Firstly, we would like to send out a very warm welcome to all new Artamatik Free stores shopkeepers, and our new VIP's domain owners, thank you for choosing us to be you POD service provider and store hosts :)

Secondly, it has been brought to our attention that a few of you maybe having difficulties with your stores templates, with products disappearing, this could happen if you are activating a VIP only feature by ticking certain boxes, or have added unsupported HTML code. You can fix these issues simply by restoring the template to default, reapplying it or by adding a new template, and things will return to normal including all your products.

We would still like to encourage you to explore and experiment in the 'Customize your store appearance' center and our next newsletter will cover the "Customize your store appearance" area in-depth.

This weeks Newsletter is a rather lengthy but fairly important one, as it covers S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) and basic promotion. The info below may be applied to all store holders, Free, premium and VIP.

The info we've included is only the very basics of SEO but ones we feel are the most important. It is base on what we have learned over the years and it may not be right to some, but is what has worked for us, and is based solely on our own experiences in web development. Please read on and excuse webmasters grammar and spelling mistakes {:O)

Get Found

Got yourself a shiny new store loaded with awesome products featuring your greatest designs and all that's left to do is watch your earning report grow, right? Well kinda, but there are some things you may need to do in order to improve your chances of being an online sensation...

The very first thing you need to do is submit your store/s URL to Google add URL and then also add your URL/s to DMOZ

Getting your store/s indexed by search engines helps people searching the web and find your site/store.

You may want to seek other major Search Engines and add your store/s URL into them too, but our experience has been; that once you are indexed by Google and listed in DMOZ most other 'important' search engines will index you as well.   

Keywords and Descriptions

Another important step to getting found is your use of Keywords. Under your Edit link for your chosen store, be sure to use add a descriptive Store name and Store title. In the keywords section, add lots of keywords relating to your store, there is no limit so long as the keywords relate to your store However some say you should not enter more than 50 and no fewer than 25, we'll leave that up to you to decide.

DON'T use keywords that do not relate to your store and content. If you sell fruit images on your products, don't add keywords for jet boats, you will get the wrong targeted visitors. Doing this could also be regarded as cheating by Google and other search Engines who are very clever at picking this up and may drop you in their rankings or remove you from their index all together.

Make sure you fill out the Meta Tag Description section, this description is what will appear to a user when your store is displayed in search engine results. It should be attention grabbing and attract visitors to your store, so be creative and as descriptive as possible bearing in mind that Search Engines will ignore all words after the first 15 - 20. So put all info your important keyword rich info first, but make sure it is in a human readable sentence.

When creating new store sections, always add section descriptions and when adding new products to your store/s, add product descriptions.

Be Patient and update often

It could take anywhere from 1 week to 6 months before you start seeing solid results from all your S.E.O. work, so you must be patient. However with online marketing, you always get out of your store/s as what you put in. We have witnessed one website become a real hit in just few days and another completely flop after being online for months, but the solution to this is simple... keep it fresh!

There is an old saying in the online web world "Content is King, and traffic is Queen". Creating content for your Store/s is really simple, as in a matter of clicks you can add 1 image to over 200 products, that's more than 200 pages (at least) in less than a minute or so!

Lets say you have 20 images ready for your store/s and you want to add those to 100 products, that's 2000 new products and pages in around 20 minutes. But, you don't want to add all those designs all at once, no. Using the example above of 20 Images, you would ideally want to spread this out over 20-30 days. By doing this you telling search engines that your store (your site) is being updated on a regular basis, and inturn Search Engines will crawl your store more often and rank you higher in search results.

Monitor your store traffic

To see how your visitors are behaving and responding to your store/s, you really need to monitor your traffic, we highly recommend you get and install StatCounter. there are others such as sitemeter, but StatCounter logs more traffic and you can have an invisible counter free of charge.

This really is a vital piece of code that will show you important traffic data, such as referrals, visit paths, top entry/exit pages, keyword analysis and loads more.

Get StatCounter by clicking the logo image or clicking -> StatCounter. You will need to open an account and generate the snippet of code you need to install! Make sure you choose the invisible counter and DO NOT block your IP until you have tested it by visiting your store and clicking through your pages, if you have installed the code correctly you should see your activity reflected in your StatCounter account.

To install your StatCounter code, (assuming you have created your StatCounter. account and generated your code) Log in to your account at Artamatik.com, click All Stores, Click My Template on the store you wish to add StatCounter to, click Customize on the active template, paste your StatCounter code into MostBottomHtmlBlock and click save.

Test your site and once you are satisfied that StatCounter is tracking your activity, log in to your StatCounter account and block your IP to avoid false readings from you accessing your own store/s

StatCounter allows you to create multiple projects, this is ideal if you have more than one store or open free stores under your own VIP Domain

If you make a mistake with your template by experimenting with customization and need to return to default settings or you decide to change your templates, you will need to reinstall any code you have added to all HTML blocks. It is recommend to save any code scripts such as StatCounter and Google Adsense etc to a notepad file

Where to promote

Lastly, with all that work done and dusted, you still don't want to just sit back and wait for traffic. As mentioned earlier it could take days or months before you start getting hits from search engine traffic! So your next step should be to promote your store/s to friends, colleagues and family.

You should also consider adding your store links to your MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo or other social networking sites as well, doing this is a really great way to speed up traffic to your store and convert them into sales!

Add links to your stores on any current website you may already have, and be sure to add a signature line in all your Emails with links to your store/s/VIP domain

Why not use your own store to create your own store promo merchandise! You can promote yourself on stickers, magnets and/or buttons postcards etc... These are all cheap and very high quality items and can be bought in bulk, plus VIP store owners get them with free shipping.

If this option appeals to you, consider our joining our resellers program on a 30 free trial and get as much merchandise as you can cheap as chips and with free shipping before the 30 trial runs out, or keep your reseller account alive and become an eBay super seller.