Optimize Your Headings – A lot of e-commerce websites do not realize the importance of having a good heading which can be the difference of having your product listed on the search engines to not being found at all. To understand this, I will be showing you how to place your keywords using heading tags that can be easily implemented. Since there are already many articles explaining what the tags are, I will let my friend Nicolas Prudhon explain it to you:

Did You Get Your Heading Tags All Wrong? – Our focus will be optimizing the product and category pages within an e-commerce store. Do remember we are trying to optimize your e-commerce store so that more traffic is driven to your products that will lead to a sale. It is not as important to optimize other non-product pages such as your about us and contact us pages.

Optimizing Your Categories Page – The most important aspect in optimizing your categories page is aiming to get the title of the category in a tag. For example if you are selling Apple iPods and the main category they fall under are “MP3 and Portable Players”, and the sub-category is “iPods”, then you want to have the following:

- MP3 and Portable Player
- iPods

It is as simple as this and too often we overlook all this. The next part we will look at is optimizing the products.

Optimizing Your Products Page – More than likely the search engines will find products on a website first, which are more relevant to a customer’s search. Therefore it’s crucial to optimize your products pages well to capture the traffic and ultimately create a sale.

What we want to achieve is to have the title of your heading containing the details of your product. For example you will want to have the following tags in place:

- Apple iPod nano 4 GB Silver (3rd Generation)
- Apple iPod features
- Apple iPod specifications

Hopefully you can see how important it is to have the right tags in place within your products page. If we want more traffic, we need to optimize these pages for the search engines to find us and ultimately we will generate more sales.

Telling Search Engines You Have An XML Sitemap – Informing search engines that you have an XML Sitemap is the best way to help them index your content faster. It won’t necessarily help you achieve a higher ranking, but it will definitely help you get onto a search engine’s crawler.

There are two ways that you can create an XML Sitemap, manually or dynamically. Most e-commerce packages or solutions have a built in option to generate the XML Sitemap dynamically for you and all you have to do is have a webmaster account with the search engines. On a regular basis you will need send an update to the search engines to get them to crawl through your site to add your updated products and categories to their index. Ask your e-commerce software provider to find out more.

Manually, you’ll find several downloadable sitemaps in the Internet. Once you’ve chosen one, download it and save it to your server directory. Once done, it’s all set up.

As your inventory changes, you’ll have to re-generate XML Sitemaps. Take what I have showed you and apply it to your e-commerce website and watch your traffic improve.

The good news is, the market offers various shopping cart software packages. Bad news is, because of hundreds of companies claiming to be the best offering these softwares, choosing is stressful and confusing. To let you out of that burden, here are some tips that might come in handy when choosing your software.

First, you need to determine your budget. These ecommerce carts come in different flavors and colors. Some offer lots of functionalities and features that you may actually never use. Others come with no elaborate frills and are just enough for your online store business. Avoid making plans around various functionalities that is not within your budget..

Second, you need to understand what your business needs. Though it may be impossible to predict the long term outcome of your business, you may want to analyze your current and future needs to aid you in choosing your shopping cart. If your business needs a low-cost carts, there are those that offer as little as $20 a month. But if your business needs complex solutions, then you may need to purchase carts that are more robust, which of course are more costly.

The third thing you need to consider is your business options. What are the features that you need in order for your business to grow? As an online store owner, you would want to organize your sales, costumers and discounts in a very easy to access location so you might want to consider a software that has database features. Another feature is the sell and cross sell feature that offers product suggestions, usually discounted ones to customers. This is enables your store to make more money because people tend to shop impulsively.

Fourth, you need to consider your gateway to sales. Online transactions require credit cards to enable them to purchase in real time. But, you need to be aware that not all carts are supported by all merchant accounts. You do not want to have carts that do not want to process transactions using your merchant account. In order to prevent such cases, you need to do your homework and research well. You need to know which software supports which credit cards.

Imagine starting your own business and be able to sell your products nationwide or even across the globe, your revenue will literally go through the roof. An ecommerce solution is very affordable now these days, less expensive than going out and renting out a building for your business and maybe more profitable. You see even if you’re in the smallest city or town and the population only being… let’s just say 5,000 most likely 9 times out of 10 you’re not generating that much revenue. But on the other hand let’s say your neighbor five blocks down is selling the same thing, the only difference between your business and your neighbors business is that he is selling his products online using ecommerce. Now by your neighbor using ecommerce to sell his products online his business is literally in front of thousands even millions of potential customers every day. So can you imagine how much revenue your neighbor is generating compared to yours?

There are many solutions for starting your own ecommerce shopping store, but before starting an online business you want to make sure you have a business plan setup. There is software applications that you can use to help you get started in creating an ecommerce store with shopping cart integration, but in my opinion they can be very difficult to use. If you’re not really computer literate then you are going to want to find an affordable ecommerce solution that can do the work for you. There are plenty of affordable ecommerce solution companies that will create a site for you with your ideal layout in mind. A company that provides ecommerce will also have different packages to help you get started like marketing, SEO, video creation, graphic design and more. Some companies can be pricey but there are some that offer affordable prices.

Your ecommerce website should be the same way. A shopper may click on your link and this should be the equivalent to pushing open the door of a shop. Your main page should be the same as a nicely laid out store. You must have a customer friendly webpage in order to keep your potential customer. How can you achieve this?

There is a basic checklist of things to do for your website before putting it out to the world. First, check all of your links and make sure that they work. There’s nothing more frustrating to a consumer than clicking on a link and having it fail; in fact, this alone can make your customer leave. This is especially important in the case of the checkout because you can lose up to a full half of your customers at the check out simply because the link isn’t working correctly! You can lose the rest of your customers by having links to products, pictures, and information fail. Once you’ve ascertained that your links are working correctly, check the rest of the layout of your page. Make sure that there are plenty of pictures (a picture says a thousand words!), that you have clear descriptions of your products (not only will this make your customer feel more trust for you, but it will also help you with search engine optimization which will make your website more popular) and that you have a clear place to contact you or your support staff in case of a problem. Another point to consider is to have information on things like registering an account, shipping information, and all relevant information about ‘hidden fees’ (shipping for example) in an easy to access place and easily read. This will inspire trust in your consumers.