• Create a site search function so shoppers can easily find items or services with little effort.
• Put this search function on all pages of your site.
• Organize your site with easy to navigate categories.
• Look at your site from a shopper’s point of view and make sure that shopping from your store is simple.

2.  Give Your Products and Services Extremely Detailed Descriptions.

• Online shoppers cannot physically see your offerings so provide high quality images of each item for sale.
• Give your clients the option to zoom in on and rotate images so they get the full picture.
• If selling used items or goods with any sort of imperfections, make sure that these defects are clearly visible.
• Use videos to show your products or services whenever possible.  This will often trump your competition.
• Along with video, use audio whenever possible to describe your products or services.

3.  Guarantee Site Security.

• Ensure that your site is PCI and PA-DSS Compliant.  Remember that not all hosts or shopping carts are compliant.  Miva Merchant 5.5 will be fully compliant with the PA-DSS by the July 2010 deadline.
• Install valid SSL Certificates so that confidential information is properly encrypted.
• Create a “Contact Us” page.  Customers will trust you more if you provide a physical address and telephone number.

4.  Supply Customer Reviews and Testimonials.

• Put a review system in place on your site.  There are review modules for Miva Merchant 5.5 on the market.
• Positive reviews of your products and service are perhaps the most important tool in establishing a successful online business.
• If a client sees that their opinions matter to you then there is a greater chance that they will become a repeat customer.
• Taking your customers’ ideas and opinions into consideration can greatly aid you in your marketing campaigns.

5.  Increase Your Site’s Speed and Page Load Times.

• People shop online to save time. They will generally be turned off by a site with slow load times.
• Use a qualified and knowledgeable business web hosting provider that has fast servers and an uptime guarantee.
• Ensure that your hosting plan provides adequate bandwidth for the amount of traffic your site receives
• Make sure that your host is willing and able to grow with you as your business grows and generates more traffic.

6.  Perform Proper Market Research.

• Study in-depth what your competition is doing including their marketing, pricing and basically all aspects of your business.
• Institute price-matching programs to keep up with the pricing your competitors are offering.
• Conduct research to find your target demographic and market accordingly.

7.  Properly Promote Your Business.

• Make sure you are reaching your target audience by listing your site in respective directories.
• Utilize site statistics tools such as the free Google Analytics to develop proper marketing plans.
• Conduct smart Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns to get to the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for targeted keywords including link building, directory marketing, social networking, article marketing, forum and blog posts and many other techniques.
• Properly use meta descriptions and tags to guarantee the correct indexing and ranking in the search engines.

8.  Clearly State Your Shipping and Return Policies.

• No one likes any kind of hidden fees so be upfront about these policies.
• Offer shipping discounts for the purchase of multiple items.
• Offer free shipping whenever possible for customers that spend a certain amount of money with you.
• Be frank about who is paying for shipping when it comes to returns.

9.  Make Plainly Visible What Methods You Accept For Payment.

• Put accepted methods of payment on your home page.
• For smaller merchants, services like PayPal and Google Checkout may be sufficient.
• In order to be widely successful, realistically you will need to be able to accept major credit cards.
• The more payment options you offer the better.

10.  Devote a Page to Sale and Discounted Items.

• An abundance of online shoppers will jump straight to the clearance section just like many customers do in brick and mortar establishments.  People are drawn to bargains.  Simple as that.  Especially in today’s economy.
• Highlight your discounted goods as much as you can.

Properly following these steps will help any e-commerce merchant be on their way to running a successful online business.  Good luck!

There are a few different ways to go about distributing press releases.  After writing a release in the proper format, you can try to distribute it to websites, media outlets, blogs and any other relevant content providers yourself.  While that may be a cheaper option, you will have more success using a distribution service such as PRWeb or Send2Press.  These services are relatively inexpensive, offer different pricing plans and will get your release to an abundance of relevant sites, search engines and news outlets.  They work hard to ensure that your story is syndicated throughout the web.

Some reasons to write a press release include newsworthy stories within your company, such as the hiring of a new CEO.  Accomplishments such as breaking a sales record or hosting a company-wide volunteer project are another major reason to publish a press release.  Furthermore, if your company is having a major sale, special or promotion, these seem to be things that journalists and bloggers love because they get the attention of a lot of readers.  Press releases announcing sales can benefit your company in many ways.  You are guaranteed links, traffic and most likely conversions, which will increase your search engine standings as well as your bottom line.

Before you write your release, if you have been employing proper SEO techniques, you should already have a list of target keywords that you are trying to rank for in the search engines.  You will want to use these keywords throughout your release.  Be sure to keep keyword density in mind while writing your press release.  The general rule of thumb is to use no more than one keyword per 100 words.  Keep in mind that long-tail keywords might be your best bet if you are a smaller company with a lot of competition because you are not likely to rank high for the most sought after keywords.  In other words, you are a little fish in a big pond and if you are selling chocolate then you are going to have a difficult time ranking number one for the search term “chocolate.”  However, if you can focus on your specialty or something that sets you apart from your competition then you will be better off.  For example, if you sell “fine imported Belgian chocolate,” it will be much easier to rank higher for this long-tail keyword.

Press releases are a highly effective means of SEO, link building and ultimately increasing your bottom line.  If you are not currently utilizing the press release in your marketing strategy then you should start right away!

Obviously, over the past few years, Google has taken the reigns as the top search engine. Around 80% of all Internet searches are conducted through Google. In fact, Google is the search engine that developed the Page Rank system to begin with. Google uses “spiders” to crawl through web pages and indexes them accordingly.

As a result of this, everyone with a website wants to be at the top of the Google results pages. Among Internet gurus, this is known as the “SERP” or Search Engine Results Page. Getting your site to the top of the SERP is a coveted position that many people and corporations are striving for, making it quite competetive. Attaining that ultra-desirable number one spot on the SERP is usually reserved for monster corporations that dominate the field of the keyword you are searching for.

Although the number one spot may be out of your grasp as a small or medium sized business, getting on the first page is not out of your reach. With the right SEO (Search Engine Optimization) approaches, ending up on the first or second page of the SERP is an attainable goal and one that owners of small businesses should always be aiming for.

The SEO capabilities of Miva Merchant 5.5 are designed to take your online store to the next level with its easy to understand application of meta tags, titles and descriptions. Miva Merchant 5.5’s templates allow you to add tags to the bulk of your pages by simply editing three templates – Storefront, Category and Product Display. Miva Merchant 5.5’s simplistic rendering of advanced practices leaves the online store owner with more time to focus on other important areas of marketing – blogging, posting to forums, social networking, etc.

Page rank is largely determined by the amount of sites linking to your site. This is why the practice of link building and exchanging has become such an important Internet marketing tool. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the higher the “weight” or ranking of a site that links to your site, the more valuable the link.

Watch this video on YouTube that teaches you how to get valuable backlinks from posting comments to blogs and how to avoid those that have “no follow” links, which will not aid in SEO: