Starting an E-Commerce Business: Baby Steps
Website Design
Marketing should start immediately after the company is created, the name chosen and officially registered. You want people to remember your company in a positive way. You need to make an outstanding first impression. So, the first thing you have to work on is your name and the image you portray. In the e-commerce world your website is the name and face of the company.
The website is the most important marketing tool for an e-commerce business. The website needs to look legitimate and provoke a sense of trust. It needs to be appealing, simple to use, eye-catching, competitive and unique. Therefore, it is worth it to spend a good amount of time and money on your website design. If you aren't savvy with website design and development, then invest in a talented website design company or independent designer.
Website Marketing
Search Engine Optimization Search engines use algorithms (mathematical formulas) to rank website listings in response to a particular keyword query. In order to protect themselves from webmasters and search engine optimizers manipulating the search engine results to their advantage, search engines do not reveal their ranking criteria. However, there are many factors that are speculated to be important influences in determining the position of a website on search engine result pages.
For example:
• Content counts!: Search engine spiders and bots like websites filled with informative articles, relevant text and content.
• Incoming links: Build up incoming links from relevant or complimentary sites. The more relevant and authoritative the incoming sites, the better your site will be in the eyes of the spiders and bots.
• Keywords: Try to place as many keywords in the content of your home page as possible without losing the sense and aesthetics of the page.
• Meta Tags: Meta tags are html text containing information about the website that is not seen by human viewers. Meta tags include title, description, and keyword tags. Considering that a title tag is the text that attempts to describe your site, it is very important to choose a title tag that emphasizes keywords of your page.
• Header tags: Header tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5…) are used to designate headers and titles. H1 tags should be used to represent the first and most important header, H2 as the second and so on. Search engines give importance to text that differs from the text on the rest of the page. Bold, italics, underlines, and various font sizes are useful as well.
• Make the site simple, easy to surf and navigate, and eye-catching.
• Keep your website updated with fresh content, new pages and information.