Archive for October, 2009

How to improve Search engine performance on ecommerce websites

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Ask the pro- Wary about the frequent updates of your products on the e-commerce? The online products that you sell are more susceptible to search engine crawlers indexing problems. Different factors can contribute to slow website indexing; it is always desirable to get the product pages indexed as quickly as possible, which provides a competitive edge. In fact, poorly-indexed websites are losing a lot of valuable traffic. Losing traffic from the Internet means losing sales, which can affect the profitability of your online business. The Googlebot will never penetrate deep in the content for a vertical website structure if those pages are just duplicate content. If they are indexed, similar pages will be auto filtered in SER (and will never rank). A vertical website structure is the most common structure for big ecommerce websites, because it is the most logical structure. So one has to take extra precautions while developing a vertical website structure. You are aware of the weakness of a vertical website structure when it comes to getting low visibility due to lack of Page Rank and internal links. It means that a good marketing strategy is required to start getting back links from other related websites pointing to your important products. Truthfully, the impact depends on the PR of the links; the higher the PR, the more frequently will Google follow those links. This encourages the Googlebot’s crawling and indexing, not only starting from the home page, but on the deeper pages. The chances of getting new product pages indexed as soon as possible. google recommends that you use a sitemap in your website. A lot of webmasters are confused by the term “sitemap.” There are two types of sitemap, namely the normal web sitemap (using .htm, .html, .php, .asp, extension) and the XML sitemap (for example: sitemap.xml). The web version of your sitemap should be easily seen by your visitors and placed in your website. All URLs should link to it. It should NOT use .XML or any other other RSS style format. The XML sitemap should be located in the root directory, and no link from the URLs of your website should be pointing to this file. You do not need this to be viewed by users and to be indexed by the Googlebot. A word of caution – do not block this file in robots.txt.

Converting Visitors to Buyers

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

Routinely, when I am consulting you guys (new prospective clients, small business owners and CEO’s) tell me we are getting traffic to our website but we are not selling. A lot of you folks are happy about the traffic but do not take into account that “conversion” is the most important matrix that your website. Non target visitors is good in the sense that your business is getting visibility but the key thing is when conversion as that is when your cash register ring.

You know it , a lot of hard work with brainstorming, analysis and testing goes in for creating a web site and once complete and ready for the world to see, it boils down to bringing in new customers and continue retaining the old ones. So, you gear up to do some business and bring in the benefits, but did you ever realize that a huge traffic flow might not necessarily be a huge customer base. We are going to discuss a thing or two on the subject, on how to convert those visitors to people who shall actually pay for your product or services.

Accomplishing it is however not that easy, but if you follow the process of conversion, the rate of which is the ratio between visitors and buyers (e.g. 100 people coming in and 10 people actually buying products from your site is a 10:1 ratio). A 1:1 conversion ratio is 100% success in terms of benefiting from the work and the money you have put in, so how do we start about it?

Forrester (August 2007) calculated an average conversion rate to be near 2.9% in e-commerce, so exceeding this percentage shall determine you above average. You will need to put in your efforts marketing your website and the products/services it sells, with a budget that can be mapped properly to your return on investment. Your primary lookout should be increasing the revenue inflow without spending any further. So, here are a few simple ways to maximize your conversion potentials.

The website design comes first in this aspect. The design captivates your visitor and then the content drives him to what to do next. Unless you state clearly what you do in a grabbing manner, chances are less that the conversion shall happen. Yet, the content must be to the point so your website visitors can act directly; it must make them believe by drawing their attention towards the item you are selling. It shall also build customer loyalty to turn them to returning ones. Implementing a reward program shall increase the chances tenfold if you are e-commerce.

However, practically speaking, such strategies are endless and are often customized as per the needs, while the content remains one of the standards that hold on every ground. It makes easy for visitors to understand what their next course of action should be. To make all this happen to hire a leading web site design orange county company and we shall bring you tons of growth for your business. Or, for a quicker result, call us at 714-936-0208