Website as Storefronts A customer walks into the store, browses through products and shelves, picks up items, inspects, considers the prices, chooses a product and takes it to the cash register to pay. Now if you want to sell your products online, then your site must be enabled for e-commerce, where you must have the following features: You need to provide plenty of content and product description like sizes, dimensions, colors and comparisons with other similar products. It must allow the customer to choose a product, get a clear pricing and shipping costs on the product, complete the transaction and get an order number, and/or invoice confirmation via email. Allow your customer to choose a shipping method. You must tell the customer if the item is in stock or delivered against order. Ideally, you should have an email contact or live help if the customer has a question. Most importantly you must respond immediately! If you wa...

What Is Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. N...

eBay University – What Is It All About? eBay University is the learning program that eBay  established to help people become successful eBay  merchants. For convenience, eBay classes are held  in many locations throughout the United States, and  classes may also be completed from home, using  your computer.  You should note that all of the information you will  learn through eBay University can be found on the  website – for free. However, understanding that free  information isn’t always easy. eBay University will  teach you how to open a seller’s account, how to  conduct research and create listings, how to improve  listings for greater success, how to integrate Paypal  with eBay, how to monitor your auctions, and how to  complete transactions. Once you’ve finished the Selling Basics course, you  are ready for the ‘Beyond the Basics’ course. This  advanced co...

Web Hosting Companies With thousands of web hosting companies in the market it can be difficult if not impossible to know which web site hosting companies truly provide an excellent hosting solution at an excellent price. When you have an established domain name with a good web hosting company, you can get reports on your traffic and which of your pages your customers are visiting most often, as well as many other statistics. Your web host will charge you a fee for monthly service that ranges from $10 or $20 to the more expensive $50.00 per month. Plan to pay between $300 and $500 per year to your web host. Always avoid free or very inexpensive web hosting services, because you may experience bouts of server downtimes and you are likely to have significant limitations in storage, number of email addresses, FTP upload etc. Be sure your web host can accommodate e-commerce and storefronts, wireless capability, bogs, forums, chats, online interactive helps and anythin...

Web hosting Services and Domain names Choosing an appropriate domain name is very important. First and foremost, when it comes to domain names, try to stay away from the silly, stupid, ridiculous or clever. Keep your domain name simple and make it something your customers can remember if they lose the link to your business website. Take note that, while your domain name on Geocities or AOL may seem like the least expensive way to go, it may also get you dropped from certain search engines. Some search engines ignore domain addresses that reside on these ‘free servers’ or on the ‘cheap’ servers. Even if your site is recognized and considered by search engines, a professional domain name that uses your primary company name or associated words is likely to get more attention and be considered as a stable business by your prospective customers. Purchasing domain names are not that expensive which cost about $100 and there are many companies that can register the name ...

Tips to Increase Ranking and Website Traffic It is worth cataloguing the basic principles to be enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings. Create a site with valuable content, products or services. Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document. Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers. Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc. Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services. Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submiss...