If you want to succeed when running an e-commerce site, you should be aware of the fact that there are certain periods of the year that will be busier than others, both for online businesses and retail stores alike. The Christmas holiday shopping season is definitely the most popular, but there is also the Black Friday shopping holiday, as well as Boxing Day which is observed in certain countries. No matter what the holiday is, there are periods of time when people will be more inclined to buy certain items. Yet, numbers show that an increasing amount of people are doing their shopping online for these occasions. Here are some of the elements that draw people to online shopping and what you, as en e-commerce site owner, could do in order to capitalize on them and use them to your advantage in your advertising materials.

• No Crowds

When you shop online, there is no need to have to navigate through crowded shopping malls to find what you are looking for and then stand in line for half an hour just to check out. Some people don’t mind the crowds and view them as part of the shopping atmosphere during the holidays. But many others hate them and would rather do their shopping in a more comfortable environment. This crowded atmosphere can reach extremes, as you can see when reading news after Black Friday. Incidents of people being trampled, as well as verbal and physical violence, sometimes involving weapons, are not at all surprising anymore.

Presenting your website as a more comfortable and convenient shopping experience in your advertising materials will seek to attract people that just want to buy things for the holidays without too much hassle.

• Products are easier to find

Online, there is no need to hop from store to store in search of a certain item or category of items. All that’s needed is a simple search in Google to find a website that will sell what your customers are looking for. This saves your shoppers a lot of time.

To profit from this, make sure your items are well categorized on your site. Also, be sure to target the right keywords in your SEO efforts. Do an analysis of what your buyers will be searching for when shopping and place additional emphasis on keywords that are more likely to bring you productive traffic. Remember that those searching for specific keywords are more likely to already have made up their mind about what they want and are now looking for a place to buy it. So someone looking for “Apple MacBook Air Refurbished” is more likely to buy them a searcher typing in “computer” in Google.

Participating in online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon are also good ways to get more sales, as the traffic is already present on these sites and people frequent online marketplaces with one main goal: to buy a product that they need. These can help you get sales in addition to those you would make on your main site.

One of the main goals  of your business is to get your website to rank as high as possible. The reason being, if you have a higher ranking website, the more eyeballs that view it, the more revenue and business (or philantropy) you can provide for your visitors. The point of creating a website isn’t to have it sit idle and without viewers, but to get as large as the owner wants it to be. That is where ranking high in search engines is really going to help. Statistics show something like 40% of the users on search engines like Google click on the first link available, your goal is to be that site.

Ranking systems within the popular search engines used more often by browsing individuals can either give you an advantage or a disadvantage. If you are not ranked higher in these listings, then you get less exposure and that is bad when your website depends on exposure from people who want to see what you provide on your website. It is not impossible to get a top ten ranking on search engines and it does not take too much to get there if you know the simple tricks to use.

There is a wide variety of things you could do to help improve your search engine ranking. The most important thing that needs to be done is having the website optimized for search engine indexing. This optimization could be simple things like providing the necessary tags, having content that is tailored to the target audience and more. This can be done by yourself or you could hire professionals to do it for a fee. Either way, it helps to improve ranking and promotes more traffic to the websites which are being optimized.

The next option is to look into blogs and social media for link purposes. The way that some of the goliath search engines work best is by having back links to the original source. This means that the more times that a link is traceable back to the website that originates to some content or provides a simple link to the main page of the website, the more times it will show up in the search engine when searched. Many search engines combine the weight of all of the links towards the original and provide higher rankings when searched. This does take time, but is fairly worth the effort to increase ranking on search engine sites.

Some of you may of noticed Googles new results page and have you wondered how this might affect your websites search engine results position ?

Google has for the last year have been slowly changing the way their search works, for example the search results are more tailored to the individual using the computer.  The new design is very similar to bing and yahoo.  But Google still dominate the search engine niche with last month being one of their best months in terms of users using Google compared to other search engines.

The new SERPs may make SEO webmasters a little worried as to how users will now start to use the new tools that Google provides users and how results will be displayed.  I can say that my traffic stats to my website haven’t changed much since the new Google changes have been introduced but my enquiries and sales have dropped a little which makes me think if this is a result of the recent Google changes, but i doubt very much as my bounce rate is still the same so im just guessing its a seasonal issue.

