Determining the most profitable keywords for an e-commerce based business is without question one of the best way to drive targeted traffic and increase conversion. Specifically as it relates to PPC marketing which can make or break an online business. Unfortunately, many small online businesses have no clue how to manage a PPC campaign which includes determining profitable keywords, determining profit and more importantly ROI. What often times ends up happening is that shopping cart software clients spend a enormous amount of money on general keywords obtain a decent amount of traffic, but have very poor conversions. In technical terms their CPA (cost per action) is extremely low.  Short of hiring an online marketing firm there are a few things small business owners can do to improve their current PPC problem, and the simple answer is determining the correct keywords.

There are a variety of simple and cost effective  methods to obtain profitable keywords for any industry.  Keyword research could be broken down in to three basic steps. Use online keyword tools,  spy on your competitors keywords and most importantly research what keywords a  potential customer would use to find your product. If you're not understanding how this works don't worry I will explain each step in a bit more detail.

Online Keyword Tools - This option is great for clients who have money to spend on a monthly subscription. Sites like Keyword Discover and Wordtracker provide great research results if used correctly, but might hit your pocket book where it hurts. In addition to these online research tools almost every PPC program offers a keyword discovery tool which is free of charge. Although not as thorough as the paid option they can be beneficial  in determining the amount of visitors to expect.

Spying on your eCommerce Competitors - Browsing competitor sites is a good way of determining what keywords might be useful for your own business. There are two things to look for First, look at the keywords in the meta tags, but be aware that these keywords are usually the general terms and not the profitable specific keywords you want to target. Secondly, examine your competitors pages and look for specific keyword terms in addition I like to run a keyword density report on a site. There are several free sites which will do this for you, but I highly recommend Seochat's keyword density tool this will give you a clear picture of specific keywords words to examine.

What Potential customers might search for - I purposely made this the last technique because it makes use of the top two straagies. Basically you want to pull out a notepad and start brain storming keyword variations which a search engine user would use if they wanted to find your company's product or service. It's a good idea to use the keywords you developed with the online keyword tools and spying on the competition to act as a starting point. Generally more specific keywords result in higher conversion and lower bid amounts.

Pay-per-click marketing should be a marketing strategy for just about every e-Commerce store owner. On the surface PPC can appear to be a rather simple and straightforward process however, to maximize ROI (return on investment) a shopping cart software owner usually comes to the realization that PPC is more than just a bidding and clicking system, but rather requires specific marketing techniques in order to maximize traffic and visitors. Often times, it becomes profitable to hire an external firm to manage the entire process, but since many small online businesses don't have a budget to hire a firm all the internet marketing is learned and executed in house. This being said there are specific techniques out there that very few merchants are taking advantage of. In this post I will cover several techniques and tips which if implemented properly  may boost not only your conversion, but will decrease your PPC spending.
 
Seasonal Keywords - It should go without saying that keywords are one of the  most important factor when it comes to setting up a PPC campaign. However, what many merchants often don't pay attention to are seasonal keywords. Let me explain if I was in the business of selling sunglasses I would bid on all the sunglass manufacture brand names as well as generic terms to capture the proper internet traffic for my sunglass eCommerce site. Seasonal keywords are targeted  keywords for specific holidays like "mother's day sunglass sale" or "Christmas sunglass blowout" often times when a PPC campaign is running on auto pilot eCommerce store owners neglect to invest the time in discovering profitable seasonal keywords.

In the next post I will cover landing pages, ad copy and evolving a stale PPC strategy.

The last few posts I discussed the cool features of WebCart’s Shopping Cart Software. I decided to take a little break, and talk about ways eCommerce merchants can maximize their profits from their shopping cart software. Obviously, I don’t have all the answers, but I can provide some amazing tips that can help you get started right out of the box.

Add Audio Instructions – Many times customers want to make a purchase on your website, but don’t have the faintest idea of how to fill out a checkout page. It’s easy to assume this day in age that everyone knows how to make a purchase online, but let me reassure you that many people don’t know how to use a computer this is especially true with older folks who never used a computer before. Therefore, it’s important to give very clear instruction. One way to do this is my providing an audio clip explaining how to make a purchase.

Guarantee – Most online shoppers are a little skeptical about purchasing items from the web. Therefore, it’s important to make your customers feel comfortable about making a purchase from your eCommerce web site.  One way to do this is by offering a guarantee that goes beyond what anyone else is offering. Think of it this way if your product is solid you will have very few returns, but your revenue will increase.

Recently, Google made a available a host of online tools to aid webmasters in getting recognized on the most popular search engine. All of Google’s online webmaster tools can be found at http://www.google.com/webmaster In this post I will go over briefly, some of the great ways an online business can meet there criteria with a shopping cart solutions, by using the free webmaster tools.

