Ecommerce | Ecommerce News

When developing a website, one can quickly get so immersed that you can lose the forest for the trees. When this occurs, you risk failing to emphasize the most important thing in e-commerce.

Generating traffic. Traffic is the single most important thing in e-commerce. Traffic is the number of visitors your site receives. You site must be designed to attract traffic from as many sources as possible. This means turning both your home page and the internal pages of the site into traffic generators.

Most people develop websites backwards. They spend an incredible amount of time, effort and money on developing their site without really thinking about how they will attract traffic. This can lead to problems. While most people focus on their home page as the primary entry page of the site, there is a better approach.

The sites that make the most money are the ones that use nearly every page of their site to pull traffic in one form or another. Let’s consider a site selling 500 different products. The typical site will be designed with a database containing the products. Each product page is then dynamically produced. The pages are lined up in some hierarchy within the site and that is about all.

A better approach is to optimize each of the product pages within a site. Let’s assume I am selling different types of pipe fixtures for home improvement. Each page should be optimized using keywords identified through research. Even if I can’t find keywords for all the products, I should optimize each page with at least a common sense phrase related to the product on it.

Why is this important? Well, think about it for a minute. If I have 500 product pages optimized and they each bring in a whopping 5 visitors a day, I will have 2,500 visitors a day. Over a 30-day month, that equates to 75,000 extra visitors. Convert at 1 sale per 100 visitors and I have an extra 750 sales a month with little or no effort. Assume I make $20 profit per sale and I am making $15,000.

If I fail to optimize these pages, I am missing out on the $15,000 each month. Over a year, that is $180,000 in profit I just missed out on. Is that really something any site can afford to do? Optimize within your internal pages!