It’s almost humors how many site owners sell themselves short when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. To many newcomers SEO is a scary word, and they focus a great deal on other aspects of their site and leave SEO on the on the back burner. The reality is doing basic SEO can be very simple and non time consuming. Doing just a little bit can make a big difference in your ranking. I will layout a few simple tips that I recommend people do.

The first (and most difficult) step to SEO is developing keywords that people search for. In this post I will not go in to specifics, but a simple search in Google for “developing keywords� should yield a number of results on how to go about finding the best keywords for your site.

The second step is to edit your site with specific keywords in mind. Add H1 and H2 headers and make sure that your internal linking structure is well defined.

Lastly, develop a site map and submit it to Google. Although this does not guarantee that Google will list your site it does help Google index your entire pages site wide.
I purposefully did not mention linking due to the fact that linking is very time consuming and is beyond the scope of this post.

Please visit http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/en/seo-tutorial/grundlag.htm for a great tutorial on the process of SEO

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SEO

My inbox is always over flowing with questions from clients regarding how they may make their store convert more sales. Say an eCommerce store has 1000 unique visitors a day, but only receives 10 orders this means about 99% of the visitors are not interested in making a purchase. Many web store owners find this type of statistic depressing. When this occurs I tend to offer my shopping cart software clients a few very simple points of advice which I will share with you, my dear blog readers.

Internet consumers like to spend money, however for the most part internet users are very concerned with safety and security. While many eCommerce store webmasters focus on things like aesthetics and usability; very few focus on showing the end user that they are visiting a legitimate web site that will honor a sale.

To remedy this common shortfall, shopping cart owners should register for servicess like the BBB (aka Better Business Bureau) and Hacker Safe just to mention a few. Companies like these will provide a special icon or image for shopping cart owners to place on their site which in turn will reassure web surfers of the legitimacy of an eCommerce store front. I will provide a list of link below to a few security reassurance web sites. Another simple but over looked tip is providing a clear phone number on your web site. Consumers are more likely to trust web sites which they can call.

Another important tip I like to provide my clients is to not throw away the rest of the traffic. What does this mean? It’s simple offer every single user to your web site a reason to stick around or at least come back if they are not making a purchase today.  Giving away an ebook in exchange for a user’s email address can be extremely valuable to you. By having opt in email address’s shopping cart owners are able to market future products to users who would have most likely fotgotten they ever existed.

Links

BBB
Scan Alert
Biz Rate

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Shopping Cart Software

Templates have been part of a web developer’s vocabulary for many years now. I am not going to get in to a ramble about the pros or cons of web templates, but I would like to know if any of you have observed what I am seeing more and more of. Let me explain… When I first started developing web sites it was extremely rare to find two sites that were identical in style and appearance. However, now it’s almost uncommon to find web sites that don’t look alike. As a web developer I strive to build upon my competitors designs. By no means do I copy their sites, but rather I build upon them with my own unique styles and additions. This by no means is a new technique, web designers and developers have been doing the same thing for years. This in part, explains why web site design tends to change every few years. While I understand how overall design concepts change it still doesn’t explain why different sites look identical.

The answer I found comes from templates and shopping carts. Most of you have heard of template monster a service that has pre-built web sites that consumers can purchase. More times then not a person who decides to use a template doesn’t have the skills to customize a web template thus, causing many people to have similar web sites. The shopping cart side of this is a little bit more interesting. If the shopping cart provider is large enough I can almost always know whose shopping cat it’s when I check out. For example, OS Commerce the number one used free shopping cart solution has a checkout page that looks similar in almost every store that will use it. I am sure many of you reading this post will agree, and it extended to other shopping cart solutions as well.

My question is fairly simple. Should a eCommerce shopping cart solution be unique to every store? Is it ok to have the same shell (at least in appearance) just as long as the functionality remains solid?

Shopping Cart Software