Top 15 Free Things Every E-Commerce Website Should Do After Launching

Here is a list of the top 15 things every e-commerce owner/marketer should do after launching their new site. I am not including anything like keyword research, competitive analysis, on-site SEO, creating unique/keyword rich content, or anything else that is generally done before a site is launched. With that being said, here are the top 15…

1. Create a sitemap.xml file (and robots.txt file)

- This will get your newly created site indexed by the search engines. You can choose to link to the sitemap directly from your website, or you can opt to upload your sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Central, and Yahoo Site Explorer. There are a number of sites online that will create a free sitemap for you (as long as your site in under a certain number of pages).

*Note – you may also want to set up a robots.txt file to disallow certain search engines from indexing unwanted pages in your site. This is used to eliminate duplicate content, preserve “crawl space” (as I like to call it), and keep unwanted pages out of the index (such as your shopping cart page).

2. Set-up product feeds

- Setting up well optimized product feeds can be tedious at first, but it is well worth the effort. The data feed can then be submitted for free to various places such as Google, MSN Shopping, TheFind, Price.com, myTriggers.com, & PriceSCAN. There are also paid services that operate on CPC and % based pricing structures. Data feeds will earn you more traffic and resulting sales. There is no good reason not to have one submitted to all of the free outlets.

3. Submit to DMOZ and other free niche directories

- The Open Directory Project or DMOZ is one of the best free links you can receive. Every new site (e-commerce or other) should submit their site to DMOZ upon launch. Due to the incredibly large amount of entries, it may take a while (months) for your site to be included. Be patient, high quality sites are often included. If you operate as a micro site or an affiliate site – well then try your luck somewhere else.

- There are usually also a number of niche directories you will be able to submit your e-commerce site to. If it is well designed and visually appealing, submit to any number of CSS galleries and directories. If you sell Bar Mitzvah cards, try submitting to Jewish directories. Get creative with your searches and you should find some easy, free, and relevant directories well worth your time and effort to submit to like www.perfectwebdirectory.info, directory.freewebsitelist.com etc.

*Note – Don’t forget to submit to free local directories!

4. Sign up for Google Analytics

- Google analytics is a no brainer for any website, e-commerce or not. It is completely free to use and is a very capable analytics program – sufficient for most of the sites online. All you need is a Gmail address and then place the analytics code on your site, and you are good to go.

*Note – Do not forget to set-up goals and conversion funnels. Also remember to filter out your own IP address and the IP address of anyone else that works on the site. Last, you may want to take advantage of one of the newer features and install page load time tracking.

5. 301 Redirect your various homepage URLs to be consistent

- While this may seem like a small tweak, it can actually be the difference between your site ranking on the 1st page or the 4th. If your site URL is http://www.perfectwebdirectory.info but you also have http://perfectwebdirectory.info (along with other variations like /index.htm) you are creating duplicate content & spreading your link juice across multiple URLs. It’s standard practice to use a 301 redirect to consolidate all of these pages to one URL. Whichever version you choose is up to your discretion.

6. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools & Webmaster Central

- This step is incredibly simple, and it can provide you with a variety of useful data points that will allow you to manage your site more effectively. You will be able to track backlinks, organic search clicks/impressions/CTR, average site load time, html errors, most important keywords, and much more. All you have to do is register your site and verify using one of the various methods. I suggest verifying through meta-tags or uploading a file to your server. It’s incredibly simple, yet incredibly useful. You may also wish to set up an account with Bing Webmaster Central – the Microsoft version of Google Webmaster Tools.

*Note – Don’t forget to set your preferred domain, as well as your geographic targets.

7. Send out a press release

- Sending out a press release is another must. A simple introduction of your company, what you sell, what makes you unique, etc is all it will take. While you can pay a lot of money to have this press release distributed, there are also a large number of free sites that will let you distribute for free (and some even let you include backlinks). Some of the most popular are PR.com, PRlog.org, OpenPR.com, Free-Press-Release.com, 1888PressRelease.com, i-Newswire.com, 24-7PressRelease.com, TheOpenPress.com, submissionsvalley.com, PRUrgent.com, pressreleaseprint.com, PressMethod.com, & of course eCommWire.com.

8. Start a free blog

- Blogging is a great way to engage your audience, establish yourself as an authority in your industry, network, and build quality backlinks. Use a free platform like Blogger or WordPress and you can have a company blog started in less than 30 minutes. You can also pay to have the blog hosted on your domain – either way, it’s up to you.

*Note – Don’t forget to set up an RSS feed for your blog!

9. Create social media accounts

- Nowadays it seems every business in every industry has social media accounts. While not every industry truly needs to be on Facebook, every e-commerce website should be. Create social media accounts on the big 3 – Facebook, Twitter, & LinkedIn. You may also want to create accounts on Youtube, Quora, Flickr, MySpace, Scribd, or any number of other social media sites related to your niche. For example, a retailer of baby products would want to make an account on CafeMom. Use your best judgment to determine which accounts are worth your time, and which aren’t. There’s no point of creating an account if you aren’t going to participate in the community and keep your information current.

