The most important aspect of a website is to deliver a message to visitors and get then to fill out a form, buy a product, service, or make a phone call.

Recently I wrote an article about how the next president of the United States Barack Obama was about to determine whether his website needs a redesign. In my opinion his website put him over the top.

The internet gets more and more competitive each year. More and more businesses are realizing the opportunities of having a website and addressing an endless number of consumers through the online market. It’s no question that only the websites with great design, wide functionalities, and the right tools will make it to the front of the line.

I have been trying to figure out why recently I’ve been able hit a home run with new projects, when in the past it was difficult to find the “creative” juice I need. I think I’ve figured out what motivates me into digging down into myself and connecting with the universe (life-stream, God, or whatever you believe in that gives you power and motivation), and channeling the energy that fills that blank canvas I am looking at.

While Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is very important so that you are found by those seeking your product s, you still need to convert that visitor to being a buyer. If you are selling through an online store, conversion is easily measured … SALES.
How do you know that your e-commerce site is generating all of the sales that it can? The answer lies in the statistics. Monitoring and analyzing your stats is absolutely critical towards the ultimate goal of maximized sales for your online business. You can almost count on, in every case, that you will find things in the stats that will indicate issues that are preventing you from achieving the best performance.
Stats offer you a window into the user interaction with your shopping cart. You can see how effective and efficient the buying process is. Are visitors moving through the process smoothly? Do they seem to get stuck on a particular step or page? How many enter the checkout process? How many complete the checkout process? At what point is the checkout process aborted? Which products are producing the most sales … and the least? Compare the best sellers with the worst? Are there differences that can be attributable to the information and the way the information is displayed?
Have you tested different designs, configurations to see which ones perform the best? There are hundreds, even more, factors involving color, font, positions, graphics that need to be tested to determine the optimum combination.
Are you insuring that the visitor feels secure, confident and have the peace of mind that your site is secure, their purchase is secure? Do you offer guarantees, warranties, even money back guarantees? Do you offer customer reviews / comments to further promote a sense in confidence in you as a vendor and in the product itself?
Not all e-commerce sites are created equal from an SEO point of view either? E-Commerce structure and internal software needs to be SEO-friendly in and of itself. The products need to be indexed through a well designed and structured relational database. Visuals are important as well; are you displaying high res / high quality images that can be enlarged? Are you offering more details / specifications … there are those that read this stuff so it needs to be made available.
Your Back Office
Your shopping cart requires active administration to:
1. Monitor and manage your product line and all available options.
2. Manage integration and options involving all of the major shippers.
3. Dynamically update the site map to include all relevant updates so that Google has your products properly indexed for universal search purposes.
4. Carefully review stats which is so essential as already said
5. Customize CRM (Customer Relation Management) features to reflect current operations, products and policies online.
6. Offer special pricing, coupons, promotions and other customer-engagement initiatives.
There are hundreds of additional considerations depending on your particular situation.
You likely will need an E-Commerce Design Specialist with demonstrated results both in Internet Marketing / SEO and Conversion Optimization. Both sides of the success formula, visibility on Google and the highest conversion rates on the site itself need to be addressed by a fully integrated Internet Marketing Services Company. The wide array of specialties and sub-specialties dictate the need for top-level expertise. The opportunity cost is huge without a dedicated company that is focused and skilled in all of these areas.

The key, as with everything worthwhile, is being fully committed to the ultimate success of your website and your shopping cart in particular.

Most of my new clients come to me with the same problems; their websites don’t generate enough leads or sales. There are several factors that contribute to this, but usually all fall under a combination of 3 problems. They are either not getting enough traffic, they are getting poor traffic or the website is not converting the traffic into leads. These are usually the biggest problems that most website owners face. Here are the solutions I propose

Website Optimization and Internet Marketing are synonymous terms.  The major supporting cast or specialty is Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

However SEO is often misunderstood.   It is not at all unusual to speak with prospective clients that think SEO is all about meta tags, title tags and even “tricks.”  However so-called White Hat SEO or “ethical” SEO or much more accurately, EFFECTIVE SEO, involves no tricks and the lexicon of meta tags and title tags does little justice to the true scope of what is involved in SEO.

5 SECONDS … that’s how long you have to capture the attention of a website visitor. Does your website convey trust, credibility and reliability within 5 seconds? Site visitors are impatient people seeking immediate gratification … they want to ooh and ahh … even before the page is fully loaded.