Search Engine Over Friends and Family

These days it is more important than ever to market your business online. A recent survey showed that an amazing 80% of shoppers now choose to visit a store's website before heading to the actual store, and 58% of people claim to do all their product research online before buying instead of consulting with friends and family. Combining this information with the fact that increased fuel prices and other costs are convincing more and more people to stay at home and shop, and you can easily see that online marketing and a strong website is vital for your company's success.

Website Content
One of the key aspects of online success in e-commerce is to ensure the customers value your website. Having incomplete product descriptions or none at all will result in customers quickly going elsewhere to find out more information about the product they are considering. You should also consider paying for some form of search engine optimisation (SEO) which customises your website and content to gain a better rank in the search engines.

A large part of SEO involves getting other sites to link with yours so submitting your site to web directories will be another important part of this area of your online marketing strategy. Some search engines will penalise you for things like having too heavy keyword saturation or other more subtle "cheats", so it really pays to hire a professional to handle your search engine optimisation needs.

Search Engine Marketing
One of the very best ways to raise awareness of your company and increase traffic to your website is with a structured search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. One of the simplest forms of SEM involves paying a search engine to put your website in a prominent position on the search results page, often as a "featured" link, this is known as paid placement.

Another great service offered by the search engines is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. As the name implies, this means that the search engine distributes your advert across its network of websites and you pay for the referrals this generates. With PPC, everyone's a winner; you get large coverage with your advert and only pay for the increased traffic (the clicks to your site) and the person who ends up with your advert on their website earns a cut of what you pay.

While pay-per-click schemes can seem a little expensive, there are some keywords that can still get you traffic but might be cheaper, so it pays to invest a little time researching search terms. You can also consider some of the smaller search engines that will have lower priced keywords. Whichever you choose, the costs of marketing when offset against your increased traffic (and hence revenue) will make it worthwhile.