So, you spent the time and money and built a really nice E-Commerce web site. It’s up and running and you have great products at great prices to offer. You have spent time getting your content and products on the site, fine tuning the operation and learning how to use your E-Commerce Web Site. And now you are ready to open your virtual doors to the world for your fantastic new E-Commerce Web Site.
OK, so now you wait. And wait. You see some traffic trickle in, maybe get a few sales, but nowhere near what you were hoping and expecting for with your e-commerce web site. What went wrong? It was a sure fire thing!
It’s quite simple. With so much competition in the e-commerce web site market today, simply creating a fantastic site with great products and deals is not enough. You need to do some serious online marketing and research to make that marketing pay off for your e-commerce web site.
First and foremost, you need to get your site listed on all important search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Msn. Some of these are free, others you will have to pay for being added. It’s the price of doing business online with an e-commerce web site. By getting your site listed, that’s good. But there are still a million other sites out there selling the same products or trying to attract the same customers as you, and they always seem to have better rankings on the search engines than you.
This is where article-marketing, back linking, link exchanges and search engine optimization of your e-commerce web site comes into play. All these things help with one thing, your e-commerce web site’s P.R ranking (page rank). Your page rank is a way that search engines such as Google look at your pages on your website, check to see what relevant keywords are on the pages, and then uses many factors to determine how important that page on your e-commerce web site is in comparison to other sites in the directory.
If you spend a lot of time (or hire the services of a good Search engine Optimization or web design company to help) and optimize your e-commerce web site’s content, add links to and from other sites that have content that is relative to your e-commerce site’s industry or types of products, this will all over time assist with earning better page rank for your web site.
Another thing to consider is that most search engines also “penalize” new or younger sites a little when it comes to rankings, as opposed to older sites that have been around for years. It’s not fair in my opinion, but the reason for this I believe is to stop satellite / landing page sites or fly-by-night sites to attain high rankings quickly.
