QuickGuide to
          E-Commerce...

Website Traffic...
The lifeblood of your e-commerce
website!

QuickGuide to E-Commerce - SEO Optimization & Traffic

Let's take a look at the top ways of generating traffic for your website.

1. Traditional Advertising Marketing...
   Newspaper, television, radio and publication advertising is a viable method of generating website traffic. One of your main considerations when using these traditional advertising media should be your website URL. If your URL is long, uses a hyphen, or has a non-standard spelling you may have difficulty driving traffic to your site. One or two tries are all most surfers are likely to give you unless they REALLY want to see the site.
2. Banner Ads and Links...
   Running banner ads and links on other websites can be an excellent way to drive traffic to your site. There are a few things you should keep in mind when making your decision...
   • Click through rates are generally very low on banners and other ads. You should never purchase any type of banner ad program with out being able to track the clicks to your site AND how many of those clicks result in a positive response (sale, request for information, etc.).
   • Pop-up and pop-under advertising is pretty much HATED by everyone. Just say NO.
   • Interactive banners and ads do tend to result in a higher click through rate. Like any other banner or ad program you need to track the results.
3. Bulk Email...
   DON'T DO IT! There are hundreds of sites that offer to send your broadcast email to thousands, even millions of opt-in email addresses for almost no money. DON'T DO IT!
   If you have your own list of people who have chosen to opt-in to your email list you can use that list to send your broadcast email. If it is NOT your list...DON'T DO IT!
   Even one broadcast email to a few hundred email addresses can get your site (and your email) blacklisted. Black listed means that many of the major providers (Hotmail, AOL, MSN, etc.) will not accept ANY email from your site. In fact, sending SPAM email can result in your hosting company dumping your website. 
   TRUST US...DON'T DO IT!
4. Registering Your Site with Directories and Search Engines...
   A directory is a category listing of websites based on content...
   A search engine indexes web pages by keyword...
   Most of the important search engines use a process (a "spider") that follows links from page to page and website to website gathering information about the content (words) on all of the pages.
   There are a number of services that offer to register your website with hundreds and even thousands of search engines and directories. Here we go again...DON'T DO IT! These services are registering your site with "Free For All" directories. Your only response will be that your email address will end up on every SPAM email list.
   There are only a few search engines and directories that you need to register with.
   www.dmoz.org - Open Directory Project: Free
   www.yahoo.com - The Yahoo Directory: There is a fee
   www.msn.com - MSN
   www.google.com - Google
   In most cases, all of the major search engines will find, spider and index your site without you having to "register" the site with the search engine. In fact, some sources suggest that the major search engines prefer sites their spiders find over sites that are registered.
   This means that having lots of sites that link to your site is a GOOD thing. So, in addition to the major directories (DMOZ and Yahoo) you should look for other content specific directories and content sites that will add a link to your site.
5. Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines...
   Optimizing your website for search engines is a complex topic which cannot be covered in any detail here. Instead, here is a quick overview of how search engines work...
   Search engines are interested only in words...for instance, if the name of your company is shown only in your logo and is never part of the text on your website...no search engine will index your website for your company name.
   Search engines don't care about your website design, the images you have, how pretty it is or how sophisticated it looks. Search engines care only about words.
   Search engines also don't care about things like fancy scripts (JavaScript) or Flash so they ignore it. That means that if you have a Flash site or a fancy JavaScript navigation system search engines will ignore all of it.
   If you want your site to do well with search engines it MUST be designed with that in mind. Make sure that your web designer knows that search engine placement is a priority before they start working.
   If you want to learn more about search engine optimization visit Search Engine Watch.
6. Pay-Per-Click...
   Pay-per-click advertising is a fast (if somewhat expensive) way of increasing traffic immediately. The two major players are...
   Yahoo 
   Google AdWords 
   Basically, both plans allow you to purchase top listing based on a price for each time a user clicks on the link, hence...pay-per-click. In both cases, you choose a key phrase and set the highest price you are willing to pay for a visitor. If you are the highest bidder you are at the top of the list.
   Pay-per-click can be a huge money sucking machine so be very careful about how you set up the account. At a dollar or two per click you can easily spend a thousand dollars a day on a popular key phrase.
   Both plans have a way to set a maximum amount you want to spend each day.
7. The Importance of Keyword Research...
   Don't skip this step if you are optimizing for natural search engine results or pay-per-click keyword research is an absolute necessity. 
   With natural search engine optimization you have to know what key words and phrases you need to add to your web pages. Remember, if the words are not there you have absolutely no chance of being in the search results for those words.
   With pay-per-click you will find that each key phrase has a different top bid. Our research often locates secondary key phrases that combined bring in as much traffic as one of the top key phrases at half the price.
   Our favorite keyword research tool is WordTracker. This is a great tool at a reasonable cost (just $26.00 for a one week subscription and $265.00 for a year subscription). 
8. Inbound Links...
   Inbound links are links to your site from other web sites. Most search engines give sites with a lot of inbound links more relevance than sites with fewer inbound links...the more popular the site the higher it should rank.
   One of the best ways to get inbound links is to create content that other sites will link to.

As you can see, there are lots of ways to generate traffic. In most cases you will find that the success of your e-commerce website requires you to use most, if not all, of these methods...because...without traffic you may as well not have an e-commerce website.

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