E-Commerce TIPS
Confused about how e-Commerce, shopping carts, website design and search engine optimization helps your online business? Here are some TIPS:
Building a proper website for Search Engine e-Commerce exposure
Most important from the start – you need to ensure your website has been built to proper specifications – we have listed the issues you need to concern yourself with and also provided alternate links for further details. There are some other strategies you need to concern yourself with.
Related and Sufficient Content – Still and always was the number one issue you need to concern yourself with! On Google, Yahoo, MSN (Organic Search Engines), your “text” content is how these engines rank you in their listings. If you have limited or low text content on your website, chances are you will not rank well. The most important part of your website as far as search engines go – is your Home Page. Your Home Page is a “Book-Cover” or “Preface” to the rest of your website. You want to have your home page completed with your relevant and most important text content, and have that content linked strategically to your most important products/pages you’re trying to sell online. If you have only images with little or no text content – you will not get search exposure!
Remember – You are building your website for two audiences:
1) The people browsing your website,
2) The Search Engines! Both read your site differently and the “Organic Search Engine” is a realatively easy audience to please because it reads everything!
Meta-Tags, Keywords and Alt. Tags – Meta-Tags and Keywords were once the higher form of search engine marketing for building your website. These days the search engines place less attention to them, though it’s best to still optimize your sites relative content and pages with the keywording and Meta-Content. More important these days are the Alt. Tags on images. These are the little pop-up text phrases that show up when you mouse over an image or active link. Mouse over one of the images or links on this page to view one. It’s important to keep the images tagged in this manner because a search engine cannot see what the image actually is…remember text content is the big factor on your website as far a search engines are concerned.
It’s also important to properly tag your images and image file names correctly and accurately to take advantage of Google’s Image Search Engine.
Submit Your Website to the Search Engines – This is one of the most important and essential steps in e-Commerce. May people contact us because they either didn’t know, or had a third party company handle their webmastering and their website was never getting any traffic. After you have built your site and published it live, submit it to as many search engines as you can…not just the BIG THREE – Google, Yahoo, MSN.
Alternately, many e-Commerce website owners do not submit to online business directories. There is an advantage to doing this because it provides “local” traffic from small business directory search engines for you from out of state / provincial and out of country customers, and also gives you another inbound link for Organic Search Engines to find. Remember your 10 points theory above which determines your ranking? This is where the pluses add up! The more directories you can submit to, the better. Those directories usually give you a “category” to sign up in, so you are provided with a relative inbound content link automatically from their site to yours. The people who use these directories may not use regular organic search engines at all so they’re lead to your site by other means – direct regional searches through the directory! Which is what those directories were designed to do. But check with the directory you are considering a listing on to ensure that they are browsed and indexed by the larger search engines. If your link is scripted to a database, and is not found by search engines in that directory, there is no advantage to you.
Other strategies you can persue – There are many new and seasoned tactics you can delve into to get your site listed even further through backlinks and related content posting:
-Publishing a press release or article on a website that accepts them (make sure you place a copy of any articles or press releases on your site to add to your content!)
-Blogging and webcasts.
-RSS Feeds
-Online Demos and Videos (with increasing areas of highspeed coverage, this is where the future of e-Commerce is heading).
-Provide links on your site to other useful and related websites that your viewers might be looking for (don’t forget to try and get a back link from those “related” sites).
Long Term e-Commerce Strategies – It is also important to remember that e-Commerce is not only “part of the marketing mix” — it’s a long term goal. Don’t expect success to happen overnight. When you first submit your website to Google, Yahoo, MSN and other main search engines, you’re site is held for 90+ days in some cases until the search engine considers you a viable long term site. From there you are constantly assessed and re-assessed with millions of other websites on the internet. Take the time to update your site at least monthly with some new content and make the nescessary changes to your sites as new technologies. Most importantly, don’t stop learning and research e-Commerce tactics and strategies because they change and grow as well!
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