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A good definition of search engine optimization is that SEO is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings.

This definition of SEO sounds simple, but be careful. Search engine optimization is difficult, even for professionals and should not be undertaken lightly. Here is a brief look at the top 10 mistakes and how to correct them.

1. Non-Relevant Linkage.

External links to your site play a large part in most of the major search engines and can be considered an endorsement of your site. But if you are being linked to from sites that have no relevance to your content, then that is now considered a negative endorsement and will not raise your ranking in the search engines. Ensure all links to your pages are from relevant sites.

2. Untargeted Keywords.

The people who use search engines are ‘normal’ people who are not likely to search for phrases or terms used in your advertising brochures. Get to know how your customers ask for your services/products and use these in your content. Often times, actual keyword research will surprise you.

3. Excessive Graphics and Flash Content.

This looks good on a web page, but to search engine crawlers it means little. Search engines are looking for content, keywords, and relevancy to the search terms. By all means have some graphics, but don’t forget the meat. This doesn’t mean Flash designed websites are bad necessarily. In fact, some big businesses do use it. For most webmasters though, Flash sites are best avoided. Unless your Flash designer does high-end websites and knows how to integrate the content and keywords within the Flash, hybrid sites combining Flash headers with HTML content will be a good option.

4. Believing all search engines are the same.

What pleases Yahoo might not necessarily please Bing or Google. Optimize your content, keywords, inbound links, and internal linking structure so that there is something for at least one of the three top search engines.

5. Multiple Search Engine Submissions.

In the very early days of search engines, this technique may have had some success, but now it can lead to slower indexing and rankings. A site with inbound links from other sites will get indexed naturally and search engine submission is not necessary. In fact, multiple submissions may be construed as an attempt to spam the search engines. The top 5 engines account for more than 90% of all activity so it is wise not to ruin your chances of ranking naturally in the search results.

6. Incorrect Use of Title Tags.

Most people consider the title to be for their company name or product. Nope. You must include your most important search phrases within your title tag and if you do want your company name there, keep it for the end. Keep the title tag to less than 65 characters long to avoid the appearance of title tag keyword-stuffing.

7. Use of ‘Black Hat’ techniques.

Techniques such as doorway pages, hidden text, and overstuffing keywords may have had success in the past but now they will earn you penalties and could even get you banned. Avoid them altogether if you are seeking long term success. Some black hat techniques can work on a short term basis, but in the long run prove very costly.

8. Expecting Immediate Results.

SEO is an ongoing process and should be treated as such by your SEO company. Good optimization will involve building good links with quality sites and this takes time.

9. Use of Unethical SEO Consultants.

Beware the consultant that guarantees rankings with no past clients to back it up, or claims of special relationships with search engines. Many such “consultants” or “experts” will probably take your money and run. Choose a reputable SEO consultant, one who will keep in regular contact with progress reports and updates.

10. Decide to do optimization in-house.

Probably possible in the past, but now with ever increasing sophistication of search engine algorithms, this is an area best left to an expert. Furthermore, the good SEO experts usually have other income streams from their online marketing activities and a regular paycheck to work full-time simply doesn’t justify their time invested.

Regardless of what your business does, what services you provide or what you want to sell through E-commerce, all business web sites have at least one common need: They all need to attract visitors in order to succeed.

Obviously, volumes upon volumes of information have been produced on various tips, tricks and tactics for building both search engine rankings and site traffic. Often overlooked in the middle of that huge data dump, however, are three simple things you can do to help build your site’s search recognition and drive more visitors to your site.

(A caveat: Don’t conflate ’simple’ with ‘easy’. Nothing below requires any sort of specialized technical knowledge, but they all require a bit of elbow grease on your part. Remember one of my main themes: For online business, there’s no such thing as an Easy Button.)

1. Links from directories. Most search engines place a fairly high value on links from directory sites, primarily because directories are generally edited and maintained by real, live humans. As a result, the categories and summary information concerning directory-listed sites are generally accurate and considered high-quality data.

Directory links, however, are frequently overlooked as a valuable component in search engine strategies - even by professional site developers. In a way, I suppose, that’s understandable. Generating directory listings can require either patience or money - sometimes both.

Submissions to directories like DMOZ.org are free, but they can take time because the directory listings are reviewed by volunteer editors who maintain the integrity of the category listings. Other popular directories like Yahoo! Directory and Business.com are paid directories, typically with an annual fee to maintain inclusion in the listings.

