Here are the main ways you can get your site to rise to the top of the shopping engine listings...

• Pay for an enhanced listing. Some shopping engines, such as Nextag.com, will allow you to pay your way to a top listing. The ones that charge you based on the cost per click usually give you the option of paying more for each click to appear higher in the results. Others will allow you to pay a flat fee for top billing or to display an advertisement for your products across their networks.
  
• Compete on price. On shopping sites such as PriceGrabber, Shopping.com and Shopzilla, the products with the lowest prices appear at the top by default. Other sites allow users to sort listings by price even if that's not the default.
  
  So in a highly competitive area, you may want to discount your product to attract shoppers (which has the added benefit of boosting your merchant rating, explained below).
  
• Boost your merchant/user rating. At sites like Yahoo Shopping and Shopping.com, your merchant rating increases as you attract more customers and get glowing customer reviews for your site and products.
  
  The higher your merchant rating, the higher you'll appear in the listings. So encourage your customers to review your products and website for you... and if that doesn't work, offer an incentive!
  
• Optimize your product listings for relevant keywords. Shopping engines such as Google Base and MSN Live Product Search display listings based on their relevance to keyword searches.
  
  You upload your product listings to shopping sites through "data feeds." These provide fields for you to describe your product in detail. It's ESSENTIAL to optimize your data feeds if you want YOUR listing to appear when someone searches for what you offer.
  
  Each product listing you have must include keywords that describe the specific attributes of your product (e.g., price, color, size, UPC code, and model numbers). You can and should include keywords in your product listing's title, description, and image alt tags.
  
  Each shopping portal has different allowances when it comes to how much information you can include, so read the fine print.
  
  (NOTE: If you decide to submit to shopping sites on a grand scale, you can hire a company like Singlefeed.com, Channelbrain.com, Feedperfect.com or Mercent.com to manage your feeds for you.
  
  However they all charge monthly or setup fees, so if you're only listing on one or two, it's probably worth managing them yourself.)

Now that you know the secrets to landing a top shopping portal ranking, let's take a look at some of the biggest and best shopping sites -- so you can land in their top three!

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