The options in the left panel of the new look Google pull from “everything” – classic Google results (universal, organic, paid, etc.), blogs from Google Blog Search, Books from Google Books (which includes magazines), Images from Google Image Search, News from Google News, Maps from Google Maps, Shopping from Google Product Search, Videos from Google Video (which includes videos from YouTube and other sources), and Updates from Google’s real-time search.

You will also notice that at the end of the search results page it will show live results from Twitter and match any keywords from a live feed directly from Twitter.  Google is moving more towards giving you live results as its constantly improving the way it gives the end user results.

I recently ran an experiment using Twitter as a way to get traffic from using the live twitter service on Google by using a plugin on my wordpress blog that updated my twitter account every 15 mins with new articles and this brought in alot of traffic as Google was picking up my keywords in my tweets and giving them tops spot on the results of Google helping direct organic traffic straight to my blog.  The only drawback on this was the plugin i was using crashed my server as it was using alot of bandwidth as it was an autoblog adding 7 new articles every minute, so you can image what this did to my server.  However at the time i was getting around 500 clicks, many from very competitive keywords on Google via the Twitter live feed.

Google and Bing (Microsoft) have signed a deal with Twitter which will allow tweets to be made available via search results.  This means that users searching online will get access to live results instantly via Tweets on Google and Bing.

Twitter has created a new type of online search in that in gives users real time information from users tweeting their information to their followers.  These tweets will now be available to Google and Bing which will make the online search experience more realtime in the information that is presented to the user.

Microsoft has announced that a potential deal will soon be struck with Facebook in that user status updates will be made availabe to Bings search results.

Google’s Marissa Mayer said: “Our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world.”

 ”In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged – real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.”

Internet experts are predicting that with this new invention of real-time search this will be the next big money maker for webmasters, allowing companies the opportunity to advertise alongside the popular information in real time.

Microsoft’s Bing service has already setup a Twitter search page specifically to search for Tweets and Google will soon launch a Twitter search service within the next few months.

If you have a wordpress blog and want to make money from your blog then a very good plugin to install is the Google adsense plugin.  The plugin is free to install.  Simply do a search on Google for the “Google Adsense WordPress Plugin”.  Download and unzip the plugin then using your FTP software upload the plugin to the following directory within your hosting account:

Public_html/wp-contents/plugins

Login to your blog and under plugins you should see the Adsense plugin and activate it.

Once you have activated the plugin your ready to customise the plugin under “Settings” on the bottom left of the screen.  Under the Adsense ID this is where you put you Google adsense publisher id also known as your PUB Number.  This number can be found at the top right hand corner in your Google adsense account.

You can also setup Adsense channels if you use adsense for several other websites and want to track which site is generating your clicks.

You can also set what sizes you want the adds to be displayed on your blog under ad formats.  You can also decide if you want your ads to appear on articles, static pages, category pages, on your home page or any of your archive pages.

You can also change the colour of your ads to match the theme of your website and you can also set to show a number of adds per page depending on your preferences.

If you have a blog or a website and are looking for a way to make money from it then i recommend joining upto Googles partnership program called Google Adsense.  Google adsense is a partnership opportunity that you will allow Google to show their adverts on your website and whenever a customer of yours clicks on their adverts you earn a commission instantly

The commission you earn depends on your content, some adverts can earn you upto $5 and some 0.20c depending on how much the advertiser has paid Google.  Google then spilts the revenue with you for placing the add on your website.  From the advertisers point of view this is called PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising via the Google Adwords network.

The great thing about Google adsense adverts is that you can easily intregrate them into your website or blog either as text or banners.  You can change the look and colour of the text to match your content which makes your reader want to click on the adverts as they will think they are part of your website so you earn commission very easily.

There is a very good plugin for wordpress that you can upload and activate and allow Google adsense to show up in your articles on pages.  Just run a search on Google for the plugin.  Installation is very easy.

