Archives for December 2011

Ecommerce Tips for the Christmas Season

December 23, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

Christmas is just round the corner and Christmas shopping is already in full swing. Ecommerce businesses need to pull out all the plugs and put in every bit of effort to draw Christmas shoppers to their webstores. What tasks should be on your agenda to ensure that your webstore does great business during the Christmas season? Here are a few ecommerce tips:

Offer free shipping: Free shipping is a proven attraction for most online shoppers. If it is feasible for your business to offer free shipping, do it. Also clearly mention the cut-off dates for delivering Christmas gifts. Any orders you receive before that date will have to be honored well in time for Christmas Day.
Advertise and Offer Gift Cards: Gift cards are a great added attraction for shoppers. They also work to help shoppers make up their mind about making the purchase at your store. Ensure that your gift card offer is somewhat more attractive than that of the competition. If you succeed at attracting customers with your gift cards, chances are they will buy more.
Ring in the New: Let your gifts carry a distinct stamp of the festive season. Promote them with Christmas-specific content and design. Dress up that area of your website just the right amount.
Take a Tour: Go visit your own website as though you were a customer. Ensure that the shopping process, from product browsing to checkout, is as smooth as smooth can get. Customers who make snappy purchases may recommend your webstore to others.
Be Ready: Can your server handle spikes in traffic? Can your webstore do a good job in case it receives more traffic than it expects? Will be able to ship well in time for Christmas Day? Make sure that your webstore can manage every single order it receives. You cannot afford to not deliver. So be prepared the entire Christmas season.

Christmas shopping need not necessarily taper off as Christmas approaches. You might see spikes on the final two days before Christmas as well as during the rest of the Christmas season. Just in case your webstore is unable to deliver every last-minute order on time, make it amply clear. No point in first taking an order and then delivering it late. Make sure that you monitor every single order personally.

If you have issues with the inventory, or the shipping, or for that matter anything else about your online business, make sure they are resolved fast using professional help. Make the most of the Christmas season!

Merry Christmas!

Original Content + SEO in 2012: A First Look

December 20, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

Search engine optimization is very obviously becoming more oriented to the post-Panda lessons that have been learnt worldwide. Quality internet marketing was never more important than it is now. Whether you think of your social media relations, PPC, or link building, the Panda updates are a beacon of warning against using scraped or copied content. Grammatically perfect, well-written, and original content wins easily if your website DESERVES to be ranked high on the results pages – meaning that it follows only white hat SEO practices.

Companies worldwide tend to pick up highly skilled writers who are able to build keyword-rich original content. Such unique content helps acquire some great long-tail keywords since the content is built with great care. Original content is to SEO what water is to a fish. The original keywords, the long-tail ones, and the entire context within which these are incorporated go a long, long way towards helping your site attract huge volumes of traffic. It is tremendously hard work because it takes a lot of writing: the authority websites typically boast over a hundred posts or pages of original content. As you are aware, Google’s bots are able to crawl only the textual part of your content. Over time, as your website crosses the thousand-page threshold, it lends itself to naturally built links and improved rankings, the works.

A newly registered domain may take anything around 20 months to reach a reasonably high position on the first pages, provided your Google search engine optimization is top grade. Google search engine optimization is evolving – fast and mighty. The effects are likely to be felt through 2012 and beyond. But 2012 should clear up Google’s stance on original content and search engine optimization a lot more.

A quality blog helps you connect with your audience as well as search engine optimization. Unique content that your target audience will find useful helps maintain an ongoing dialogue, which in turn helps you understand them better. There’s always plenty to write about in your blog, and it pays rich SEO dividends as well.

The year 2012 seems to be well positioned to deliver on quality SEO, the issue of generating quality SERPs, and a lot of corrective action by Google. This is a company genuinely concerned about delivering top quality to its consumers. Maybe, the rest of us could take a page out of its book.

Local SEO Services for Small Businesses

December 17, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

Optimizing your website for maximum online exposure is a useful ploy for small businesses. Local SEO services firms help various businesses get the online recognition that is so critical to their success and survival. Local search engine optimization services are the ideal tool for positioning online content in a particular manner on the website to ensure that search engines find it easily and that it ranks high enough for the business website to receive quality visits. The service includes the provision of unique content that is sure to show up in Google’s and other search engines’ search results.

Local SEO services can also provide excellent reviews, articles, and other online content to make your business identity known online. Depending on the kind of content, these services are able to generate profiles and news articles that promote the client company. Once the most prominent search engine for the area picks up such content, the client has to only deal with the hordes of customers that want to buy from your local business.

