It is not enough to build a website and drop in some meta tags. Search engine optimization takes more than that.
Be search engine friendly
Your eCommerce platform must be search engine friendly at its core, so that the search engines can crawl it. This means preventing characters such as questions marks and ampersands out of the URLs and instead using relevant words that relate to the page. URL rewriting handles this in eCommerce platforms. There are other tools that inadvertently kill the friendliness of sites, such as misused robots files (which are used to tell the engines which directories to index), and HTML codes that tell engines not to follow links.
Create website content that is valuable and pertinent
The copy on every single page must be written with two audiences in mind: your website visitors, and the search engines. It must educate, entertain, or otherwise provide value. But in order to pull in that organic traffic, it also needs to be keyword rich. With enough visible, optimized, relevant copy on the website, the engines will take notice, and so will your customers.
Have a sitemap
There are programs that will generate a sitemap automatically. Many eCommerce systems have this functionality built in. The sitemap does not exist just to help visitors find their way. It is a pipeline through your websites that makes it exceptionally easy for search engine crawlers to find and index every page of the site. Because search engines list individual pages (not just the home page) and because many pages are buried deep within the site, possibly without many links to them, the sitemap plays a vital role in getting every carefully crafted tidbit of your website indexed.
With these fundamentals in place, the search engines will be able to locate, fully crawl, and index your website. The benefits of free marketing, increased traffic, and more valued content for your customers are immense.