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When merchants talk about ecommerce conversion, it usually centers on design, button placement and ease of checkout. The process, though, actually starts the second someone lands on any web page. This is why textual content is so important.

Here are eight rules for using text on your ecommerce site that eliminate confusion, welcome your new visitors and otherwise answer all questions about your products.

1. Don't Assume Customers Understand Your Products Product descriptions and supporting pages–like Frequently Asked Questions and customer service details–are highly important. Not only does word choice help define rankings in search engines, it can help teach visitors about products and how to use them. Oft-used terms are always new to someone. Many new Internet users still post on sites asking what LOL (Laughing Out Loud) means.

2. Define Acronyms and Initialisms Assuming that everyone knows what these types of abbreviations mean can increase frustration amongst those...

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As an established high street name, your customers need to be in a position where they can easily find your name at the top of search results. For this reason, you need to have an effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy in place. Here are some tips to stay ahead of the game:

Brainstorm your brand’s keywords: This is the first thing your team needs to do during SEO, but don’t fall into the trap of considering “brand” terms first. Instead, try to get inside the mind of your average customer – generally speaking the terms and phrases they use are unbranded long-tail terms. These are what shoppers will be typing into search boxes, so should take precedence during the branding process.

Optimise technical aspects of your site: This can easily improve its crawlability, which is usually achieved through page tags, site maps, internal linking, coding practices, media usage and URL structure. In doing this however, bear in mind that search engines do not index all the pages they...

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When shopping for something which can be bought both online and in store, 34% of UK shoppers would prefer to buy online, with 55% opting for the high street.

While this stat shows that offline retail still holds an important place in customers' minds, 34% is still a sizeable portion of the sample.

These stats are taken from Econsultancy's Habits and Motivations of Consumers report, which looks at e-commerce consumer behaviour in both the UK and US.

Factors influencing online purchases The survey also looks at the features on websites which make it more likely that consumers will decide to shop online.

Free shipping was the most popular motivation for 82% of UK and 80% of US consumers, and gives etailers that offer this option a clear advantage over competitors.

Plenty of well-known retailers have caught on to the power of free shipping, with the likes of ASOS, John Lewis, Amazon all offering some degree of free shipping, and just as importantly,...

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The term “marketing” gets used a lot and, sometimes, it’s used rather loosely in search and social media circles.

“Not all, but a lot of the search industry tends to be kind of search geeks who are trying to figure out what marketing is,” says Bill Leake of Apogee Results, formerly Apogee Search.

To make a long-term difference in customers, he believes effective marketing is key. Factors such as determining what the customer wants to do, how you can make it happen, and how you can transfer business objectives into strategies that can be implemented, are all instrumental aspects of marketing. He goes on to say that search is just one area of marketing that is important, but it works best when used with the other aspects.

Some people focus heavily on search, since it is easily measured. Other challenges of marketing could result from all the departments in companies and, particularly, within marketing itself. Due to the lack of communication these departments create, many opportunities...

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Since SEO is constantly changing, how can SEOs determine the most important areas of focus? As Matt Bailey of SiteLogic Marketing tells WebProNews, the foundation has to be strong in order to be built upon.  For this reason, he believes the fundamentals are critical to SEO success.

Content is just one of the fundamental areas of SEO. Not only is the content itself important, but the structure of the content is also important. Bailey says content needs to be scalable, readable, and allow users to understand the content on the rest of the page by simply looking at the headline. This is significant because numerous studies show that the majority of people scan content instead of reading it.

There have been many recent debates pertaining to long content versus short content. People often say they tried blogging, Facebook, or Twitter and found that they didn’t work. However, Bailey believes users need to examine their efforts to see if they are utilizing them correctly.

“The what...

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Small businesses in the UK and US increased their spending on online marketing in the second quarter of 2010, according to a new report.

Figures from WebVisible show that US expenditure in particular shot up by 159 per cent compared with the same period last year.

In the UK, Yahoo! saw the biggest increase in web marketing spending by small firms, while both Bing and Google registered declines.

The cost-per-click (CPC) metric rose by 5.4 per cent on Google and 3.7 per cent on Bing, while click-through rates increased for the former and dropped for the latter.

On average, UK CPCs represented one-sixth of the equivalent US figure during the second quarter.

"Over the past year, conversion activity increased on almost all website actions - filling out an online form, watching a video, bookmarking a page or printing driving directions," noted WebVisible chief executive Kirsten Mangers.

Last month, research by Econsultancy and Guava found that six...

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We all know that how we conduct our business has not changed much over the years, as the most important thing that you need to do is market your brand. However, how we approach has certainly changed. Going back five years the best way to do this was with email campaigns, but now most of us use social media marketing for that end goal of success.

We are being told time and time again that marketing your brand on social media services such as Facebook and Twitter is the key to growth, but an article on IABUK offers some interesting stats that refute this belief.

According to research provided by Econsultancy over 38 percent of people have still not embraced social networking sites – so the need to focus on email marketing is still as important as ever.

In the survey taken the results showed that out of 36 percent of consumers studied, they said that they were more likely to purchase something online via an email that was sent to them.

So this tells us one thing, do...

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It is widely accepted that SEO has evolved from simplistic initiatives such as keyword density and frequency within a page of content. Search algorithms are continually evolving to understand context and attitudes based on advanced semantic analysis.

That said, understanding the target keywords of a given web page will always remain a key focus for SEO development. The main principal remains; each page should have a clear and unique theme.

When briefed on SEO strategy, content creators frequently ask for a methodology by which they can identify the target keyword for a given page. To this end, over time I have constructed a five point checklist that can be deployed to help determine the target keyword for a given webpage. Each method can be used together or in isolation. They are designed as a guide rather than a strict process.

1. Empathise with the user. In my opinion this is the most simple but valuable stage of the keyword identification process. Anticipating the potential...

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Online retain Grows by a fifth in June 

The UK online retail market grew by 20% in June, according to IMRG figures published today. It is only the second time growth has reached this level for two years.

The month saw total internet sales reach £4.4bn, equivalent to £72 for every person in the UK and a record for June. The rise in sales builds on a 22% rise in May, making these the most successful two months for e-retailers since June 2008.

In the first half of the year, £26.2bn was spent online in the UK, up by 15% on the same period in 2009. The second quarter of the year recorded an 18% lift, compared to last year.

Alcohol was one of the fastest-growing categories, gaining 23% thanks to the World Cup, Wimbledon and the third hottest June since 1929. Online electrical goods sales were up by 26%, compared to last June, while clothes sales rose by 22%. Web purchases of accessories rose by 73% compared to the same month last year.

Multichannel retailers saw online...

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