Is your e-commerce site your best salesperson? This article will provide you with information about e-commerce and SEO, and how together, they can increase conversions and keep your customers coming back! Whether you’re a small business just starting out or a large corporation, the following information will be beneficial to you.

In order to gain a competitive edge in the world of online retail, you need to have a strategy that encompasses all aspects of e-commerce: search engine marketing and optimization, online product merchandising and online retail operations. A well-developed e-commerce platform can increase the ease of navigation, boost conversion rates and produce loyal customers who spread the word and keep coming back.
We all know a great SEO campaign will get you more traffic and (hopefully) more conversions. But what do you do with all of that traffic once they get to your site? Is your site ready? Do your visitors know what to do? Do you have a strong call to action? Is your site easy to navigate?

If you haven’t asked yourself these questions, your website could be in a lot of trouble! Even companies with the best SEO campaigns can fail if their site is hard to navigate, confusing or unappealing. Internet users have a short attention span and very little patience, so you have to make sure your website is built for visitors, too – not just search engines.

Here are some tips about web design that will help you make sure your site is ‘user friendly’:
– Make sure you have easy navigation. You need to make sure your website is fool proof. If a visitor comes to your site and can’t figure out where to go in less than 10 seconds, they will leave and find another less confusing site.

– Keep your content and promotions fresh. Nothing can turn a new visitor off of your site faster than a sale or promotion that ended 3 months ago. If it’s summer and your site is still talking about Christmas gifts, you definitely need an update.

– Give visitors something they’ll appreciate. People like free stuff, so give it to them! Create a guide about your products or services and offer it as a free download if they fill out a form. They’ll be happy to get the information they want and you’ll get their contact information, which is basically a lead!

– Allow customer reviews. Give your visitors the opportunity to review your products or services. This is not only helpful for new visitors that come to your site – the feedback will help you out as well. Careful, though. If you have a lot of unhappy customers, you could get a lot of feedback you may not want others to see!

– Add some videos to your site. Sometimes there’s nothing better than a visual explanation and a video is perfect for doing just that! It doesn’t have to be a huge project, something simple will work. Your visitors will find it very useful and the search engines will love it, too.

– Get social. A great way to connect with your visitors or customers is to interact with them on other websites: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are just a few of the social networks you can try. The more places people see you and your website, they better chance you have of them remembering you when they’re looking for your products or services!

Organic Search results appear in the non-advertising areas of the search engine results page. This is the equivalent of FREE advertising, so search engine optimization (SEO) is a very important strategy for creating a successful web site. So, it is imperative that you create an effective SEO strategy to help your web site bring you new customers. Here are 10 ways to improve your search engine optimization strategy.

1. Keywords: Develop unique keywords and relevant titles for each of your web site pages and each article or blog you publish.

2. Content: The depth of research and development applied to your content strategy will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of traffic you receive in organic search. “Content” includes the written word, applications, widgets, tools and other digital assets.

3. Copy writing: Adding one word or phrase in the right place can increase visibility for a particular keyword. Be careful in your approach, and consider the human element, no matter how tempting it is to over-tweak.

4. Permanent Links: Start the process of cataloging multiple redirects and campaign URL’s and set up permanent redirects to make it easier for the engines to find the “real” URL.

5. Interlinking: Link to others web sites, have others link to yours. Writing useful articles that link back to your web site and getting others to use the articles on their home pages is one of the best strategies for improving your rankings in the search engines.

6. Feed submission: Determine which feeds are most relevant to your business (products, maps, etc.) and take steps to provide data to the engines. With placements like Google Maps, a feed could be a quick ticket to a No. 1, No. 2, or No. 3 natural ranking.

7. Title and Description: Create a succinct title and description, which along with your Keywords, is an important part of your meta strategy for SEO.