Are paid directories worth the expense? In moderation, probably. Some of the directories cater to specialized interests, which may be valuable to you if it’s a market your business targets. The better-known general directories are high page-ranks sites with heavy saturation in the search engines - both of which are elements that can help boost your site’s search score.

Directories are too numerous for me to list here, but a good place to start researching them can be found at Strongestlinks.com.

2. Online press releases. There are a number of sites that specialize in publishing press releases in various ‘feed’ formats. When you first take a close look at the process, it might not make much sense. How many people scroll through all of the posts on a press release site, looking for information about shopping sites or local businesses?

Fortunately, that’s not how they work. By publishing their press releases in easy-to-use web formats, these services help feed the press releases you write into the search engines. Some of them are picked up by so-called ‘content aggregators’, but the real point is to get press releases about their clients - you, in this case - stuffed into the search engines where they can be found.

You can find a number of press release ‘tutorials’ if you take the trouble to look. In a nutshell, in order to have maximum impact, your press releases need to be packed with text that uses the keyword phrases your potential customers will be searching for. And don’t forget to include links back to your website and your business’ contact information in each release.

3. The ‘blogsosphere’. This tip assumes that you have a blog somewhere on your web site. (You DO have a blog hosted on your domain, don’t you?) Your web site’s blog is just the starting point, though. A broader participation in the ‘blogosphere’ is what will start to boost your search rankings and bring more traffic to your site.

This involves finding other blogs that may reach your target market and actively partcipating on them by posting relevant comments, joining into discussions and linking to interesting posts on your own blog. This helps other bloggers - and other blog readers - find your blog (and the rest of your business web site that accompanies it). If you’re clever enough, or simply diligent enough, your blog can be a great tool for attracting qualified visitors to your web site.

When you walk into a place of business, how much do you value appearance and presentation? Appearance isn’t everything, of course, but you’d probably have some second thoughts if the receptionist was sitting at a collapsible picnic table in a room furnished with folding lawn chairs. The public face that a business presents goes a long way toward building the first elements of consumer trust.

Business web sites aren’t any different. They need to have “furniture” too. Unfortunately, in all of the rush and fuss associated with getting a new E-commerce site off the ground, much of the proper site furniture sometimes can be overlooked - or at least left until the last moment and then thrown onto the site hastily and without much thought.

Here’s a short checklist of important bits of furniture that every site needs to include:

1. Contact information. Your site should share your business contact information in as many places as possible. In order to avoid spam, email contact should be limited to a programmed contact form - but your business’ phone and address info should appear somewhere on every page of the site.

Obviously, people can’t do business with you if they can’t contact you. It baffles me that many businesses want to restrict contact information to an email contact form and nothing more. Their main fear is that publishing their phone number on the Internet somehow invites more abuse than publishing the same number in the phone book.

Why on Earth would you want to hide contact info from people who want to do business with you? Your business web site isn’t a super-hero and you don’t need a secret identity. Openess with your website customers helps breed the trust that’s so critical to online business.

2. Detailed “About Us”. This element works closely with the prominent display of your contact information. Customers want to know why they should do business with you - how will you solve their problems? - and this is where you tell them. Remember that your web site is available even when you’re not, so the information you give to your site visitors needs to present your business’ best ‘face’.

3. Clear data privacy policy. Give your site’s data-handling policy a prominent display in the site navigation (don’t hide some tiny link in the footer) and explain clearly to your customers what you do with their contact information. If your site generates lead for third-party clients, tell your site visitors. If you will only be using their contact information for your own business, tell them that too. Most importantly, whatever policies you state - make certain that you strictly abide by them.

4. Prominent terms of use and refund policies. This applies primarily to E-commerce sites. Be up-front with your potential customers about how you expect to do business with them and what they can expect from you when there is a problem with their order. Site visitors are aware that you likely aren’t perfect - but they also like to know that you’re prepared to deal with the imperfections when they occur.

If your business has been avoiding E-commerce because you think your target market doesn’t buy things online, you may be making an expensive mistake.

According to the report Generations Online released earlier this year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an amazing 71 percent of all online adults use the Internet to make purchases.

Even more interesting, older Americans are turning to the Internet in greater numbers than ever - and a large number of them are now using the Internet to research products and make purchases. Over the past few years the greatest growth (by percentage) in online users was for the age 70-74 group. In 2005, just 26 percent of this age group used the Internet. By 2008 (the survey’s end date), 45 percent of Americans age 70-74 were online.

