Ecommerce Store Owners : Want Visitors? Here’s How

By: Robin Porter

Have you recently opened an online store, and waiting for those
customers to drop by and start shopping?

In cyberworld - unlike the real world - you just can’t pick a
good location and rely on passing trade. You’ve got to work
hard to get visitors to your virtual store.

Let’s take a look at how we can drum up a small stampede...

Are You Optimized?

To stand any chance of being ranked well in the free search
engines, your site must be optimized for the keyword phrases
you are targeting.

Research and develop a list of keywords related to your product
line, using the free downloadable software at
www.goodkeywords.com . From this list, you can find two or
three well targeted phrases, with decent visitor traffic, and
make sure your website is optimized for them. Include the
phrases in the title, and meta tags, in the body text (several
times) and “alt” mage tags.

Make sure your product listings are optimized too. The term
“horse saddle” is searched for over 1900 times a month on one
search engine alone, so make sure your product titles and
descriptions include the relevant search term, rather than just
the plain old product number, such as “Acme A35284”.

Are You Link Building?

Search engines are placing more and more importance on incoming
links to your website – in a way, ty consider them to be votes
for your site.

First, make sure you submit your site to the large list of
directories that are crawled and indexed by popular search
engine spiders. You can get the SEO friendly directory list
free at www.info.vibesilencer.com

Next, pursue an ongoing campaign of getting links from other
websites. Try to make sure the sites are on a related theme.
You can find sites that are linking to your competitors by
typing “link:www.yourcompetitorswebsite.com “ into Google, and
then approach them to request a link to your website.

One useful piece of software for researching and keeping track
of link requests is available at www.seoelite.com . (If
nothing else, the free search engine optimisation course is one
of the best free courses I have ever come across)

Are You Using Pay Per Click Advertising?

There’s nothing like Pay Per click (PPC) for a quick shot in
the arm! You can often have traffic within an hour of setting
up a campaign with Google Adwords (http://www.google.com/ads).
Overture is Google’s main Ppc competitor (www.overture.com) and
can take a few days to get up an running with, but they are now
part of Yahoo! – and therefore mustn’t be overlooked.

Ppc search engines can provide you with extremely well targeted
traffic that you can turn on and off like a tap. However, you
must get your strategy right or you will hemorrhage cash ;
develop a large list of targeted keywords, write a catchy text
advert and don’t get drawn into bidding wars.

Are You Overlooking Your Existing Customers?

Once your online store starts getting customers, make sure you
keep them. Develop a newsletter to keep in contact with them –
and regularly send them details of special offers and new
products. Repeat business is often overlooked – but it is a
vital part of some of the webs most successful ecommerce
operations.

And if you already have a “bricks and mortar” store, don’t
forget to publicise your new online shop – include it in all
your stationery and marketing materials.

The marketing and promotion of an online store is an ongoing
project. The most successful store owners know how important it
is to set aside time each week to attend to marketing - whether
it’s link building, writing a newsletter or keeping abreast of
the latest online marketing developments – success comes to
those who consistently put the work in.

© 2005 Robin Porter.
About The Author: Robin Porter has been CEO of London based web
designer Arpey Internet http://www.arpey.co.uk for over six
years.