Amongst the many online marketing channels, search engine optimisation is the most cost effective and most accurate way to drive qualified web traffic to your e-commerce site. Unlike other marketing channels, for example display advertising, web users who click on your search result are actively looking to make a purchase (hence qualified) and best of all, it won’t cost you a penny (hence cost effective). Now that you understand how important seo is for your e-commerce site, here are a few tried and tested tips for 2010.

1. Get Singular Keyword Vs. Plurals Right – If you’ve red a bit about seo for e-commerce sites you know that every page (and in particular product pages) must have unique page title and page description which includes your keywords. The search engines use this information to determine how relevant or not the page is to the user search query. Despite this, most e-commerce sites miss the connection between singular and plural when choosing the keywords and optimise around one or the other. My tip is to include both terms in your metadata, based ‘product title [singular] order product title [plural] at store name’ e.g. ‘blue iphone cover – order blue iphone covers at store name’.

2. Use HTML and XML Product Site Maps - For many e-commerce sites, especially sites with many product SKUs, the battle is sometimes getting all the products into the search results index. If the product is unique for your site and isn’t blocked from the search engine crawlers, there’s no reason why it should not appear in the index. Unless the search engines could not find the product when visiting your site. To ensure all the products are accessible and found by the engines, consider using two sites maps. HTML site map which is placed close to the root, for example www.sitename.com/sitemap.html will ensure it will be found. While XML site map will require you to submit it via Google Webmater tools, which is a simple and free service from Google.  

3. Intelligently Deal With Out of Stock and Discontinued Products - Unless you know better, in most cases you’ll take those products off the site and web users reaching the page will receive an error message. The missed opportunity is that those pages have some seo value, maybe some back-links pointing to them and possible high ranking. To save some of the value from those pages, consider redirecting them to a more appropriate product page. To maximize this, use a 301 server header from the old product to the new product so the seo value will be transferred from one to the other. Here’s a useful how-to redirect guide.

4. Always Rewrite, Refresh and Reinvent Content - Great content is an essential long term seo strategy. Content in the shape of product descriptions, products guides and even products reviews will include your keywords which will go hand in hand with the keywords in the page title and page description making the page appear even more relevant. Quality content will also make the page more sharable thereby increasing the likelihood of sites linking to the page and fresh content will ensure the page gets crawled more often by the search engines. For e-commerce sites, getting new fresh content is easy by simply encouraging customers to leave reviews.

5. Don’t Forget On-Site Optimisation -  This type of search engine optimisation relates to on-site improvements which will contribute to the seo mix. e-commerce sites should pay extra attention to:

A. Image naming – use the product title as the image name to gain web traffic from Google image search.
B. Image alt text – populate the alt field for all your images, in particular for product images.
C. Title as H1 – turn the product title into an H1 HTML tag.
D. Link internally – Link between relevant products to increase their relevancy.

I hope you find my e-commerce optimisation tips useful. Good luck for 2010.    

—
Guest article by Michelle Strassburg, head of sales and marketing at hardwood flooring store Wood and Beyond. The online store which was re-launched in 2009 offers timber products from worktops to decking.

This the second article in a series about protecting your website, the first article published was about stopping content stealers who damage your website with duplicate content issues.

Stopping the hackers getting into your website is obviously hugely important. Here are a few methods to protect yourself and keep your website secure.

Passwords
Change them often for the login to your website. Make them strong so use lots of letters, numbers and symbols. It may be a pain but for something so simple and important it must be done.

Index.html In All Folders
For every folder on your server make sure it has a blank index.html, otherwise if a hacker visits the folder directly they will be able to see all other files inside the folder.

Monitor Error Log
Check your stats, or 'Error Log' and keep an eye on it. You may spot hackers trying to find web based programs on your site to later attempt to use them. Alternatively you may also find missing files, images not loading etc which is good to locate to improve your users experience.

Htaccess File
Use the .htaccess file on your hosting.

Stop kiddie hackers with this code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)=http: [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F,L]

Stop other people viewing the content of your htaccess file with this code (do the same for any other file just change the name):

<files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

Block IP addresses with this code:

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from ENTER IP HERE

Robots File
Use your robots.txt file to prevent indexing of important folders and files on your website. Here is the code, change folder names to your own. Learn more about this at robotstxt.org

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder-name/
Disallow: /folder-name1/
Disallow: /folder-name2/

Chmod Permissions (Unix servers only, not Windows)
Change the permission of your files to 644 when possible. This basically means the owner gets 'read and write access', but all other users only get 'read' access preventing programs from running. Obviously if you have a shopping cart script and other functions it may not be possible to have all files 644. You don't want to leave files unnecessarily vulnerable so have the right chmod in place when possible.