8. Linking Architecture: Search engines need a unique URL for each page to actually index each page separately. Using parameters like /ShowArticle.cfm?article_id=14 doesn’t work. You could have a million articles linked like this, but the search engines wouldn’t know it. But search engines do like /ShowArticle.cfm/14 – if your information architect designs your system in this way, you can be assured that every article or web page will be reviewed by the search engines – making sure each has a different title, keyword list and description will guarantee that the search engines actually index the articles and pages. This is the best strategy for getting search engines to crawl your site and index content.

9. Clean up broken links: Find and remove permanently broken internal links or set up properly configured 404 error page to improve crawling performance that lets engines know that the old link is history.

10. Make your pages smaller by removing common JavaScript and CSS code to external files. The files are then cached by the browser and your page loads quicker and the search engines can crawl your pages quicker and easier.

These are only a few of the many things you can do to help your SEO. They are free and if you can coordinate all of these things into your web site, they are also very effective.

Bonus Information!

For coders, these are some of the areas that must be taken into consideration:

*Meta Tags – though your title, keywords and description in your site’s meta-tags may have been effective when you launched your site, this can change. Your meta-tags must be tested regularly – it is important to test and re-test your meta data.

*Content – like meta tags, your site content must be updated regularly and must reflect the meta data you are using. When it comes to search engine indexing, the continuity of your meta data and content are checked. Event the order in which your keywords are set and HTML like bold text can make your information easier for the search engine spiders to crawl.

*Links – building links on your site allows you to become more friendly on-line. By making friends virtually, you are increasing your popularity and reputation on-line. This interlinking is an effective strategy to promote your site – the more relevant your links are, the more powerful your web site becomes.

For marketers, this is the most powerful way to build traffic.

*In-Bound Links – Article marketing is one of the key ways to build in-bound links. Every site that posts one of your articles becomes a billboard pointing back to your web site. Imagine having an article on 1,000 web sites – that’s 1,000 billboards pointing to your web site. Now imaging 100 articles on 1,000 web site pointing back to your web site – that is 100,000 billboards that make your site one of the highest ranked sites on the Internet.

When you implement these Strategies, you’ll find two long-term benefits for your website:

1) This will boost your web site search engine rankings.
2) This will attract quality traffic to your site.

Webmasters of business Web sites should always implement strategies that will improve their accessibility on the Internet. After all, their online page would not be giving them a good profit in business if no one on the Internet knows that its there. The concepts of SEO will surely come in handy to achieve this goal.

Affiliate Marker’s Dilemma

There are certain businesses on the Internet that requires a steady traffic on their Web site to increase the chances of profit. Income-generating business on the Net, such as Affiliate marketing, requires large products to be sold in order to increase the commissions they will be getting from their respective merchants.

It has always been a common dilemma of affiliate marketers that their site does not produce a sizable traffic that will ensure the success of their enterprise. In fact, inexperienced marketers often find that they are hardly making any sale at all, since their site remains inaccessible on the World Wide Web.

This reduces the number of potential customers visiting their site or making their online page inaccessible to these individuals even if advanced search methods are utilized — like search engines. This is where SEO comes into play.

SEO Concepts To Improve Online Accessibility

For budding affiliate marketers who aren’t that Internet savvy to suit their online purpose, there are plenty of SEO concepts they can implement on their respective pages to ensure their accessibility on the Web; common ones are:

1. Keywords

Keywords are the soul of search engines; these online services utilize keywords keyed in by a Web surfer and use it to look for matches on other pages on the Internet. The more keywords found in a particular site, the higher its placement on search engine results would be.

To use this strategy, you need to come up with a variety of keywords that reflects the content found on your site. Integrate these keywords into the page, particularly on the title, Meta description, links, site address, and the body. Make sure it does not compromise the quality of your site’s content. Avoid spamming keywords at all cost, since this will only get you banned by search engines.

2. Links

Another SEO strategy you can use to increase your online accessibility is through the use of links. This method improves your online coverage, as well as giving you a much higher page rank that will ensure your placement on search engine results.

You can initiate link building strategies with other Web sites that are similar to your content, or you can make use of other methods; like:

? Submission to Web directories

? Publishing articles on the Internet with embedded links

? Social networking

? And Social bookmarking