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In today's business environment, the online business has begun to play a major role and having a website for your business has become an issue of paramount importance. Not only having a website, but online business needs a marketing plan, a plan for the website itself and involves a lot of thought process. The very first thing a business needs is a website. The website should have its own business objectives and a clear cut long term goal. Website strategy should always be long term and not short term.
The online business planning and strategy implementation begins once you have a fully functional, professional looking and optimized website. Measuring your online business is no mean task. Due to latest trends in dynamic content, you may put up a different promotional or discounts or deals on a weekly, monthly or even hourly basis. A baseline measure is possible only when you measure your business during a quite month of no promotional and deals are put up. This will indicate the performance of your online business more accurately and help you plan ahead. Keeping tabs on all happenings at the site should be monitored.
Bringing visitors to your site is important. This is called traffic generation. But once the traffic arrives, it is your websites responsibility to make the visitor make a purchase. The number of purchases compared against the traffic is called the conversion rate. The conversion rate can only be bettered by your website through promotional, discounts or deals or any other way you think fit.
Traffic generation can be achieved by search engine optimization, the process through which your site can be edited or developed to rank higher in the search engine results, preferably in the first 10 or so. Use organic procedures for long term results.
Putting up forms when a visitor comes to your site may not be helpful, after all many of the visitors find this irritating and time consuming. Even if the visitor does fill in the form, it is not necessary that he makes a purchase.
Always make sure that the navigation through your website is simple and easy. The prices and product description pages should be easily accessible and clearly worded. Put yourself in the visitor's shoes and imagine you are trying to buy something on the internet. What would you like to see in a website – Simplicity, Navigation, Pricing, Ease of Use, Testimonials, and Transparency? Make sure that your site fulfills these pre conditions.
Traffic
Just because you think something is a good idea doesn't mean the general public agrees. A web site should solve a problem that is common to some part of the population. If people have a problem, they will be compelled to find an answer to it. If they don't, they are not going to visit your site for anything other than browsing. Browsing doesn't pay the bills!
Do the research on Overture or your favorite tool. If there isn't a significant amount of monthly searches for your topic, move on to another one. If you think you can both alert people to a problem and solve it, you are in for a difficult time. It can be done, but your chances of success are pretty small.
Database Parameters
If you have a database driven site, you absolutely must get control of the sub-domains. Examples of database sites include sites selling products or providing some version of a listing service such as real estate or jobs. Programmers and designers have a bad habit of putting session ids in the sub-domains. Session ids are an indication of dynamic pages, pages that are built on the fly when the domain is triggered. A dynamic domain looks something like:
http://www.your-site.com/default.cfm?sid#####LLLLaaa#####
The problem with dynamic domains concerns search engine robots. A robot is designed to recognize the meta tags and content of a page. The robot will then include the page in the search database. Robots often refuse to index dynamic pages because the robot cannot predict the content on the page. From the robot's view, the page could show different things each time it is accessed. As a result, the search engines can't list it under any particular keyword with any confidence that the content will be relevant to the search. If you have dynamic pages, most of the pages of your site will never appear in Google, Yahoo and MSN. That's a disaster.
Planning is the key to setting up a profitable e-commerce site. Make sure you are solving a known problem and set your site up to be friendly to the search engine robots.