SSL
Try and use SSL on your whole website, not just during payments. You may need to pay extra for this so enquire with your web host provider about whether it is possible and for how much.

Backups
Remember to also do regular back-ups of your website should anything happen to it.

Your PC
Make sure it is free of viruses and well protected. Always update and run anti-virus software as often as possible. If your computer is hacked they could get the details to hack your website as well.

Surfing the web on mobile phones continues to grow in popularity. With the rise of smartphones such as the Apple iPhone, Blackberrys and devices from other brands such as Nokia the ‘mobile web’ seems to have become more and more in use.

Worth Becoming Mobile Friendly?
No doubt this is one market that will continue to grow over the coming years, and potentially rapidly, so ignoring this opportunity would be madness. It improves your reach to potential customers, means you are more accessible and also being involved already means you are ready for the future as mobile web develops even further. It also acts as another promotional method as there are directories specific for phone surfers.

Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?
Most websites aren’t automatically suited for use on phones, the formatting can end up all over the place. Get your website up on your phone (if it is internet enabled, which most new ones are) and take a look. Chances are it is isn’t.

Do Any Companies Yet Have Special Websites For Phones?
Yes. Lots of major companies, and much smaller ones, are now creating specific mobile-optimised websites. Amazon, Travelodge & Swiftcover are just a few of the companies already live – test them our on your phone to see what they look like. Another site is DropshipBog.co.uk, that’s right (see image on right), you can read all our content on your device, check us out on your phone now!

What’s The Difference Between The Sites?
Sites for mobiles have to be much ‘lighter’ so they load a lot quicker – compressed images, stripping out design elements and removing scripts are just a few of the changes. A script on your website means it detects the browser a visit is using and shows them the website as appropriate.

How Can I Make My Website Mobile Friendly?
You can either install a script yourself, search in google for things like ‘mobile friendly’ and there are lots of blog posts and articles with advice. Alternatively you can use a service to create one for you (it is free for basic services or paid for a more premium service). One I have tried out is MoFuse.com which is very easy to do and a quick solution. The benefits of doing it yourself are; you have complete control and your content doesn’t get redirected to another domain (like it does with services like MoFuse). However the services are a quicker and easier.

Conclusion
The web really is going mobile, and it is an area you can attack now before other ecommerce sites get in on the act. Be one step ahead of the game, it should pay off!

During the month of September LCN.com, the UK web host and domain registrar, are providing a new promotion code each day giving you ways to save lots of money! All offers are valid for 24 hours so you have to be quick, you can check daily the offer on THIS PAGE.

Current Deal
At the time of writing the offer is 99% off 1 years web hosting (1 years hosting for 21p!), but it expires in about 12 hours so by the time you read this I guess there will be another offer on.

What’s The Catch?
At first I wondered “Whats the catch?”, for the offers to be as ridiculous as this. But then realised that they are doing the offers simply to try and get as many new customers as possible, and then hope in a years time you renew your hosting (or domain name, or whatever offers you take advantage of) at the full price. As it happens, there prices are quite reasonable anyway, hosting starts from just £21 per year up to £56 per year, the monthly cost works out decent value for money for UK hosting.

How To Take Advantage Of The Offers
Simply visit this page each day where they provide the promotion codes and copy it. Then you checkout as normal and paste the promotion code during the checkout process and the discount is applied, very simple to do.

Who are LCN?
On their ‘About’ page it says they were established in February 2000 and currently hold 350,000 domain names and host 50,000 websites. So they are an established company. If you want to be sure about their customer service before you take up any of their offers do the usual test of contacting them (via phone or email) and seeing how friendly they are, how quick they respond and quality of response.

These offers are only on during September 2009 so don’t miss out, it is a great chance to save quite a bit of money on your overheads. Visit the LCN homepage now or check the latest offer available now.

Here is a very good video I found on YouTube this morning. It is titled Optimizing Ecommerce Product Images. Although the video features two American marketers, what they talk about isn’t region specific so is good advice if you are in the UK.

