Start planning for your website by researching your chosen industry online. See who your competitors are, what their websites are about, and what keywords they are ranking for as well as their age. An industry with more competitors vying for shelf space or in the case Google space will be a much tougher commercial arena to compete it. Along with that analyze the age of your competitors, as older websites are weighted better in Google. These factors must be considered and used for project the amount of effort that will need to be put into Search engine marketing and their return on investment.
When choosing the url for your website consider keywords that you would like to rank for in the future. The importance of this varies from industry to industry and key word to key words, but in general a website that sells pet supplies will have an easier time ranking for the key word pet supplies if the words pet supplies are in the domain. Be careful when choosing not to be too narrow. In the long run if you expand beyond the domain targeted key word your business might be limited. For example, from a human psyche perspective of marketing, if you initially sell wine glasses and choose "janeswineglasses.com" you may have a hard time expanding if you carry other products. Alternatively many people choose to go with a branded domain to avoid such problems. This is ok as long as you intend to use SEO friendly urls which will include categories and product names in urls.
Buy your domain early in your planning process. Older domains do well in Google, it's no secret, just do a search for anything and check the ages of top domains. While you may not be able to change time, Google does put new domains in a so called "sandbox" for a few months. During this period the search engines algorithms devalue your site. If you can get through this phase before you even intend to launch your site, you are one giant step ahead of the game.
Give the search engines some content to crawl as early as possible. Let the search engines know they there is a site there and what it will be about. This best done with setting up a blog directory on your server and blogging about stuff related to your business. This will give you the chance to feed the search engines with exclusive keyword rich content that will help you the long run when you get your e-commerce site in place.
The bottom line here is that your internet marketing efforts need to begin as soon as possible. Industry needs to be evaluated before you begin. Don't start until you understand how competitive your niche is in the e-commerce world and what will be needed to achieve profits. If you do decide to go through with your e-commerce venture, choose an appropriate domain and buy it early. Most importantly feed the search engines with good content before your site is even launched via the use of a blog.
Corey Czyz has over 4 years experience in e-commerce, internet marketing, and importation. Mr Czyz currently works for sizz marketing.