For detailed survey results, you can check out the resources available at the links I gave above. But it’s also worth noting not just how many people are online, but what they’re doing once they get connected.

There is plenty of good news in the report for E-commerce providers. According to the survey, 71 percent of online adults used the Internet to make a purchase. While it’s no surprise that purchasing activity is dominated by the age groups between 18 - 44, ‘Boomers’ and older Americans are no strangers to shopping online.

68 percent of younger Boomers (age 45-54) bought something online in 2008, as did 72 percent of older Boomers (age 55-63). Also note that the purchasing trend is fairly strong for the 64-and-older groups - around half of the Internet users in those age groups report buying something online.

Now, note that the report concerns percentages of the various demographic groups that use the Internet - and not the percentage of that groups total population. It’s an important distinction, of course, because not everyone uses the Internet - especially among members of the older age groups. But the bright side to that - pointed out in the first part of the Pew study - is that the strongest growth in Internet use over the past three years has been among older Americans.

Getting your new E-commerce store up and running is only half the fun. Once that’s done - then you’ve got to figure out how to efficiently run your store in order to maximize your bottom line.

Very little of it qualifies as rocket science. In fact, most of it is nothing more than running to ground a bunch of little issues - any one of which can cause endless headaches for your new enterprise. As with most things business, what you’ll soon discover is that the devil is in the details.

Here are a few ‘best practices’ tips that will help get your E-commerce operation headed in the right direction.

 
1. Put somebody in charge. Running your E-commerce site can consume a surprising amount of time. An online store requires constant care and feeding - and inside your business someone should have the ‘official’ responsibility of keeping up with it. If your business is very small you likely don’t have any choice. But the larger your business, the more urgent the need becomes to delegate your E-commerce site’s operation to someone who can dedicate the required time to the task on a daily basis. 

2. Monitor your “drops”. Dropped transactions and abandoned shopping carts are the bane of any E-commerce operation. Fortunately, over the past few years online commerce applications have become so dependable that technology - the dreaded browser crash - is no longer the main culprit in most drops. Rather, abandoned shopping carts now more frequently result from either the onset of consumer cold feet or, worse, customer frustration with something encountered on your E-commerce site. Either way, you want to gather as much information as possible about the problem and try to get it resolved. Ideally, your E-commerce software should provide you with data on abandoned or incomplete transactions.

Systems that require user registration may even provide you with contact information for the customers who abandon their carts. If you system provides you with such info, treat it like gold and follow up immediately via email. You just might salvage a sale after all.

3. Keep it fresh. Your site will thrive on returning customers, but you generally have to give them a reason to return. New products, new featured items or new specials should all play key roles in your marketing scheme. Your cusomters aren’t alone in their appreciation of ‘new’. Search engines give better ranking to sites with dynamic content - and what could be more dynamic than a store with constantly-updated inventory? Most E-commerce applications are turbo-charged content-management engines with dollar signs attached and you can take advantage of that dynamic power to keep your site interesting. Some of the available ’stock’ applications even include built-in tools that allow you to create ’straight’ content pages for your site. If your solution includes that capability, you need to take advantage of it as often as possible. Providing your customers (and the search engines) with information associated with your products can prove extremely valuable to your long-term efforts at building site traffic.

4. Don’t get lazy. This is one of the most common mistakes I see in small business E-commerce. When a site is first launched, everything is spot-on perfect. Products and categories are well-organized. Product descriptions are clear and detailed. Product photography is well-done and there are plenty of images for every product. But somehow within the span of a few months, some of the fine points start to slip. Descriptions for new products entered into the system are only one or two sentences long. The product photos are poorly lit or badly cropped. Products start to show up in oddball categories, and somtimes in no category at all.

Somebody has discovered that there is no Easy Button for E-commerce. Unfortunately, they will also soon discover that cutting corners on their site’s presentation and reducing the amount of useful information they provide will have a negative impact on their store sales. If they let things get sloppy enough, they may kill their store entirely.

Remember all of the energy and effort that went into creating your E-commerce site? Well, that same level of energy and effort is required to keep it running. Nothing turns customers off faster than inconsistency and sloppiness.

