Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking
for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on
your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets
interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product
by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one
product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the
information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer
can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your
customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website
business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to
your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on
your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you
discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your
shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product
descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To
know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a
simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also
your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide
contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing
address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to
contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have
your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox
often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or
other online payment service.

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search
engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to
their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their
books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with
your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on
your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your
Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website
link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent
colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing
with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are
secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your
product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the
customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your
customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

9. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they
decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them
off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will
certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer
wish to receive.

It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves.

Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results.

A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine.

New sites need not be “submitted” to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues.

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high.

Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.