Because of how dropshipping works you may be thinking “well I can’t do that because I don’t have the products to take photos of!”. Good product images can really help sell items, so spending money on buying the products yourself direct from a dropshipper to take photos of them is an investment. And once you are done you can then sell them on to recoup your expenditure anyway.

If you sell hundreds of products then it may become a slight issue. So perhaps only do it with your best sellers to begin with. You could clearly see in the video what a difference it makes so don’t underestimate the use of product photography.

Here is a very good document titled User Experience Activities which should help you with various aspects of your own ecommerce website and business as a whole.

The points are only short so you will have to research more into a lot of them. Other points have the ability to just make you realise something (the penny drops) instantly. I especially like the 4th point down under the ‘Analyse’ section which says “If the company sells tangible products, get your hands on them and use them. To think like a customer, you must be a customer.” Short, sharp, and so true.

With regards to web design, in the past I thought about whether it was best to:

• Method 1: Record all plans and ideas, and then do lots of updates all at once. Or;
• Method 2: Each time I get an idea or find important info on web design issues make the changes straight away

The second method means rather then spending a lump amount of time (say every 3 months) doing upgrades to your website, it is more of a continuous ongoing process.

Types Of Sites
The method you choose should be based on your type of website. If it is purely an ecommerce website then I think using method two is much better. It is a lot more flexible and if the issues will improve your sales, such as these tips, then can you really afford to wait until your next round of upgrades? Best to just get the changes done to start benefiting straight away.

Alternatively if the site in question is a blog for your business, or a related minisite you use as a feeder to your main site then I think method 1 is better. The nature of these sorts of sites means waiting to do a whole round of updates would be more beneficial as you could continuously build up ideas, and then carry them all out when you have a set amount of time available to you. And unlike with ecommerce sites the web design changes you make to these sites probably won’t have as big an impact on sales/profitability.

Conclusion
Given the points made above I think for a main ecommerce website it is definitely best to have continuous website development, because then you can be more flexible (IE when sales are quiet work on the web design) and also take advantage of the improvements right away.

I’m sure other people will have differing opinions on this but I’ve found this way best, and alternative opinions are the beauty of business

This is a guest post by Ran Nir, the founder of online marketing agency Conversion Counts and a Google Analytics Consultant.

Google Analytics offers free enterprise level analytics software for everyone which just a few years ago would have cost an arm and a leg. Google Analytics will be an important tool to achieve your business goals provided the initial configuration is carried out correctly. Although Google Analytics offers some very complex solutions, the 10 benefits below are my favourites to increase conversion rates and revenues. They all require a basic understanding of Google Analytics and in many cases no additional configuration.

1. Track your website revenue: The Google e-commerce module is very comprehensive, in fact it can be used as a simple stock management system. Both online and offline orders can be tracked using Google Analytics which will provide your business with a complete picture in terms of revenue by category, revenue by channel, revenue by keyword, conversion rate, average order and many more important measurements.

To enable e-commerce reporting, follow these steps:

- Log in to your Google Analytics account
- Click ‘Edit’ next to the profile you’d like to enable
- On the Profile Settings page, click ‘edit next’ to Main Website Profile Information
- Change the E-Commerce Website radio button from ‘No’ to ‘Yes’
- Get a developer to install the tracking code available from Google
- Schedule a daily email e-commerce report so every morning you can start the day with a smile

2. Analyse and fix your sales funnel : You can use Google Analytics in many ways, but the most straightforward is to analyse and optimise a sales funnel. If the goal is set correctly then each stage in the sales funnel can be analysed and optimised to increase conversion. For additional information on how to set goals, visit the Google Analytics support page

3. Locate website errors and fix them : Having broken links on a site is bad news for user experience, site revenue and for your search engine optimisation efforts. Using Google Analytics to find error pages (404s) is really a breeze.

To locate error pages, follow these steps:

- Make sure you have a custom 404 page (you should have one anyway)
- Customize the page title of your error page, for example ‘Sorry Page Not Found :: SiteName’
- Visit your Google Analytics account >> content >> content by title
- Paste your unique page title in the free text under ‘containing’

4. Improve content by analysing the bounce rate : For online retailers, a high bounce rate hits where it hurts – the bottom line. Bounce rate is the percentage of entrances on the page that result in the visitor immediately leaving the site = missed revenue. There are a number of ways to reduce the bounce rate, my favourites are:

- Get rid of low quality traffic if you’re paying for it
- Improve the page content and address some basic usability tactics
- Ensure accurate metadata descriptions so you’re not promising something you can’t deliver
- When selling a product, ask yourself is the price competitive?

