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So, you build an e-commerce site, all your products are on there, but then very little changes which obviously causes your site to become less active, and ultimately not ranking as highly in search engines.
Is there anything that can be done to keep it active? I'm aware that inbound links are important and I guess these come over time, are there any other recommended means of keeping the site active?
As your products and categories aren't changing that much, you might want to consider adding some user generated content - product ratings, product reviews, that sort of thing - which should help the content of your product pages stay "fresh" and active, provided you don't just use a 3rd party client side implementation.
On top of that, you could add a news area, but you'd obviously have to have something to talk about on there...
Content. Updating content on a regular basis will greatly help you here. If you have banners on your site, consider attaching textual content to them rather than having large images with text inside them. This will greatly assist for SEO.
Also, submit a sitemap to Google and a Google Products Feed.
You can add articles relating to your products, provide recommendations and news in the industry you're working at. It would be a good idea to create or a blog to stay in touch with your customers or a community which would allow comments. This would make your website update frequently and thus it will be more often visited by Googlebot.