10. Create social bookmarking accounts and start bookmarking your most important pages

- Social bookmarking is a great way to gain traffic and backlinks. While the links are not as authoritative as other sources, they will get your site indexed quicker and they are a great starting point for any e-commerce site that has just launched. The major players are Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Folkd, Fark, Diigo, Slashdot, & StumbleUpon. Wists, Kadooble, Fancy, & Nuji are also great social shopping sites that allow you to bookmark your products and gain traffic/backlinks. There are thousands more sites for social bookmarking, but unless you have an unlimited amount of time and resources to dedicate to this – I suggest you stick with the big ones and actively participate. It’s better to have a few social bookmarking accounts that carry weight, than hundreds that are neglected.

11. Sign up for HARO

- HARO (or Help a Reporter Out) is one of, if not the best place online for free PR. It’s a completely free subscription based service consisting of 3 day emails loaded with queries from various media outlets. It’s made up of journalists and bloggers looking for expert opinions, stories, and products. It’s a no brainer for any e-commerce site. You have the opportunity to earn media coverage on a wide variety of outlets – from the largest to the relatively small.

*Note – There are similar, yet smaller, services that virtually mimic HARO – Reporter Connection, Pitch Rate, & Flacklist (think Facebook meets HARO), just to name a few. They are all free and definitely worth your time.

12. Set up Google Alerts to monitor brand mentions (& competitors)

- Setting up Google Alerts is simple as can be. Visit google.com/alerts and type in the terms that you want to be notified of as soon as they are included in any new indexed web pages. This is great to monitor brand mentions – not just your own, but also those of your competition. It’s also great for monitoring your most important keywords. You may find new opportunities or inspiration relatively quickly. Best of all, its free, and you don’t even need a Gmail account to use it.

13. Take advantage of $75 of free Google Adwords coupons

- There are many reasons for e-commerce site to try Google Adwords at least once. It can give you a better idea of the actual search volume of specific keywords, it lets you know which keywords your site performs best for, it lets you test different ad copy/promotions/landing pages/and marketing messages, and you can get $75 credit free when starting a new account! There’s no good reason not to give it a shot…

14. Sign up for and/or verify your local search pages

- If you are an E-commerce site with an actual brick and mortar storefront, you should be claiming and verifying your local search pages. Google Places, Yelp, Yellowpages, CitySearch, SuperPages, InsiderPages, Merchant Circle, Bing Local, and Yahoo Local are the first places to optimize for. Local search is a completely different animal…but signing up for and verifying your place pages is the first step to gaining additional, local traffic.

15. Inform all of your contacts about your new site

- This one seems like a no brainer, but you would be surprised how many people simply forget to utilize their existing database to help spread the word about their new business. You can choose to use email, phone calls, or traditional mail.

*Note – Don’t forget to link to your website and any relevant social accounts in all of your email signatures from launch date onward.

These last tactics were so close…but didn’t make the cut. – Either because they were too advanced for the normal e-commerce site owner, not a large enough priority after an initial site launch, take too long to become effective, require too many resources, or because they are not entirely necessary for operating a successful e-commerce site. There were also many other ways to market your new e-commerce site that were not included, simply because they cost money.

• Register for an affiliate program (a free one)
• Blog comments and Q&A site participation
• Download free SEO toolbars for Firefox
• Article marketing
• Guest Blogging
• Link request emails
• Competitor link theft
• Giveaways, donations and product reviews
• Link bait
• Forum participation
• Submissions to general directories
• Creation of a press list and contact of all the bloggers/journalists in your niche

Hopefully all you e-commerce people out there have already knocked most of the items off of this list…and if you haven’t – what are you waiting for? The sooner you get going, the sooner you start increasing traffic and start making more money.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-15-free-things-every-e-commerce-website-should-do-after-launching/30906/

Winning Multinational eCommerce SEO Strategies

Ecommerce lives and dies on its conversion rate. That's true for all channels, not just SEO. Get the three key areas covered here right, and you'll be able to conquer those new territories while not just protecting, but actually improving your main territory performance.

What does an expert big-site Ecommerce SEO do to expand into new countries without harming existing rankings?
Let's assume we have to handle expanding into Canada, U.S., Germany, and France. It's your job to ensure the new country performance is just as good, and that performance in the current country isn't affected during the roll out.

Design & Build to Succeed in Foreign Languages & Territories


Domain architecture is the first port of call, because you'll need to get your changes in the technical queue ASAP.

First up, we want to harvest up all the country TLDs for the brand if we don't have them already. We will be using them, but not to perform in the SERPs or host content of any kind, instead we'll use the following structure.

