Building a successful ecommerce website is far beyond the old days of slapping up a pay pal button and performing simple search engine optimization and calling it a day. You need to build trust and have strong branding and trust factors in order to create and build a stream of daily customers. If you want your ecommerce website to function how it is supposed to in the search engines you are going to have to make some real improvements to how they function for the end user.

Ecommerce websites need to create a stimulation in your audience and make them want to act and create an action your website. Let’s take a look at a Website like Wal-Mart. Why do you think they are so successful? Yes, partially their name but their website has a series of components and factor built into it that are vital for online website conversions.

Categories – Make your categories very easy to find. They should all be clearly labeled on the home page. If you can’t fit all your categories you should have at least your most important high level categories on your home page. Don’t make your audience look for anything.
Seasonality: If you visit the Wal-Mart home page today you will see exercise equipment on sale. With spring around the corner many people are trying to shed some weight for the spring and summer. If your industry has this type of seasonality you should be showcasing your most important products during that specific time of year and creating that call to action. Feed off the emotions of your audience during each season.

Newsletter – You have to have a newsletter sign up that gives your audience a reason to give you their email address. You will want create a call to action if you want your audience to submit their email address. “Sign Up for Discounts” or something to this effect will get many more people submitting their information than just a sign up form.

Call to Actions – If you want people to do something on your site you need to entice them. With e-commerce websites you want your audience to be able to make it to almost any page possible in your entire website. They need to know they can trust you, so having things like privacy policies and return pages visible creates confidence in your user. It takes a lot for a person to be able to pull out their credit card and make a purchase.

Other Trust – Build trust in your visitors by highlighting your industry association logos such as Hacker Safe, BBB, your local chamber of commerce, etc. Also, consider live chat and promote your phone number accordingly. All of these types of elements actually help build trust in your audience.

Before you can think about bringing visitors to your website through search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay per click advertising, etc. always make sure your ecommerce website is build to last and built to sell!

I’m sure you have heard it everywhere you go on how important content is in this industry and how it is the driving force to any successful search engine marketing campaign, but why?

It is important to understand exactly how the search engines work. I know many people like to keep their websites clean and clutter less but the search engines are not artificial intelligence. They are readers; they read massive amounts of information in a split second and find the most relevant information they can in order to supply the search user with what they need. With that said the better the content the easier the search engine spiders can find your business. If you don’t have enough content they don’t have enough to read and your rankings will slip a bit. Text is the search spider’s food. You have to feed them with good quality content and over time you will be rewarded with better and faster indexing.

That doesn’t mean you have to fill each page of your website with thousands of words either. Make an educated business decision with how much content you need to provide for your users to do what they need to do. If you have product pages that need content a hundred to a hundred fifty words will work. You don’t need to drop a thousand words so the search engines can find you. Think about your user experience as well. If you own a website that sells t-shirts do you want to have a thousand words on your product page? Probably not because nobody wants to sit there and feel like they have to read all that but if you are a business to business entity and you offer technical database solutions to your audience than a lengthy description of your services or products might be in order. Think about your audience and step into their shoes.

Take a step back and figure out exactly what your audience is like and what they want to see on your website before you think about what the search engines want to see. Your audience is more important, they are the ones that are going to purchase from you not the search engines. The search engines are just there to display the information in the best possible fashion.

You’ve heard the entire search engine optimziation world repeatedly talk about how you need to create compelling or “great” visitor focused content. We all have heard many times that once you have great content then you will magically make you a lot of money or boost your search engine rankings like a magic carpet ride. Well, there may not be any magic involved, but you should always produce the best possible content for every page of your website. If you spend the time writing (or hiring a great content copywriter) content for every page of your website, generally speaking it can help your website achieve great results.

These results are not only from the search engines but having great content on your website helps in several key ways, including the following:

• Great content helps deliver your message to the audiences of your website.
• Great content (with excellent call to action) helps generate your conversion (leads, sales, etc).
• Great content keeps people on your website as long as possible.
• Great content keeps them coming back.
• Oh yeah, great content can be naturally optimized to generate the right type of targeted visitors from the search engines to your site.

Keeping clients coming back does not necessarily mean to your website, but it does mean to your business. Once you’ve sold them you’ve just got to keep them and that means good customer service (that’s a different blog post). Keeping people on your site means closing the sale. But you have to keep them long enough to make your case (or sales pitch) by having great call to actions on your website.

Another question that I always get asked is, how much content do I need on each page of my website? The answer to that question as far as I am concerned is quality over quantity is the best policy. If it takes 200 words to accomplish your goals and deliver the message on a particular page then so be it. If it takes 100 words of great content to describe a product, then that works too. Be in tune with your audience and understand what is too much or too little content.

Great content is no magic trick. It’s just good copywriting. If you can’t do it yourself, hire someone who can!

Search engine optimization and increasing visitors through content development is not always so straightforward. Sometimes it’s a little sneaky. Not sneaky in a black hat kind of way, but sneaky in a good kind of way.

