Promoting Your E-Store

There are some crucial things business owners need to consider and implement for your store to be found on the internet. John Debrincat reveals some of the more obvious (yet often overlooked components) steps in building and launching a successful home page.

"If you build it, they will come…" (with apologies to Field of Dreams). Is this what the business owner believes when they start an online or web-based business?

The often-quoted percentage of small business failure is 80 percent in the first two years. When it comes to the internet, those numbers may even be higher. If you look at the top ten reasons for business failure, you’re sure to find the following areas high on the list: Lack of promotion/marketing; site content not up to date or missing; lack of a business plan; and/or no contact information or support.

Many businesses that start on the web believe in the "Field of Dreams" concept but unfortunately their belief is misguided. The issues of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are very important, as are traditional marketing and promotional mediums.

If you’ve developed a business plan, then you will have considered and identified many of the areas that can create problems for you. Understanding the business that you want to be in is critical and can start with a simple Google search on your business idea. As an example, a search for "garden gnomes online" (you will understand later) returns over two million results—that’s a lot of free advice.

During the early development of the internet, ‘smoke and mirror’ techniques were commonly used to get a site found on the web and many companies sprung up to offer specialised SEO and SEM capabilities. As the search engines became more sophisticated, the ability to trick the results became more difficult. There are many good providers of SEO and SEM but you get what you pay for, so don’t expect it to be free.

So what can you do to make sure that you have the best opportunity to be found on the web without spending all of your capital on SEO and SEM?

Getting Found by Search Engines

The most important marketing tool on the internet is the Google search engine. It accounts for approximately 65-70 percent of all searches. The fastest and most efficient way to be indexed is to submit your website URL directly to Google.

There are organisations that offer this registration process as a service and products you can buy on the web that claim to automate this process for you. If you choose the automated tools you need to be very careful. It's not uncommon for Google and other search engines to block your URL if promoted through these automated tools. Once you've submitted your site to Google it can take up to six weeks (and even longer) for your site to get crawled for the first time. So don't panic if you can't immediately find yourself on Google.

The other important thing to consider is there are hundreds of millions of websites out there. Don't expect to be the number one ranked site overnight. The methodology that Google uses to ‘rank' your site is highly complex, but there are a number of things that you can do to make your site Google-friendly. To give yourself a chance of being successful you need to provide high quality content (especially on your home page), use keywords throughout the site that you predict will be used in searches, and make sure that other sites link to yours (Google determines whether or not the link contains ‘valuable' information).