5. Track the effect of SEO metadata and content optimisation : If one of your SEO goals is to increase organic search CTR (if not, never too late to start!), Google Analytics can help. Once your changes have taken effect and are visible in the engines, head to Google analytics and follow those steps:

- Compare two dates, before and after your changes, taking into account seasonal and weekly fluctuations
- For site wide analysis, head to traffic sources

6. Track revenue sources : Best practice is to track and report on every channel which can turn into revenue. Using Google Analytics URL Builder it’s easy to assign a unique trackable URL or Tag URL as some people call it. Once the URL is tracked, you can analyse revenue, bounce rate, page views etc and start spending more cash where it matters. 

7. Track outbound links : If you link out from your site or blog, make sure you add onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/link/linkname’); “ It’s nice to know where your users are going to.

8. Compare historical data : One of my favourite features in Google Analytics is the ability to compare historical and seasonal trends. With e-commerce websites I use this information to better understand customer behavior and shopping habits so the right offer is always available at the right time. New offers can be compared to historical offers so your business can see what’s working and what’s not. Great for comparing seasonal keywords, traffic sources and more.

9. Manage sub domains and directory separately : This feature makes it easy to analyse and report, especially for websites with large folders and many pages. If you run a large website, this might be the only way to really turn raw data into actionable information. For additional information on tracking sub domains, visit the Google Analytics support page 

10. Reports by email : A great feature for businesses who like to stay 100% on top of things and get involved as much as possible. Using Google Analytics you can configure different reports to be sent to different people in the company, resulting in less manual work for yourself and happy customers.

The series on Increasing Revenue has now been finished. Here is the full list of all the articles:

Post 1: Looking At The Possibility Of Tripling Online Sales
Post 2: Increase Revenue 100% Without Getting More Traffic
Post 3: How-To: Improve Conversion Rate Of Visitors
Post 4: How-To: Increase Average Spend Of Shoppers
Post 5: How-To: Increase Number Of Times Customers Purchase
Post 6: How-To: Increase Traffic To Your Ecommerce Website

I’ve also added it to the Series page which I’ve created to list the post series which have been published. It makes it easier for you to refer to in the future should you want to refresh your memory on any methods/ideas.

Conclusion
I’ve managed to fit a lot into the 6 articles so I hope all the information contained within them can help your business. Even if you are only able to implement one or two of the tips it should have an impact on your sales. Most of the points mentioned can also be expanded upon in more depth. So if you feel I have been a bit brief with some elements have a good search and you will find even more info I’m sure.

Reach The Customers!

This article focuses on traffic. In percentage terms the amount you can increase your traffic using the content below will vary. But young businesses should be able to increase their traffic a notable percentage.

First off; you must be going for targetted visitors who can convert into customers, not just any old visitors. Give me 50 targetted visitors over 5000 random ones any day! A while back I wrote an article with 7 ways not to promote, worth a read to check you aren’t doing any of those methods.

I’m now going to split this post into 2 parts, Long-Term and Short-Term.

Generating Traffic In The Long-Term
SEO – search engine optimisation, it is all about the SEO! Get your website ranking highly in Google for popular terms in your niche and you will receive thousands of visitors every month. You can either pay a company to do SEO for you, or do-it-yourself.

Paying someone is going to cost a fair bit of money, I can’t give exact figures because I do all my SEO myself but I know it isn’t cheap (well it can be if you hire someone crap!). If you have the time I recommend you learn yourself. It will take a while to learn, take action and see results, we aren’t talking weeks here – we are talking many months and possibly years.

It is a massive subject so their is no point me trying to cover it in this post. Instead here are some websites I’ve used to learn SEO which have served me well.

Search Engine Guide – A huge archive of articles, the whole blog is about search engines but pay close attention to the specific SEO category. Covers everything from the absolute most basics upwards.

Problogger – This blog focuses on bloggers, so you can ignore most articles, but the SEO category has lots of good articles with information that can be used regardless of whether you run a blog, ecommerce site or just a content site. Go through the archives and have a good read as their is lots of content so don’t just skip through it as you may miss important stuff.

Those are the main 2 that I’ve used so I highly recommend them. Everything else I’ve learned has just came from being active online looking through forums, searching etc. There are a fair few SEO specific blogs, perform some searches for terms like ‘SEO blog’, ‘SEO tips’ etc and you will find lots of resources.