5. Respond immediately to customer service contacts. Whether they’re extremely aggravated or insanely happy, customers always (always, always, always) appreciate prompt responses to their feedback and/or inquiries. Answers to contact form questions and responses to customer service issues should be part of your daily site management routine. Note that in this case, by “response” I don’t mean the usual “Thanks and we’ll get back to you” that an auto-responder can send out for you. Auto-responders should be used as nothing more than a technological ‘ping’ to let you customers know you’ve received their e-mail. The “response” is when a real, live person either calls them or sends them an email. Your auto-responses should give the customer an expectation of when they will receive a live response - and you should make every effort to stay within your promised time-frame. Promptness, courtesy and respect can often defuse a sticky customer service situation - before anybody has a chance to  light the fuse.

Soon after you decide to add E-commerce to your small business, you may find yourself suffering from a touch of sensory overload. There are a lot of E-commerce engines, shopping cart systems and hosted storefronts vying for your attention. How do you sort through all of that to find the solution that best suits your business?

Finding the best solution is largely a matter of asking the right questions. Today I’m going to arm you with a few good questions - along with some related ‘thinking points’ - that should help you sort through all of the information and make the best possible decision. Here are five key considerations:

 
1. Does the E-commerce engine you’re looking at provide a first-rate shopping experience? This is the first question to ask because it’s all about your customers. The people who do business with you should be your most important concern when you start to compare E-commerce solutions. Put simply: If your web site doesn’t deliver an excellent shopping experience to your customers, nothing else will matter. Regardless of the rest of your grand business scheme, if your customers can’t find what they want, see it in detail and pay for it without pulling their hair out - chances are your site will be a flop from day one.

2. Is system management as straightforward as possible? You and your staff shouldn’t have to battle your E-commerce engine just to perform the daily tasks of online business. Not so many years ago, affordable shopping carts for small business included only very basic functions. They couldn’t track inventory, couldn’t manage quantity discounts, couldn’t handle multiple product options - some didn’t even organize products by categories. The industry has come a long way in a short time, however, so systems that provide full store management capability are now the standard. 

3. Is the E-commerce engine flexible enough to accommodate changing requirements as your business grows? Right now you may only want to sell 10 items. But what happens in six months when you want to expand your online inventory to 500 items, include apparel items with multiple size and color options and offer a series of downloadable e-books about how to grow better garden vegetables? In that case, you’ll need to make sure your system can handle complex option sets and paid digital downloads. Otherwise, you may face additional development expenses just to add fairly common features to your web site.

4. Are you getting more than ‘just’ a shopping cart? This is a theme that I’ve knocked around before. It’s not so much that your E-commerce engine should have every conceivable business and marketing feature built in - but it should be able to share your valuable customer data with whatever CRM, accounting or marketing software you want to use. In addition, it should include customer loyalty tools that help you build a solid base of repeat buyers.

5. Do your business plan and your budget fit together? This question is more about controlling your own expectations than anything else. In the world of E-commerce, you usually get what you pay for. If you want your site to display a large inventory, sell customized boxes of widgets, feature separate pricing for retail and wholesale customers, give your customers reward points, perform well in the search engines, offer multiple levels of quantity discounts and ship from three different warehouses - well, you need to realize that all of those things aren’t happening on a shoestring budget. Ask questions and be a realist as you develop your business plan and your project budget side-by-side and it’s much more likely that you’ll be happy with your new E-commerce web site.

In a previous post I addressed the topic of online payments and how they’re processed. Today I’d like to address the security of your E-commerce site’s payment transactions in a bit more detail.

A surprising number of small businesses avoid E-commerce (which could prove very profitable for them) because they believe credit card information submitted via the Internet can be easily compromised. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if your E-commerce is properly implemented by a skilled developer, your customers are safer using an online interface than they are handing their card over to the staff at their local coffee-stop.

Here’s a quick little tale of credit card woe. A few years back The Missus and I traveled to Guatemala City. Shortly after we returned from our trip, several charges dated after our departure appeared on my card statement. During the entire trip I had allowed my credit card out of my sight on only one occasion - when I paid the bill after we had dined at an American-based chain restaurant (a Chili’s in this case) near the hotel. Obviously, in the three minutes my card and I were separated somebody had made use of the local photocopier. Ugh.

It was easy enough to sort things out on my end - the re-entry stamp on my passport was handy proof that I wasn’t in Guatemala when the charges were made - but it’s an example of something that can happen to any card-holder any time they hand their card over to another person for payment.

The singular vulnerability in the payment process - another person - is eliminated entirely under the automated payment processing model used in secure E-commerce. Payment gateway services like Authorize.net directly capture your customers’ credit card information. This means that their payment information never resides on your web site at any time, which in turn means that an unauthorized administrative login or a data security breach of your site can never expose your customers to fraudulent charges on their accounts.

