Building an Online Business: The Website

Surprisingly, generating income is often the last thing that ecommerce business owners focus on. Many internet business owners focus on internet marketing, but never think of how they will generate income.

Some may make an adsense account, but they stop there. There are several steps to building income. Each one may not sell, but each one is designed to help business owners lead visitors through the buy-now process.

- search engine optimization

The free software package www.webceo.com will help business owners make sure their website uses meta tags and keywords properly. If the website sells widgets, then you want to make sure that every keyword phrase used by people who want to buy widgets is in your website.

Do you know what the #1 keyword is in most businesses? Home. That is right, when search engines look at the site, the word home is their #1 keyword. This means that search engines will bring up your website when someone types in the keyword home in combination with other keywords in your site.

Using a program such as WEBCeo will help you see your website or blog the same way that search engines see the site.

-Pay Per Click

Most people want to use PPC as an income generating forum. However, they don’t know what keywords ‘pay out’ the highest. Just because a Keyword has a high CPC (cost per click) doesn’t mean that the webmaster will receive a large portion of that.

The site needs to attract people who use the site and stay for longer than 10 minutes. This means that your site needs to focus on different methods of visitor entertainment and education to keep them.

The website also needs inbound links with the same keywords in the link as are on the site. The only way to guarantee this is by writing articles and embedding links in the site. You can paste these articles around the web, or you can submit them to sites such as www.isnare.com to submit for you.

- Generating Inbound Links and increasing Page Rank

This is not separate than the website. The webmaster should always look at their website as if it were an ever expanding entity. It is not held within the confine of the domain name, but spreads and ripples through the Internet.

Generating inbound links will increase page rank, and it might bring in traffic. But, it will only do this if the links are treated as part of the website. This is done by writing articles that solve problems, then invite users to ask more questions or find answers at the main site.

-Building Content

Content can be video, forums, blogs, articles, RSS feeds, audio files, downloads or anything else created for visitor consumption.

Content must meet both the search engine needs and the visitor needs. Most webmasters naturally gravitate to one or the other. If they lean toward search engines then they will have high traffic, but low sales. If they lean toward writing for people then they will have lower traffic, but more sales.

The webmaster needs to figure out what they can sell based on the type of content they generate.

-Adding Social Networking Tools such as forums

Social networking tools let other people promote your site. But, you have to ask. People won’t promote you if you don’t ask. In some cases you can submit your own work and then ask them to vote. Each of these Social Networking sites can build links and page rank, so they are worth the effort.