Perhaps you’re new owner of a business, or have been long established in an actual retail shop, and just want to put your items online to show world what you have to offer.

The easiest way to do this is by being selfish! That’s right, think of what YOU like to see when you surf or shop online. Do you appreciate beauty of a photograph that makes you want to put that product in shopping cart, or are you lulled into a buying frenzy by moving images or techno music? Or does a simple text only site make most sense to your needs?

Ease of Use Most of us want things to be easy, whether we’re driving to supermarket and want to find fastest way to get there, or shopping online. We would probably all consider way a site loads in less than 30 seconds to be more acceptable than a site that takes far longer and rewards you with a red X where a photograph should be!

Easy navigation is like street that runs from east to west, not dividing into a dead end or curving into another street name. Buttons that are clearly labeled as to what page represents, for example, on my site I clearly mark which button is for soap and which is for monthly specials page. So should your site be concisely marked so that visitor is encouraged to stay and learn more about your products. If you’re selling shoes, have easy to read button, tab or link read shoes, not hoofwear! Being cute is nice, but being accurate with your description will get you more hits/sales!

Exchanging links with other webmasters can help you in two ways.

Firstly, by getting your link displayed on other websites you are increasing number of paths leading back to your your own site. This in turn will increase number of visitors.

Secondly, exchanging links will increase chances of getting your web page ranked more highly in results returned by search engines.

The reason for this is that for most search engines, number of links pointing to a site plays a huge part in determining where that site ranks. Why? Well, wouldn't you be more likely to visit a place that had been recommended to you by a friend? The same reasoning applies to search engine positioning.

A link from site A to site B is like a vote for site B. The more votes that site B gets, higher it is regarded by search engines.

However, quantity is not everything! A link carries more weight if it is from a high quality site - in same way that a recommendation from a trusted friend would be taken more seriously than a recommendation from a casual acquaintance.

If you have been reading up on subject of search engine positioning, you may be familiar with term "PR", or "Page Rank". Page Rank is Google's way of measuring "importance" of a web page. In simple terms PR is a number between 1 and 10 and can be viewed by downloading Google toolbar.

It is easy to become hung up on or obsessed by page rank, but my advice is to try to take your focus away from that PageRank icon on Google toolbar and focus your efforts instead on building up a good set of reciprocal links. If you do this well, PR and search engine rankings will come.

So, how do you start reciprocal linking?

The first step is to find other sites that you want to link to. Use search engines and links from other websites to find sites that complement your own and try to request links from sites that you think would interest your visitors.

You can find some linking directory resources to help you with your searching on my Link Exchange Directories and Tools Page.