Of course, in order to take advantage of this extraordinary security, your site has to be designed to use secure automated payments. That sounds like a no-brainer, but over the years I’ve come across an unsettling number of small business web sites that have no secure features on them at all. They have no security certificate, so credit card information is transmitted unencrypted and ‘in the open’. They keep the credit card information in a database on their web server and use the information to run a manual charge to the account using their point-of-sale system.

Not surprisingly, these unsecured web stores seldom see much in the way of sales. Online shoppers are increasingly security-aware and few of them, if any, will type in their credit card information unless they see that little security ‘lock’ icon appear at the bottom of their browser window.

Maintaining credit card information of any kind on your store’s web server is a grave financial liability for your business. I understand that for many businesses and small web sites the extra expense of a gateway account (in addition to their point-of-sale account) can be a nuisance. But when you consider that a single compromised credit card number could cost your business thousands of dollars, $20 a month or so looks like very cheap insurance.

In my last post, I touched on some of the important concerns that small business owners need to examine when considering the use of a hosted E-commerce solution. Today I’ll take a closer look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of building a stand-alone E-commerce web site.

First, realize that with a stand-alone E-commerce web site you’re generally letting yourself in for more work. A LOT more work. That’s why stand-alone sites truly aren’t a suitable solution for every small business. If you plan a very small online inventory and can be satisfied with minimal-to-basic marketing tools, then a hosted solution may be the best route to take.

More may not always be better

A stand-alone site will give you more tools and deeper resources, but none of that comes without a price tag. The differences in capabilities between hosted and stand-alone solutions can be substantial and so can the differences in their project costs. In fact, just the licensing expense for a good stand-alone E-commerce engine will usually outstrip the amount a small business can expect to pay for the complete setup of a hosted solution. By the time you add in custom design costs, programming modifications, SEO work and a few other project line-items, you’re likely looking at a significantly higher initial investment.

A stand-alone solution may also appear daunting to you if you run a business with limited personnel and/or time resources. A custom, stand-alone E-commerce project begins life as pretty much a blank slate. As the project progresses you work with your developer to fill in the slate’s open spaces with your business vision and their E-commerce experience. This takes time, thought and communications - which may be something you don’t have much opportunity to spare from running your day-to-day operation.

Most E-commerce engines are designed to include powerful tools intended for dedicated E-commerce, so they also carry a higher learning curve and require more time to manage to their full capability. No doubt, one of the primary reasons for the failure of many E-commerce sites is the inability of the site owner to commit the appropriate amount of time and effort to the store’s management and upkeep.

But frequently, more IS better

However, none of that is to say that even the smallest business can’t realize the maximum return from a stand-alone E-commerce site. Many very successful E-commerce sites are operated by one- or two-person businesses.

One of the biggest advantages to a stand-alone E-commerce solution is that a skilled developer can completely customize both the design and the programming to suit your specific business requirements. In my experience, no two businesses are run exactly the same way. This means that they frequently have demands that simply can’t be satisfied within the limits of a one-size-fits-all solution. An E-commerce project has the highest chance for success when it can be adapted to your existing business practices (instead of requiring that your business practices adapt to your web site).

Stand-alone E-commerce solutions are also entirely open-ended. There are no restrictions placed on the size of your store’s inventory, the amount of traffic you receive or the number of customer accounts you maintain. The company that hosts your E-commerce site may have several different service rates that scale according to the server resources you demand (i.e. more disk space for images or more bandwidth for higher traffic), but those service fee differences are generally negligible until your site begins to attract traffic of epic proportions - at which point you won’t be a ’small’ business, anyway.

A good stand-alone E-commerce engine is designed with powerful marketing and customer-loyalty tools built-in. It’s also built around industry-standard database technology that is open to custom programming and interfaces with common CRM and marketing applications. The database belongs entirely to your business - it’s not built on some shared data platform - and you have complete control over how your customer data is handled for marketing, privacy and security.

Stand-alone E-commerce sites offer better search visibility and are more open to search engine optimization than hosted solutions. For a business with serious marketing ambition, that’s enough of a deciding factor on it’s own merit. If your site can’t be found easily through search, all of your other marketing efforts aren’t likely to make up the difference. Your store’s customer base is built from your site traffic, and the best way to drive traffic is through search results.