Learn how to build your webpage the right way
Starting your own e-commerce business can be quite the adventure. There is nothing wrong with falling head over heels in love with your ideas and plans and becoming overly excited, but always remember, feet first. Creating a business from scratch is like a child learning to walk. You need to grab on to something solid, feel around, get a sense of balance, and take baby steps. Risky Business Before running full speed ahead with your brilliant business brainchild, proper planning is required. Being an entrepreneur is risky business, however you can improve your chances of success with preparation and development. First, you need to research your target market, product and services, competitors, the demographic of your potential customers, popular key words associated with your business and the probable cost involved. After compiling all this information, you need to ask yourself, is it worth it? If the answer is yes, then carry on.
Marketing should start immediately after the company is created and a name has been chosen and officially registered. You want people to remember your company in a positive way. You need to make an outstanding first impression. So, the first thing you have to work on is your name and your face. In the e-commerce world your website is the name and face of the company. The website is the most important marketing tool for an e-commerce business. The website needs to look legitimate and provoke a sense of trust. It needs to be appealing, simple to use, eye-catching, competitive and unique. Therefore, it is worth it to spend a good amount of time and money on your website design. If you are not savvy with website design and development, then invest in a talented website design company or independent designer. Step 3: Website Marketing A. Search Engine Optimization Search engines use algorithms (mathematical formulas) to rank website listings in response to a particular keyword query. In order to protect themselves from webmasters and search engine optimizers manipulating the search engine results to their advantage, search engines do not reveal their ranking criteria. However, there are many factors that are speculated to be important influences in determining the position of a website on search engine result pages. For example: Build a content rich website: Search engine spiders and bots like websites filled with informative and relevant text and content. Incoming links: Build up incoming links from relevant or complimentary sites. The more relevant and authoritative the incoming sites, the better your site will be in the eyes of the spiders and bots. Keywords: Try to place as many keywords in the content of your home page as possible without losing the sense and aesthetics of the page. Meta Tags: Meta tags are html text containing information about the website that is not seen by human viewers. Meta tags include title, description, and keyword tags. Considering that a title tag is the text that appears, representing your site, on a search engine result page, it is very important to choose a title tag that emphasizes keywords on that page. Header tags: Header tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 ) are used to designate headers and titles. H1 tags should be used to represent the first and most important header, H2 as the second and so on. Search engines give importance to text that differs from the text on the rest of the page. Bold, italics, underlines, and various font sizes are useful as well. Make the site simple, easy to surf and navigate, and eye-catching. Keep your website updated with fresh content, new pages and information. B. Free Advertising Search Engines As a business owner, your first priority should be to get your website listed in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista. This can be done simply by submitting your website to various search engines. Directories You can also submit your site to web directories, which are databases of categorized listings of websites. Focus on directories that are popular and specialize on your industry. Link Building Considering that the World Wide Web was created with the concept of discovering new websites and web pages by following links between documents, link building is an important factor in optimizing your website for search engines. Effective link building consists of exchanging links with authoritative and information websites that relate to and/or compliment your e-commerce business. Specifically Google, but other search engines included, believe that when web page A links to web page B, web page A is casting a vote for web page B. The more votes
Presented in Association with SiteSell and Eric Taylor.
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