However, ensure that the claims made by such local SEO services hold true and that there is enough proof to begin with to support them. Look up their customers and the directory. Go speak to the businesses that have engaged this firm in the past. If their reviews and experiences are good enough, ask for their click rate.

The click rate refers to the number of customers being referred to their clients’ websites through the efforts of the service. An authentic service provider should be able to provide these statistics to prospective clients. If not, beware of the local SEO service provider.

However, many quality service providers are now capable of delivering the goals, especially if they happen to cater to optimization requirements on the global scale as well. A local SEO service that optimizes your website for a local audience is often quite a cinch for major players that cater to large clients in addition to serving local needs.

Plus, people everywhere are making full use of the Internet in their quests for firms and businesses as close to home as possible. For achieving a fair measure of success at business, your firm needs to consider investing in a quality local SEO services provider.

The competition is already looking at options. Are you?

How to Optimize Your Twitter Profile

December 16, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

Your Twitter profile is already hard-wired to your internet marketing efforts. It is meant to promote your brand/s and develop a healthy discussion on relevant topics. If handled carefully, it will at once enable your online business to communicate well to the target audience and generate brand awareness.

Whichever way you look at it, your Twitter profile is a cornerstone of your internet marketing efforts. So how do you go about optimizing it for the best results? Here are the pointers:

Customize your Twitter Background. A customized image for the background will convey a better sense of the identity of your online business or brands. Don’t use the usual and default backgrounds. You will find any number of tutorials that explain how to create a background that is exclusive to your Twitter profile. It is a big op at standing out from the crowd, if you put enough effort into creating that special and unique background image.
Use a clear image in your Twitter profile. The default image of the oval shape will do nothing to lend an identity to your business. An ideal image could be a close-up of your own logo. That’s the best way to go, in fact. If not that, go for an image that clearly communicates your Twitter presence.
Ensure that your bio is made up of proper sentences. Such explanation will be particularly useful to owners of new businesses. But it is definitely the ideal choice if you wish to communicate aspects of your business. You could also include a link therein, to your website or blog. Your visitors can use the link to learn more about your business and how it can help them in their objectives.
The quality of your tweets is of utmost importance. In all the camaraderie of your profile and the photo and the background, don’t forget that ultimately it will be your tweets – the content of those tweets – that will ultimately carry your message to your audiences. Content is said to be king for this very reason. Engaging people using interesting, regular (including weekends), and timely tweets will do your Twitter performance and your business a humongous favor.

Follow Ydeveloper on Twitter

In addition, optimize your tweets. Share content that people can use, which means you need to use language that is in itself a major call to action. Tweets on Saturdays and Sundays have been universally known to be very beneficial.

A good tweet is all it takes to get the buzz going. So take up your tablet and get going on your Twitter profile and your online business tweets.

How to Avoid Ecommerce Mistakes

December 15, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

You are an ecommerce business owner and your store either is about to be launched or already up there in cyberspace. Either way, your webstore could be suffering because of some ecommerce mistakes, which left uncorrected, can potentially lead to untold ecommerce consequences? Therefore, it is critical that you explore all the ways in which your webstore might not measure up. Here is a list of four ecommerce mistakes to avoid:

Planning for an online business is a primary requirement. Without planning, you cannot manage the webstore successfully. When you ask your developer to create a webstore for your business, ensure that you have included every requirement in his briefing. Making changes after the website can be either messy or not at all possible. This is a major ecommerce mistake.
Your website just does not LOOK well. The ecommerce design has inherent flaws that do not convey the feel of an ecommerce website – a serious ecommerce mistake. When you read about good ecommerce website design, don’t for a moment imagine that it is about the aesthetics. If you have good products and good deals, customers will come nevertheless. Once they do, they want to see the products and the prices, not the colors and graphics used. An ecommerce website, with adequate differentiation, should look like an ecommerce website.
Timeliness is a major factor in successfully closing an order. Your ecommerce website should save the customer’s time. That is a major reason why people prefer to shop online and your ecommerce webstore. Having once received an order, it would be a mistake if you do not ship it on time. Also, returned merchandize should be quickly dealt with – either replacing the product or offering a refund.
Lack of security at your ecommerce site can damage your reputation in the mind of even those visitors that only considered buying something. Make no mistake – you can build trust among your customers by ensuring (and mentioning as much on the site) that customers’ credit card info will be strictly confidential.

These are only four ecommerce mistakes to be avoided no matter what. Ecommerce websites are a major challenge in the ecommerce development. Take every care to ensure that your ecommerce store is free from every minor mistake as well.

Happy online selling!