Market your site

Without doubt, the most important thing in making your e-commerce website successful is marketing it. In fact at Shopfitter we believe the biggest advantage we provide is in allowing you to spend your money where it will do the most good - on your marketing.

The simplest and quickest way to get results is to get a specialist web-marketing or search engine optimisation company to do it for you. We have negotiated special rates and packages with Indez, one of Europe's top web marketing specialists, who we know will do a good job for you at a price to suit most budgets.

Before signing up with any webmarketing programme please read Google's SEOs page on their Webmaster microsite, this should help you recognise what not to choose.

Shopfitter offers a Google xml and Yahoo txt sitemap service, visit our Other Services page for more information. We use Google Sitemaps to inform Google's crawler about all your pages and to help people discover more of your web pages.

Alternatively, here are some tips to do the job yourself:

Read the Google Webmaster microsite for guidance on 'fact or fiction' statements about how Google works.
Visit each of the major search engines submission pages, some require payment (MSN and Yahoo, for instance), and submit your site. See the links at the bottom of this page to get you started - click here
Include your keywords in the body of the text on your homepage, this improves the relevance rating to the search engines (make sure that they are included as part of sensible sentences).
Put your web address on every piece of company literature - Besides adding a Web address to business cards and company letterhead, marketers put web addresses on software packages, promotional giveaways, and classified advertisements.
Drive traffic with print advertising - Your print advertisements and direct mail should direct buyers to your website for more information, special offers or for an online "express" order form.
Offer sneak previews. Demos of new products are especially good ways to generate traffic from highly-qualified prospects. You can also collect feedback that will help you identify what features are most exciting (and which ones aren't).
Conduct regular Email campaigns - Brief Email teasers, new product announcements, special offers, company news, etc. will give users a reason to visit your site more often. Indeed, any excuse you can think of to contact existing customer will improve sales.
Cross-link to other sites -If you share a similar target customer base with other non-competing companies, it's often possible to place reciprocal links on their sites that will enhance everyone's traffic counts. A good way of finding sites that you shouls approach for reciprocal linking is to put your product keywords into the major search engines and then contact the 'best bets' from the top ten sites found. Do this with each keyword and search engine separately. If you are a member of an Association, Federation, Chamber of Commerce etc. you may be able to arrange to have a link to your site from their's. Some ISPs will provide links from their main pages to their members sites.
You could consider forming relationships with portals and affiliate programmes. It is worth investigating a number of different avenues. The more links from other sites you have to your shop site the more visitors you are likely to get.
Give customers a reason to bookmark your site - Resource directories, calendars, contests, interviews, giveaways, and in-depth product information, any kind of useful and interesting content will help attract repeat visitors.
Conduct a survey - Post a simple questionnaire on your site (make sure the questions are interesting), then publish the results.
Create a "membership" forum - Invite customers to join an online user group and offer the members discounts and other special privileges.
Visit Search Engine Watch submission tips page for an excellent resource in how to get the best rankings for your site: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/index.php

Links to search engine submission pages

It is a good idea to register with as many search engines as you can.
Here are some links to relevant pages to help get you started:

Google site submissission page - www.google.co.uk/addurl.html
Google guide for website owners - www.google.co.uk/webmasters/index.html
Lycos free site submission page - insite.lycos.com/browser_test.asp?func=free
Yahoo guide to suggest a site - docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
AltaVista basic submission page - addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new
AOL/ODP site submission guide - search.aol.co.uk/help_url

Paid inclusion only (no free submission).

MSN/LookSmart submission page - submit.looksmart.co.uk/msnhome.htm
Ask Jeeves submission page - ask.ineedhits.com/sitesubmit.asp

To work out what the best search terms are you can use the Overture search term suggestion tool. This search engine only accounts for a small percent of web searches but is a great help in finding what terms people tend to use with search engines. To get an estimate of the total numbers across all engines multiply the Overture figure by 29.4:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.

Try a number of variations for each of your products or services to see which give you the best results.

Google provide a similar tool, although it's intended for use with Adwords campaigns, the following link opens an externally accessible method of assessing search terms, suggesting alternatives and getting a rough idea of how commonly used they are. There's also a scale for how much competition there is for each term displayed:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Further to the mention of Google Sitemaps above, we've found a really easy resource for creating your own xml sitemaps free of charge. Visit our sitemap generator page for more information.