so I'm bored as **** and can't be bothered to do any work today so seeing a few people commenting that are clearly already or half way on their way to getting completely ripped off, even if you don't want to do much yourself its better you understand whats going on prior to spending money on it. Otherwise its like ordering a t shirt for £100 when you don't know if you're getting primark or armani.
Starting with a disclaimer I don't and have no intentions on selling anyone anything I just do it for my own sites.
Also if you're thinking you're going to magically get 10,000 views on your products like you do on ebay then that won't happen either for a long time and if you have a big budget but I'd recommend everyone diversifies their income streams other than ebay.
Not going to put anything on web design as I'm dyslexic as ** but I wouldn't recommend spending any more than a few 100 £s on a website to start with, you don't need a bespoke site, theres 100s of templates that can be easily customized.
After that onsite seo is really important but getting it 85% right is really easy, I use a plugin for wordpress called yoast seo. You should make sure you've got this as good as you can before building any links or it will cause you a lot more hassle later on. On site is basically:
Url- you want the keyword in the url or if its a really hard niche you should find a longer tail word to target thats easier to rank for, not going to put anything on that though as the post will be too long so I'll ignore the difficulty factor. Heres a example of a big site that has this completely wrong:
Max Factor Colour Elixir Lipstick - Cosmetics at allbeauty.com
You see their url is a complete mess it should be:
http://www.allb eauty. com/Max-factor-elixir-lipstick
After that its meta descriptions, this is the description you see under the url when you search google, this doesn't directly impact seo but it will improve your click through rate which in turn moves you up and also whats the point in ranking high if you get a low % of clicks, you should think about what people are most likely to click, as a example you could use 'all beauty has genuine high quality max factor elixir lipstick at the best prices in the UK' rather than 'max factor elixir lipstick is a great lipstick to use, it comes in multiple colours'.
After that you want your image files to all be renamed to the product, then you set up alternate keywords for them too and put a description, this helps you get a few clicks via google image searches.
Then you want your product description to a high standard, don't just use the manufacturers description, try and improve upon it and make it slightly longer. Lot of debate on what keyword % is best to use but I personally keep it low between 1 and 2%.
Then your product categories, you should search up on 'silo structuring' to get this on point but its basically keeping your website in sections so its easy for google to scan. e.g You'd have a lipstick section and then I use sub sections for the brands you sell like max factor,loreal etc. I like to put 2-300 words in each product category, you don't want too many as you want people to see your products rather than getting bored reading. The lipstick section is linking to the brand and lipstick section and then that links to the products.
Once you've done all that and your site is live you can submit your site map to google/bing, I like to share it on social media too, even if they're new accounts it can help to get it indexed faster.
Then I get google analytics set up so I know where all my visitors are coming from.
After that I start writing blog posts and after a week or 2 I gently start linking to the homepage, theres different types of links you can use. I start off with web 2.0s, these are just sites that you can make your own site on without having to register a domain like weebly,wordpress,blogger etc. I write 3-700 word articles on there and then put a few links in to the homepage. Then I use tier 2 which is basically spam blog comments etc, I buy a lot of this from fiver or other marketplaces.
I order a press release after that, you can get decent quality ones from £30-50 on plenty of marketplaces, most of the links are nofollow but they make your site look more of a authority.
I tend to leave it for a month or 2 whilst gently building basic links as I want the domain to age and I want to see where my words are ranking with on point on site seo and barely any links. Theres loads of rank trackers you can use, I use proranktracker which is $15 per month to track upto 250 keywords but its better to find a free one first to use.
Then based on where my early visitors have come from using analytics or webmaster tools and based on the search volume of the keywords and where I'm currently ranked I'll work out where I want to build my main links to.
E commerce sites have 100s/1000s of keywords you can try and rank for but obviously you can't do them all. so depending on the above I'll either target certain popular product directly or more often I'd go after the category page 'lipsticks' (note this is a bad example as lipstick would be too hard to rank for).
I start making more web 2.0s for the categories I've picked, I make the main ones 5 500 word articles to start with and then send spam to them, these are my high quality ones that I'll actually update with a new article 2-3x per month. then I also have some lower quality ones that are only 2-3 pages that I tend to just forget.
For linking back to my main site I use varied anchor text. You don't need to use the same keyword too much if your onsite is good, as a example I'd use the following for lipstick with the anchor text bolded:
Just bought this high quality
lipstick from ***
Got this
lipstick on sale
Was surprised how
great value this lipstick was
Been sent this lipstick
sample from *** Lipstick from *** is great value
going to order more max factor lipstick from ***
click here for great lipstick deals
Another linking strategy is to get all your competitors links and see what you can replicate. I use aherfs for this, you have to pay to sign up but if you cancel within 2 weeks you get a refund, I search the top 10-20 results for the keyword I want to rank for and save all their links in excel. Then I'll go through and see which ones I can get for free or cheaply.
I make a note of all the bloggers in my niche and sign up for their newsletters, I reply to them like 'oh that was a great article, I hope you don't mind me messaging I have a small site *** I recently wrote a similar article if you fancied taking a look' I try to make friends with them.
You can set up google alerts for the products you sell or the niche so you get a alert when a new story or page comes up on it. Then I make a comment with a link to my site, not just spamming 'come buy this here', try to add value and suck up to them again so that they approve it.
Plenty of other types of links you want for diversity too, social bookmarks,high pr profiles,image sharing sites, audio sharing etc. Can search google for what these are but most can be bought cheaply on marketplaces, just don't build too many links too fast or get loads of spam.
A lot of ranking power comes from pbn's, once you know what you're doing you should look into making your own so its safer but can't be bothered going into that lol.
Sorry was longer than I thought, will go back and edit it a bit so its clearer when I've got time, loads I'll of missed out too.
e commerce seo basics 
