Hope you like Four Ecommerce Best Practices for 2011 – I, if you have gone through. It contains best practices for ecommerce website design (index page, global, customer services) to increase the conversion.
Best Practices for E-commerce Website Promotion:
- Marketing
- Technical
Let’s start with first,
Marketing (off site):
- Landing page creation – You can create and optimize landing pages for each category or each primary keyword that best described your products, which will especially help in your PPC campaign as well. You can after analyze which pages have most conversion.
- Targeting keywords for your products – This is truly difficult part for any site owner. You can use keyword research tool and identify the best suits of keywords for the products, whether it could be the short tail or long tail. You can also use the synonyms of the keywords based on Latent Semantic Method, which describe to contain keywords related to a particular keyword, e.g. Ecommerce, E-commerce, Electronic Commerce, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, etc.
- Set up a blog to the site – Why is it necessary to have a blog for an ecommerce website? The answer is to gather the people of having interested to find more information, resources about the products or services, which you are selling. Post at least once in a week in the blog with the targeting keywords in titles and the content. Make sure your blog post title should be attractive. You can even link out from the blog post to the top category, landing or product page of your ecommerce website.
- Follow up surveys – Send out the survey forms to your existing customers to know their behavior about your ecommerce website, products and services.
- Send an email newsletter – This is the best and affordable way to keep communicating with your existing customers via sending the newsletter, which includes the promotional offers, coupons, discounts, etc. Even you can highlight the new products with their features.
- Create Facebook page – Facebook fan page is one of the excellent way to build friends, fans for your store by the references of your existing customers. You can share the special offers also.
- Create a Twitter account – Twitter is a micro blogging in which you can quickly announce the special offerings, introduce new products, features products, etc. to your existing customers.
Technical (on site):
- Accessible in multiple browsers – Make sure that your ecommerce website work perfectly in all major browsers, e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE, etc.
- Multiple sorting to navigation (color, size, gender etc.) – Sometimes people leave your site as they cannot able to find out the product of their choice. The best solution is to provide sorting option in the home page that distributes all the products by color, size, gender etc.
- Keywords in title tag – Make sure to include targeting keywords and brands in the title, which are not more than 65 characters.
- Keywords in Meta tags – Recent algorithm changes suggest that there will be no more impact of Meta description to the ranking henceforth. You can now include the targeting keywords relevant to the content.
- RSS feeds – Two areas you can use RSS feed in your site, Product, Category page and Blog. It informs your shoppers if they subscribed to the product feed about the new product. They can also subscribe to the blog to keep updating with the products of your ecommerce website.
- Keywords worthy and easy to understand URLs – Make sure to include keyword in your URL with underscore “_” sign. You can remove the unnecessary stings of numbers and letters from the URL so that it makes easy for human to read.
- Image optimization – Make sure the images are in good quality and perfect in size. If you want to show a product, use jpg. For logo, you can use png or gif format.
- Use “title” and “alt” attributes in your image – For better visibility and usability of your product image in search engines, you can use keywords in “title” tag (link source) and “alt” tag (image source).
If you have more ideas about ecommerce website promotion, you can share them in the comments.
In our next post, you will find the best practices for product pages.