If I build it, will they come? SEO Matters.

If I build it, will they come? SEO Matters.

The short answer is no, they won’t. I have lost how many clients have come to me and ask me to build an e-commerce site, but have not put 1 minutes thought into how they will market their website. I had one lady ask if I can get the site live for the next week, because she had a new employee starting to take care of all the orders. I then quizzed her on her marketing campaign, and she looked at me blankly. So I asked again, what was she doing to get all these orders, and her reply was “Well, when the site goes live, the people will place the orders”. To some people this may be misguided, funny, or just plain sad. And in reality it is all 3. This client had spent hard earned money on developing an e-commerce website, and her entire plan to making it work was – Put the site live. Needless to say she was rather shocked when I explained the reality to her. If all you do is build a site and make it live, no-one will visit. How will they find you? 

Google, yahoo, MSN and the other engines, don’t just automatically add your site once it is live. To get your site indexed you need to tell them “Hey here I am , over here!”.

To add your site’s URL to Google for indexing visit http://www.google.com/addurl/

To add your site’s URL to Yahoo for indexing visit https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

To add your site’s URL to MSN for indexing visit http://webmaster.live.com/

Once you do tell them your site is live, your site needs to have proper SEO (search Engine Optimisation) for the search engines to give you a decent ranking. And that can take time. To give yourself the best headstart with your SEO, you should consider SEO Elite. This is some pretty powerful SEO software than can help you beat out the competition.

Any online business requires as much planning and attention as a traditional business with a storefront in the town centre. If your thinking of staring an online e-commerce store, you need a proper marketing strategy to get people to you door fast. This might include PPC (Pay Per Click), writing articles, blogging, and many more, but remember if you neglect these, and just hope for the best, your on the fast path to failure. If your looking into PPC advertising, you should check out PPC Web Spy.