5 January 2011
If you are trying to get your online e-commerce site going, then your work is never done. There are always improvements you can make. You can always optimize your site better so that the search engines will return your site higher in the search engine rankings, and there are improvements you can make to your site to make it more appealing to customers so that you can increase your conversions and profits.

You need to focus on both getting more people to your site to view your products and you need to find better ways to turn those visitors into paying customers. Here are 5 of the best ways to help you accomplish both goals.

Write More Content

If your website largely consists of 2 or 3 sentences describing each product, then this probably isn’t going to be enough to get your site to show up in the search engines. Although quality content is best, what you really need is more content, period. Even if you write a random story about one of your products, that will cause your site to show up in the search engines more often just because what you happened to write will match up with what someone searched for.

Optimize Your Meta Data

This is one of the quickest ways to boost your rankings in the search engines and to get more people to visit your page. This will require you to acquire some basic HTML knowledge, which most e-commerce site owners don’t want to do. However, learning how to optimize your Meta data probably only takes about 15 or 20 minutes, and those minutes could be the difference that gives you an advantage over all your competition. The Meta Tags you most want to pay attention to are the TITLE tag and the DESCRIPTION tag. These are what show up directly in the search engine results. You should word them just like you would word an advertisement to induce people to click on your website’s link.

Make Your Product Pages Attractive

You want your prospects to see your site as a credible site that offers high quality products. If possible, you should use high resolution photos, and you should use multiple photos for each product. This will undoubtedly increase your conversion rate. If you want to take things a step further, you should be careful about the file-names of your photos. Rather than naming your photos something like image01.jpg, you should give them names that are relevant to your products. This will increase the chances that your site will show up in search engines like Google Image Search.

Clean Up Your Navigation

You should make the navigation of your site and your product pages intuitive and easy to understand. This not only benefits the customer, who will be able to more easily find your products, but it helps the search engine spiders find and index all the pages of your site.

Speed Up Loading Times

Google and Microsoft have released research that shows that if a site takes more than 2 seconds to load, web surfers begin to click the back button on their browser. The longer your site takes to load, the more customers you will lose before they’ve even had the opportunity to see your products. Google has also indicated that they now take loading time into account when deciding which sites to return for a search query. One thing you might want to consider is to find an affordable e-commerce hosting package that provides a faster speed.

By implementing any of these 5 tips into your e-commerce sites, you can expect to see an increase in traffic and conversions. If you implement all 5, your profits could really go through the roof.