I’m talking about using current events to draw new readers to your blog or website if it pertains to your industry or helps contribute to the goals of your website. Using current events and hot industry topics can provide a better user experience for your site visitors as well. You can use this strategy for any niche or industry. But suppose that a popular news item has everyone talking. Let’s say it’s your favorite celebrity and she’s been arrested for drunk driving (of course you run a gossip blog as an example). Is there a way you can tie your message into this current event?

You might ask: What’s the benefit of doing that? One of the primary benefits is that you are playing off of a currently hot news topic. People are discussing the item with their friends, family, and co-workers. You can piggyback off the success of that popular news or relevant industry story and tie it into a message about your product or service or you can keep the story purely informational to attract new relevant visitors as well. The basic concept is if a topic is hot then there will be an increase in visitors searching.

A prime example of this related to the search engine optimization industry is this week Google’s head of web spam announced the Google algrothim change known as Google caffeine is expected to start to roll out throughout the Google data centers after the holidays. This is big search engine optimization industry news! There were countless blogs, news sites, etc that reported this huge news this past week. So I felt it was important to recap this event. I created this post not just to generate visitors to my SEO blog, but to let my readers know about this important and relevant news. Anyway, this is an example of how to leverage industry news to generate relevant content for your readers.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with discovering the current method that deliver pages to web browsers, says HTML5 is a big step forward, but it does have some security challenges. Of course, HTML 5 has not been rolled out for public use yet. That isn’t expected until some time next year or 2011.

I for one will be glad to see it. I love the new features being incorporated into HTML5 that currently require special hacks that rely on special knowledge gained for successful implementation. HTML 5 will make it easier for the average person to build web pages without needing multiple sources of reference material. And right now anyway, I think it will still present search engine optimziation benefits that exist in the current version.

Here are some the features HTML 5 will incorporate:

• Video
• Audio
• Mathematical equations
• Complex layouts
• 2-D animations
• Non-standard typefaces

If you have some time to watch. here is a really cool video about HTML 5 that I found that highlights additional features, etc:

All of these are currently supported by HTML 4, but each has a special coding structure that involves adding more code to your site and increasing your code bloat, or may require special hacks that also use a lot of code. With HTML5, the code will be streamlined.

I am anxiously awaiting the release of HTML 5 despite its potential security risks. The only browser currently not equipped to handle the changes HTML 5 will require is Internet Explorer (big surprise!).

While reading a blog post on Marketing Pilgrim here, I came across a writer who said he had visited a recent blog – actually, he’d clicked a link from Twitter – and read the post and left a comment. Then he, out of habit, right clicked on the page and took a look at the source code of the page only to find that he was sorely disappointed at the code. It looked like it had been done by a “drunk monkey” in 1998. I suppose that there are many old coded websites out there that rank and work well with old nasty looking code.

My thought was this: If you didn’t notice anything wrong with the page without viewing the source code, why then would it disappoint you when you did look at the source code? Whatever he saw must not have been too bad, right?

I don’t know what this writer (Joe Hall at Marketing Pilgrim) saw and it doesn’t matter. But it did get to thinking. Is there a taxonomy to HTML? Are there some codes that are better than others? Should you stay away from “primitive” code that will make you look like a drunk monkey? There are people who will tell you that coding in CSS is better than coding in tables. However, there are people who still code in tables. And their sites rank reasonably well. Does it matter?

I’d say that it really depends. The real issue is whether the old code impacts negatively your search engine optimization efforts and user experience on your website. Though, there are people who may not do business with you if you don’t code your site using the latest technology (this should be the minority of people). After all, only truly technical people will take the time to analyze a websites code.

When it comes to HTML code istelf, the latest iteration is 4.0, though 5.0 is in progress. If you are coding your own site, try to code as much as you can (or hire a professional to code for you and build your website) using the latest coding strategies, but don’t go hog wild and start using code that isn’t tested and proven.

If your website has a high visitor bounce rate, you might be wondering why visitors visit your site then leave before looking at any more pages. That’s what is called a bounce rate and unless you are running an AdSense site, it’s not good. You won’t make nearly as many sales with a high bounce rate.

Why visitors leave? There are a number of reasons why, among them:

1. Poor site design – Let’s face it. Your website design is a visual treat. If visitors like it they are more likely to stick around. If it’s unattractive, gaudy, or obtrusive to their eyes, they will leave.
2. How good is your content? – If your content is sub-par you can’t expect people to stick around. No one will hang around for bad content. If you can’t create great content on your site then hire a ghostwriter. Otherwise, live with the high bounce rate.
3. Poor calls to action – You want your product descriptions to be very good and your calls to action to be strong. If they aren’t, you’ll lose traffic.

These are the top three reasons visitors leave your site before buying anything or visiting other pages. If you want to kill a high bounce rate, fix these problems before they kill your site.