How to get customers for freeWritten by Mark Baartse
There's no shortage of ways to spend money promoting your online shop - and certainly no shortage of people willing to take your money! However, search engines can be sending you qualified customers all day every day. How do you get a piece of this traffic? It's estimated that 70% of people stop at first 10 results in most search engines and over 90% don't go beyond first 30. If your shop isn't in top of search results, you're missing out. We'll go through five steps to getting you higher in search engine rankings.Choose right keywords You need to decide which search term(s) you want to be top for. This might not be as obvious as you think. Firstly, you need to know what people are (and aren't) searching for. Being number 1 result for a search term no one uses is no good. The Overture keyword selector tool can show you what people are searching for. Take some guesses as to what people are looking for, try them out and see what tool says - you might be surprised! Do a Google search for a possible keyword. If, for example, you see 5,000,000 results returned you have to consider: can you beat 4,999,990 of them? You might be better off getting a number 1 position for a lesser keyword than a number 200 for a big one. Be careful not to be too ambitious - that keyword with most traffic might be highly competitive in search engines. If you are competing against a multi-million dollar online shop you're unlikely to win.Make sure your site is search engine friendly The goal here is to make sure search engines like your shopping cart site. You might need some help from your techies with this. - Create a sitemap pointing to all your pages, or all your key pages. This helps search engines find all your pages.
- Include your keywords in your HTML <title> tags in all your key shopping cart pages.
- Include your keywords in a <h1> tag.
- If your shopping cart or CMS uses session IDs in URL, turn this off, or change to a different tool. You can usually tell if you have this turned on if you URL looks like http://www.widgets.com/products/page.php?product=2329&session=29dha9198yfka8129fnv0. The big long session number is dangerous part.
- Make your HTML code clean & validated - most search engines prefer this.
- Make sure your keywords are included in copy on your site.
Some shopping carts such as Erol or osCommerce (with an add on module) provide excellent search engine optimization tools.
| | Beware Goose Laying Golden EggsWritten by Stephen Cope
The Internet is awash with money making scams. The general rule I always follow is that if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.The most common scams involving websites are turnkey websites , or as they are sometimes sold, niche websites. It is very easy to get taken in by appealing sales letters but before you invest any money in an online business you should always do some research. Basic Online Business Research What I always do myself is: - To search Google and Yahoo for company and any releated information looking for good/bad reports.
- Ask myself some questions -
- If I knew about this would I tell everyone about it?
- How do they make money from this?
- How do they benefit by telling me?
- If it is really so easy why aren't they doing it themselves.
- Visit http://www.ripoffreport.com and search their database
- Wait a few weeks before making any decision.
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