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.

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.