Running an ecommerce business is not a simple task, but there are a few tips and a few tricks that you can use in order to ease your job. For example, you should know that your potential customers are somewhere on the internet, extremely active on social networks and they don’t take into account their age, their gender or their economic status. Recent studies showed that a social networking average age is 37. At the age of 37, internet users do have a job and they can afford to purchase the items or the services you sell. This is absolutely great and you can use this in your favour.

In order to make sure that your business has more and more customers, you should know that you can use the social networks in order to attract them. You simply have to go where they are and you have to attract their attention. This is not going to be too difficult because the social media marketing offers you numerous options that can bring you a lot of advantages.

Use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even LinkedIn and make sure that people find more about you. If you don’t have internet users to visit your web site, you don’t exist and your ecommerce business doesn’t exist either. This is the reason why you have to approach these internet users. You can ask them simple questions, you can add them as your friends on Facebook and Twitter and use your walls in order to make them aware of your existence, you can make polls on your web site that have gifts for the first of them who choose to participate in your forms, you can do basically anything that you want.

The main idea is that you attract the attention to your web site, so that it is visited by as many internet users as possible. Use blogs, use the article submission techniques, use the numerous forums that are so visited by so many people. You have hundreds of tools at your disposal, you just have to learn how to use them. This is the huge advantage of an ecommerce business: the internet offers you the chance to grow your business into an international one without financial effort from your part. The only effort is represented by what you do in order to be present on the different web sites, so it is going to be a time consuming activity.

If you feel like you don’t have the skills needed for such an advertising type, then hire a specialist because there are numerous of them ready to give you a helping hand. Of course, their services have to be paid, but I assure you that the investment is worth the financial effort.

Yet another Google update released – you don’t want to see a certain website in search results? No problem, just block it with the new Google feature to block sites you don’t want to appear in your results. This is another experiment to help users personalise their experience within search results.

Guys at Google announced in a blog post that for now they will not use this data in their algorithm however they will analyse this information and try to evaluate and improve their results in the future. This should not be taken as a replacement for spam reporting but as an added feature for personalised results.

Where will the “block” button be available? It will be placed along with the “Similar” and “Cached” links; however if you clicked by mistake on block you can undo your action in a few seconds following the error. Although, the websites you have blocked will not be displayed on your search results only if you are logged into your Google account.

Although this might seem similar to Blekko’s feature to report spam sites, it is a totally different feature and does not replace the report spam one. It is only a “tool” to personalise each user’s experience when doing a certain query on Google. This one is available on Google.com only for English results but it will be launched in other languages and for other countries as well.

URLs are often ignored or simply not properly “taken care of” however they are not a negligible part in optimising a website. Whether we are talking about the ease with which visitors browse the site or about the advantages from using keywords in URLs, it is necessarily to make the proper adjustments when doing the on-page SEO.

We have identified 5 major issues that can be easily solved, here they are below:

1. URLs do not provide information about a page

The proper URL structure should reveal to the visitors what information that very page contains. Structures like site.com/”page title” are beneficial for both visitors and search engines.

2. URLs are too long

A long URL is difficult to read and remember but also to being “syndicated”. Even if your page title could seem interesting, try not to use words like “and”, “but”, “an” etc. Only the words that best describe the page.

3. URL contains unnecessary folders

An optimised URL should not contain characters, words and unnecessary folders, for both visitors and search engines. A simple example of “what not to do” can be seen below:

Site.com/news/story/27364942/…..Those three folders do not bring any relevant information for that page.

4. URLs in uppercase

Unlike a domain name, URLs are case sensitive which can cause a duplicate content problem.  It is therefore advisable to avoid capitalization in URLs.

These optimisation tips will definitely not translate into immediately higher rankings, however they are a part of the big SEO process that should not be neglected.

With all these latest algorithm changes Google did in the past days, there are a lot of rumours regarding how Google classifies low-quality websites that do not deserve their rankings, thus getting them penalties and being thrown from their actual rankings.

How will Google determine whether a website is of low quality or not for its future visitors? There are two major things that seem underestimated nowadays by SEO communities out there: the click-through-rate and the bounce rate.

The CTR, although being a way to measure the success of a PPC campaign it can also be considered one of the top factors of ranking a website due to its quality. The higher the CTR, the more Google sees a website as a quality one.

The bounce rate represents the volume of visitors that enter a website and leave it instead of continuing viewing any other pages from that site. But what does a higher bounce rate percentage mean? It means that people entering the site did not find the information they were searching for nor did they find anything interesting to read more of on the website, thus leaving and searching for another website. This leading us to the conclusion that the website is not of such high-quality…Nothing wrong here, right?

These two metrics can definitely represent a quality site (or a low-quality one), but again, this is only a supposition while nothing is clear right now. We will definitely keep an eye on this subject and update as soon as we find out more data.

In the link building environment, link baiting can only be defined as the sum of all strategies that help attracting visitors, increasing link popularity and increasing authority. Blogs are amongst the most likely websites to use this kind of strategy for helping increase traffic and popularity while they have the most up to date content, very often updated that can create “the buzz”.

Indeed, the term bait may appear with a negative connotation at a first sight and might seem that it is suggesting something like a trap or a practice that does not stay under search engines’ guidelines, however this is all white hat and furthermore, one of the best strategies for increasing awareness and website authority. It is human nature to try and spread something new or interesting to as many friends as possible, and this is exactly what link baiting is doing.

There are two aspects of link baiting: the positive one, where an interesting post can lead to a flood of comments, links and visits but also the negative one related to people trying to spam a post with their link or un-related comments, in search for an “easy to catch” link.

Here are some strategies that can help your blogging efforts:

-          Write a very interesting article

-          Write something unusual about your niche, something out of the ordinary

-          Offer something free – a program, a tool etc

-          Write something controversial

-          Start a contest

There are many other strategies that you might use, however those above have proven to be the most successful ones recently.

We all know how powerful Twitter is nowadays but all marketing efforts can be helped by one of the most powerful Twitter marketing tools – Tweet Attacts. We’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of tweets like “where should I buy Halloween costumes from” or “do you know any good offer for website design?” These are all buying keywords and those tweeting those questions can be considered great leads.

Tweet Attacks makes things easier allowing you to reply with your offer, thus gaining massive traffic and potential buyers for your services/products. But let’s see how exactly Tweet Attacks can help you:

Increase unique visitors’ numbers and leads

We are not talking about bots or something fishy, only human laser-targeted visitors interested in your industry. Let’s say you are selling “iPad cases”…just add that keyword to Tweet Attacks and this wonderful tool will search for any person that ever tweeted about “iPad cases” and will receive a comment with a link back to your offer. This does not mean only waves of visitors but being so laser-targeted can also translate into lots of potential buyers.

Automatic follow

This is smart: not only that this tool will follow anyone related to your niche but after a while it also un-follows the persons that do not follow back, thus getting thousands of targeted followers with a blink of an eye, all on auto-pilot.

Unlimited Twitter accounts + mass tweets

Tweet Attacks can post literally thousands of scheduled tweets and also, in case your account gets banned it is a matter of seconds to change the old account with a new one and start again your efforts.

Isn’t it a great Twitter marketing tool?