Should you build your own website? As functionality is so important to SEO it might be a good idea to hire an expert if you are a newbie. Make sure you ask for the site to be search engine optimized when you hire the firm or individual and stress that you would like to the site to be as functional and user friendly as possible.

If you would rather build it yourself you can find a ton of off-the-shelf solutions for building an online store or catalogue range in price from several hundred to many tens of thousands of dollars. Once you have purchased the software, it requires a host and installation onto a server. This is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to build a web store or store front overnight however if you know nothing about SEO you might want to read up a bit or take a course so that your SEO techniques can be employed into your self- built site.

There are numerous ways to present your products or services online in a sellable manner but the easiest way is using the catalogue format. If you are a small to medium sized enterprise then you probably won't want to spend any more than $10, 000 on software and design. You'll also want a solution that is quick to implement and easy to maintain as well. One tip for search engine optimizing this type of venture is to add photo captions beneath products as search engine spiders love to crawl captions.

If you don't have money to invest in software that does it all for you than I suggest you consider building a much less expense web-based storebuilder. You can build an e-commerce site using only your Web browser. There is no software to buy or install in this case as your store or "storefront" is hosted by a much larger online entity such as Yahoo or eBay. SEO techniques are usually effective when it comes using site builders although some hosts like Bravenet make it difficult for you to upload keyword optimized metatags.