The first thing you need to do is make sure your website has been optimised making sure you have the following (if you have bought a website from us then you can skip this section):

Website Optimisation Tips

1.) Making sure you have meta tags on your homepage
2.) All your pages have titles with your keywords
3.) Page names with your keywords (example – www.domain.com/keyword.htm )
4.) Very good content on all your pages matching the keywords on your title and page name
5.) Having your main keyword on your pages in H1 font style towards the top of the page
6.) Having some of your keywords as anchor text (hyperlinks) that link to inner pages within your site
7.) Having a xml sitemap accessible from your homepage for search engines to find and crawl (helps with indexing your pages)
8.) Making sure your website is updated on a regular basis (ideally everyday). Best ways to do this is by having a blog, free directory, free article submission, forum as added features to your site

Marketing Your Website

The most recommend method for marketing your website is the organic method to get high rankings on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn etc.

Google will determine your rankings on searches by how many back links you have to your site, which means how many other websites have your link on. This lets google know that your website is very popular. If you can try to make sure that the sites that you have a back link on match the niche of your website. For example if you are an electronics website selling electronics try to have back links on other shopping websites selling similar products and services. This will make it easier for Google to understand what your website is all about.

Even better is if you can have keyword anchor text as your back links from other sites. For example instead of just putting your domain URL as a back link you could have your chosen keyword for example – cheap ipods – and when someone clicks on this they are directed to your website. This lets google know your website has cheap ipods and to place your rankings high up when someone uses this search term on google.

The HTML code to create a keyword anchor back link text is:

<a href=http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com>YOUR KEYWORD TEXT</a>

Another good trick is to look at your competitors and find out how many back links they have and what other websites they have their links on. This will give you some idea of how they have achieve page 1 listings on google. To find out what back links your competition has you can do the following:

1.) On google get their domain name and search using their full domain name ( example – http://www.establishedwebsiteforsale.co.uk = over 1000 back links)

2.) On Yahoo.com get your competitors URL and do the following entering the following in the search bar:

Linkdomain:www.yourcompetitorsurl.com

This will tell you how many back links they have and what websites they are on. A good theory is if you put your link on all the websites your competitor has, you will over time be next to them on top of Google.

A number of good ways to get back links is to try some of the following:

1.) Writing up articles about your products or services that you offer with your back links within your articles using the anchor text back link
2.) Writing in blogs leaving your links (e.g commenting on other peoples blogs)
3.) Exchanging links with other similar websites. Usually if you look towards to the bottom of most websites they have a Links page that allows you to exchange links with each other
4.) Submit your URL to free directories
5.) Submit your URL to DMOZ. Google loves this directory, altougth it can take months to get lising on there
6.) Submit your URL to social networking sites, forums
7.) Use Yahoo answers and other forums to answer peoples questions with a link to your website.
8.) Use a very good forum called (forums.digitalpoint.com) and look for individuals offering the following services which will help with building your backlinks dramatically:

# Article submission service
# Free directory submission service
# Sponsoring wordpress themes that match the niche of your website (highly recommended)
# Sponsoring joomla themes that match the niche of your website
# Buying high PR (Pagerank) links of similar websites to yours
# Buying blogroll links on blogs

List of websites to submit your website to

http://www.bestcatalog.net/seo_tips/directories.htm

Another method which you can use is setting up a pay per click campaign with Google adwords.

This works by paying Google everytime someone clicks on your link in Googles network of websites and search engine. You can set a budget for example 0.20p per click to your site. You can set a daily budget so you can pay for example 1,000 hits aday to your website.

Another very good way to promote your website and build back links to your site is to write in forums, blogs and social bookmarking sites. For example the following:

1) Yahoo answers

2) Forums and blogs that match your niche. For example if you have a finance website, look for forums to do with finance and people looking for loans etc..

3) Facebook. You can create a group on facebook with a link to your website and email this group to all your friends

4) Set up an email campaign and email several people your services

5) If you have a blog, write very good articles and Digg them on Digg.com and if people like your article it will become very popular within the Digg.com community and help with your rankings dramatically and popularity

Another option is to pay for an advert in your local paper telling them about your services and a link to your website

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