One thing I will say is make sure the SEO advice you read is relatively up-to-date, anything over a few years old may now not be sound advice. The search engines are changing the ways they rank websites all the time, so if an article tells you to do tonnes of link exchanges, quickly leave the website! Generally from an SEO point of view I say the fresher the better.

Generating Traffic In The Short-Term
If your website isn’t ranking highly in the search engines you need to use other methods in the short-term to get potential customers to your website.

• Shopping Directories – Submit your website to all of the major shopping directories like ShopSafe. All the good directories have strict requirements so it means you won’t be listed amongst a load of crap like you are in general directories.
• Review Sites – Get your website listed in all the consumer shopping review sites like Ciao.co.uk. You will probably need to submit your website to be in their database, so search their FAQ’s and if you can’t find how to get listed then drop them an email.
• Pay-Per-Click – All the search engines now have sponsored results, Google call theirs ‘Adwords’. You only pay for the clicks you receive. You will need a decent budget to be able to really utilise PPC effectively though. A good way to get instant traffic.
• Paid Banners & Text Links – Pay for banners and text links on targetted popular websites. Must be done carefully. Ask the website owners for stats on previous ad campaigns they have done for people to see what the CTR (click-through rate) is like. I once spent £50 on a banner and text link ad on a blog in my niche. The whole time the ads were running I received about 5 visitors! Not a good ROI! So make sure you know roughly how effective the ad placements are.
• Offer Products In Return For Reviews – Contact bloggers and website owners in your niche. Drop them a quick email asking if they would like to review your service. You don’t charge them for the product so the reviewer gets a free product and you get some exposure within your niche. Can be very effective because the cost of the product to you could soon be clawed back from the direct sales made from the review.
• Sponsor Niche Forums – Contact forums in your sector to see if they will let you sponsor them. If you can get a good price and the forum has lots of loyal users you could get a fair few visitors and a good ROI. Because of how loyal forum members can be they will have a higher trust in you before they even visit you simply because their forum is willing to let you sponsor them.
• Create Coupon Codes – Create special coupon codes for reductions and free delivery and then try and get word out about your ‘limited time coupons’. Contact blog owners etc to let them know. You can also submit to websites which list retailers coupon codes, search in Google for them as there is a lot of those types of websites so you should be able to get at least a few listings.
• Submit Press Releases – I’ve covered this methods of advertising before, check out this article: Press Releases For Marketing. If you can get featured in the press it can drive a lot of free traffic.
• Social Media – Utilise facebook and myspace groups which focus on topics in your niche to drive traffic. Although don’t spam them, join in the groups properly! You can also tell relevant friends and family who like the sort of products you sell.
• Start An Affiliate Program – Sign-up affiliates to promote you and pay them a cut everytime they make a sale! You could either create an in-house affiliate program or use an affiliate service like Affiliatefuture, using a service like that would make it easier to hire affiliates.
• Offline Methods – Leaflets being one of the most popular for those on a tight budget. You could even design a simple leaflet on your computer at home (you will need the natural flair for design of course) and then print-off a few hundred just to get you going. For small and young online businesses I really don’t recommend offline advertising in the early days. You need to build up an online presence first and then move into offline ads.

Conclusion – A Good Mix
Long-term SEO should be your main traffic generation focus. The amount of highly-targetted visitors you can receive from being high in the search engines for absolutely no money makes putting a lot of effort into SEO very worthwhile.

Having said that it is also important you have a good mix of traffic streams, just encase one of them suddenly drys up. Instead of 95% of traffic from search engines and 5% from returning customers. It would be good to have 60% of traffic from search engines, 10% from returning customers, 10% from banner ads, 10% from directory and review sites, 5% from PPC and 5% from forums you sponsor. That would make your traffic levels a lot more solid and also shows a greater web presence.

Traffic Generation Is A Huge Subject
What I’ve talked about in this post is only the very basics and designed to introduce you to the different methods. There are whole websites about traffic generation, it is a huge subject. So use what I’ve mentioned above as your starting points. And when you go searching for more information on them you will also learn about other methods I’ve not mentioned. Just being active reaps its rewards.

Test, Test, Test
And one last thing, remember to Test, Test, Test! Not all methods will work for you, some will provide a poor ROI and some will provide an incredible ROI, so keep trying and changing things and eventually your traffic, sales, revenue and profits will all keep on a nice upward line.