Keywords are the foundation of your search marketing account and help lead customers to your website. The keywords you select can have an impact on future traffic and sales.

Here are some guidelines for choosing keywords:

1. Look for keywords on your own web site.
Think like a customer and pick the words that your customers might be searching on to find you.

2. Use a keyword suggestion tool.
Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing both provide free easy to use keyword tools.

3. Think about keywords that attract customers at each stage of the buying cycle.
The buying cycle has three major phases: research, shopping and purchase. The closer someone is to buying, the more specific your keywords should be. For example, customers may search for “guitar” during research, “Fender guitar” while shopping, and “American Standard Fender Telecaster guitar” when they’re ready to purchase.

4. Pick a mix of broad and specific keywords.
Keep in mind that using more generic keywords, like “guitar,” can cause you to go through your budget and may not lead to sales as often, but can be helpful for driving traffic from prospective customers who are in the research phase. Selecting more specific keywords may deliver fewer clicks, but they may be more likely to result in sales.

What is a product feed? - A product feed is a file containing information about the products listed on your site. By sending Google this product feed regularly (once a month, once a day, or somewhere in between), you can make sure Froogle is displaying the latest pricing, promotional, or other information for your products. To create this file, all you need is a spreadsheet program or text editor.

Bounce Rate - This is an important metric and one that should be paid close attention to. The rate should be a part of the marketing plan as well, normally as an objective accompanied by appropriate strategies and tactics designed to reduce the rate to an acceptable level. Once the bounce rate has been reduced to a consistent acceptable level, then efforts can be concentrated against increasing the buy rate. Bounce rate is defined as the number of times someone exits your site from the very first page they landed on, without viewing any other pages. Its important to identify pages with a high bounce rate, in order to “plug up holes” and convince the visitor to proceed with further site navigation.

Scenario Analysis - Scenario Analysis reports identify at which step visitors abandoned a given process and indicate areas of weakness in a web site’s content, offer or navigation. This report can help you optimize your web site’s content by eliminating the scenarios with high abandonment rates and identifying specific funnels with high conversion rates.

20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment, Part 1

20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment, Part 2