more you have talked about your product or service, the more likely that person is to receive your website in their return search results.

Do not just repeat the same words over and over on your webpage. That will have the effect of getting your website blacklisted by the search engines.

Now that you know the basics, update your website and get yourself found by your potential customers!