Google Sitemaps

This is perhaps the most useful feature which Google offers webmasters. Basically, Google is saying please let me know what pages are on your website so we can index them. A shopping cart with hundreds of products can now be submitted to Google with relative ease. I personally use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to generate my sitemap. Once the sitemap is generated I uploaded the XML file to the main directory of my website. The XML page usually includes links to all my online products, which will help google recognize all my product pages. Obviously, this is not a sure way to get a top ten ranking, but it’s the first step in letting Google know where and what your products are all about.

The webmaster toolbox also includes a simple analysis of orphaned links (broken links) which Google spiders, as well as a wealth of information about your site. By following and fixing errors that Google finds, your site can be on its way to eCommerce success.

The key to search engine optimization is content, the more keyword rich content a website has the better chances the search engines will rank its keywords. Writing content is a pain in part because unless a website hires a full time writer, it often times because a burden to write content full time. The good news I always let my clients know, is that all webmasters need to spend is about 15 minutes every day on content creation, in order to see SEO benefits Every company should have something to write about, for example a section called “company news” can be an extremely beneficial source of content for a shopping cart. The reason is simple; every company, no matter how small, has something new going on which they can write about. In addition, who else on this plant knows more about a company then the owner of a small business?

Another great technique I recommend is writing articles about how the products you are selling operate. An example would be a company which sells business telephone systems. If I were creating content for this site I would start by describing the many models that I have for sale. Followed by, the features of each telephone model, Basically, I would write my own mini review on the pros and cons of each telephone system. Finally, I would write a series of articles about how these phone systems can benefit potential clients. If you have been running a successful online, I am sure you already have a lot of content scattered through out your site. The tick is to get it in to one place and create a structure around it.

WebCart was engineered with SEO as a top priority. Therefore, in every standard version WebCart meets the criteria for shopping cart software by adding useful SEO tools pre-built and ready to be used. As a result, creating a news section within an eCommerce website is easy and painless. An article system is also pre-built which make posting and organizing articles by category, topic or keyword a breeze, for even the most inexperienced user.

I am appealing to all current and past users of osCommerce to submit their problems here.

What are your biggest hang-ups with OScommrece? It could be a very simple thing, like the look and feel of the administrator back end panel or a more advanced feature like modifying a template. Whichever issues you are experiencing with osCommerce please let me know on this post via a comment. For every real comment I receive on this subject I will give away a free SEO Report/Analysis of your site.

SEO (search engine optimization) is such a vital part of ecommerce that I decided to post a few more SEO related tips that should in my opinion be utilized whenever A shopping Cart client is starting an SEO campaign.

1. Get good keyword software. I personally would recommend wordtracker but it could be a little pricey, therefore, you might want to wait until your SEO is producing monetary results for you. A great alternative to work tracker is free program called good keywords here you can research and come up with a list of keywords which are relevant for your web site.

2. Once your keywords are selected it’s a good idea to sprinkle them around your page. However, you want to pay special attention to adding your main keyword with an H1 tag. Webcart has a special built in feature which enables end users to configure their shopping carts with the correct H1.H2, and H3 information. Another keyword tip that is often overlooked is how three word keywords should be placed on your site. A good example of this would be PHP Shopping Cart. Now, I could place PHP shopping cart all over my page, but a more effective method is to “sprinkle” those keywords. I would put shopping in one section then cart in another and PHP in another area of my page.

3. Keyword Stemming is another area that armature SEO’s tend to ignore. Totheweb defines keyword stemming as

“Goggle searches not only for your search terms, but also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms, including plurals.”

Basically this means that searching for the term shopping cart may yield different results then searching for shopping carts.

4. Avoid stop words ( as much as possible) when writing content for your web site. An example of some stop words are:

a, about, above, across, after, again, against, air, all, almost, along, also, always, an, and, animals, another, answer, any, are, around, as, asked, at, away, back, be, because, been, before, began, being, below, best, better, between, big, both, boy, boys, but, by, called, came, can, change, children, city, come, could, country, day, days, did, different, do, does, don’t, down, during… etc

To learn more about webcart’s php shopping cart software click here

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Traffic and ECommerce go hand in hand like a burger with a bun. With out traffic eCommerce would be worthless no matter how fancy your shopping cart may be. The same goes for traffic you can have a million hits a day, but if no one is buying your products all the traffic in the world is worthless. Now that I got that out of the way I want throw some very simple tips out there.

EBay is a great resource to generate traffic. You may be thinking that you can’t compete with price compared to other eBay members. However, the answer is simple because eBay allows you to place as many links as you like within your auction page. Even if someone doesn’t agree with your price you can market to them by sending them to visit your site.

A cool trick I sometimes use is uploading an eBook to a torrent or to a file sharing service. I embed the URL I am trying to market in to the file name of the file title. This lets me get free advertising even if no one downloads your eBook.

These are just a couple of tips you can start to use right away in order to see more traffic to your eCommerce store.

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