Taking Canada as an example territory, we'd use: ca.bigdomain.com/en/ & ca.bigdomain.com/fr/, and so on for all relevant language permutations, with the root subdomain verified in Google Webmaster Tools as local to the country to be targeted.

Why keep everything on the .com TLD? So we can perform out of the box on the top level generic terms that are critical to the success of our campaign, yet still target multiple listings thanks to Google allowing subdomains to perform in the SERPs independently.

If we've got best practice eCommerce URLs in place already, then it's a simple case of translating our existing, non-duplicating architecture to identify all the key pages we'll need for each territory:

• ca.bigsite.com/fr/ (French language homepage, Canada)
• ca.bigsite.com/fr/translated-full-product-name-matching-title/
• ca.bigsite.com/fr/translated-top-level-category-page/
• ca.bigsite.com/fr/translated-top-level-category-page/sub-category/
• ca.bigsite.com/fr/translated-top-level-category-page/offers/

...and so on.

Because we're localised in Google's Webmaster Tools, if we declare our languages as an HTML attribute and in the head, we'll ensure the right page is performing in the right country for the right language. Keeping control of the landing pages performing for each term is critical to achieving success in new territories.

Oh, and those country-level TLDs? We've set them up as vanity URLs to 301 to the appropriate subdomain pages, so we can run offline campaigns through them, where the shorter the total URL the better. By making the 301 preserve any additional query parameters or directory info, we can also segment out the performance of those offline campaigns in our main site analytics.

In our .htaccess on the vanity domain we'd use something like:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(([^&]*&)*)id=radio&*([^&].*)?$
RewriteRule ^/$ http://ca.bigsite.com/fr/radio?%1%3 [L,R=301]


Avoid Content Translation Penalties in Google


Looking at our four new target territories (Canada, U.S., Germany & France), two would use essentially the same content developed for the current English-language market. If we're also after the English speaking communities in Germany and France (often the case for high end products targeting Ex-Pats), then we have 4x pages for every live page on the site requiring essentially the same content.

Your first thought would be that if Google allows site owners to localize parts of a domain to different territories, then it also wouldn't treat identical content intended to return in each territory as duplicate content. Right?

After all, what value does requiring sites to generate different content for a product page in England, America, New Zealand, Canada, the U.S. and Australia provide for searchers?

You'd be wrong.

Matt Cutts (and Google's) formal stance on the topic is particularly unhelpful. I'd also hope that Cutts isn't deliberately being disingenuous by suggesting that local country TLDs are best: think of all the additional linkbuilding that would require to get them all performing, and don't get me started on tipping the threshold to escape the sandbox (yes, that does still exist) and perform on transactional search terms.

So what do we know?

Don't auto translate. Matt states in the video that you'll be treated as if you've auto-generated content, and you'll incur a filter preventing SERP performance at best, and trip a +30 or +60 penalty at worst.

In short: we need unique content for all languages in each territory, regardless of language overlap.
This is in fact a good thing, as you can also brief your translators to add unique value to each page, feed back on native searcher habits, and proof content to improve conversion rates.

At the very least you should use this opportunity to address obvious issues like international delivery costs, support quality and location, guarantee validity, etc.

Once you've launched, keep asking your visitors if you're doing it right. Use User Voice surveys like those available for free from 4Q or make your own with SurveyMonkey.

Make Sure You Can Get Paid


To be more precise: make sure you can take payment natively.

Your ecomm payment system needs to take payments in the local currency, using the most common local payment cards & processes. Cross territory payment systems like PayPal and Google Checkout are good, but are still uncommon forms of payment, especially outside of the U.S. You need to handle the right credit and debit cards for each location or your checkout conversion funnel will break down.

I've lost track of the number of European payment systems that won't handle U.S. dollars, or vice-versa, and the plethora of cards (or card alternatives) worldwide is a major challenge.

In Germany, for example, only a small proportion will use a credit card online, with many (40 percent) instead favouring ELV (in effect, a direct debit transaction). The UK has electron cards to make you life a little more difficult, while 2.5 million people in Ireland have a laser card.

In Singapore, 3.2 million users want to use real time bank transfers, while the Italians are remarkably keen (24 percent payment process marketshare) on offline bank transfers to complete online payments.

Each system has its own security checks to overcome, and will likely require third-party authentication from the likes of WorldPay which can severely disrupt the payment process and requires a high level of security in passing transaction data back and forth, so budget to test different options and check to ensure your bank's merchant account can handle future planned international rollouts.

Finally, make sure you clearly populate the right currency options through each territory's pages.
Make sure you don't use just 'Dollars' next to payment in a site that operates in both Australia and the U.S. It's not too much to confirm that you mean Australian dollars on your Australian pages, and U.S. dollars on U.S. product pages, rather than making the customer get all the way through the shopping cart before they discover that the item they're buying actually costs 5 percent more (and, in really poor cases also includes a large shipping fee as a supplementary surprise on checkout).

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2073589/Winning-Multinational-eCommerce-SEO-Strategies