ecommerce tips for business to business in manufacturing, electronic and high-tech, and enterprises 7 great ways to improve your search engine optimization, overall site traffic, conversions, and integration to backend systems This article covers important ecommerce topics for everyone from small business owners to funded entrepreneurs to C-level executives at Fortune 100s. Business to business ecommerce in particular is a growing space that continues to evolve and develop. SEO and SEM campaigns are not enough to convert site visits into revenue and produce bottom line results. Find out more about how to execute. Get 3 quick tips to ensure your product catalog and ecommerce website development success. e-Comm tip #1 - Optimize page titles, h1 and h2 tags, meta info, file names, and urls Keyword usage in the product or part catalog’s title tag is among the most important on-page factors for SEO SEOMoz.Org survey results from 72 SEO Experts show that most experts highly recommend getting external links of high value (see tip #3 below) and making sure your on-page optimization is in place. This means that to achieve an optimal enterprise ecommerce level of results you will want to check that the Title tag contains important keywords and that the highest payoff keywords show up first in the product descriptions. Not only do you want to optimize the title, but you’ll also want to optimize the H1 and H2 tags (make sure you have these on the product details page), provide friendly urls, optimize alt tags and link titles and ensure that your product details page’s content matches all the meta info. ecommerce tip #2 – Add a product catalog feed to the home page, RSS feed or Google Merchant center Adding a featured parts, or items on sale section to the home page or site-wide sidebar gives the site more fresh content and helps search indexers find site content. Product catalog feeds allow you to quickly spread the news about new product launches, new parts, limited quantities in inventory, etc. In addition, feeds can help your site stay fresh and updated. The idea is that when a search engine visits your site’s home page – the feed of products (which is getting updates more often than any other area of the site) will show fresh new content. This causes search engines to come back to the site more often to index the site – since it has fresh content. This is a great tool to help generate more ecommerce and part search website traffic. In addition to generating a site feed that shows on your home page, Clarity also recommends setting up a Google merchant account if applicable. This small extra step to setup a feed that goes to Google can be worth the time. It allows Google to index your items within their part search. This is yet another area to generate traffic from. ecommerce tip #3 – Integrate to Dynamics GP, Microsoft CRM, Oracle or SAP systems integration with Microsoft ERP, Dynamics AX, GP and CRM or Oracle/SAP helps companies deliver better results - faster. When developing a catalog system it’s important to consider how you will integrate the live ecommerce site data with the internal company ERP or back-office accounting and inventory management systems. Many times the integration to systems like Dynamics GP, MS CRM, Salesforce, SugarCRM or other systems like Oracle, SAP, etc. can be an afterthought. This is extremely expensive considering the potential gain from having a seamless integration from the live website to the back office accounting and inventory software. Ultimately, direct integration means synchronized inventories, synchronized order processing, a single point for managing product catalog data and more. Although some companies have not budgeted for the ecommerce to erp integration option right away, it’s still good to let your development team know about your target. Many times the ecommerce development company can factor in architectural and framework considerations for Phase II and Phase III development into Phase I with enough advance notice. ecommerce bonus tip – Get links back to your e-Comm. Site – Directories, Sub-sites, blogs, Article writing and more In order to get the strongest SEO results you’ll need to get links back to your product-catalog web-site Off-page SEO is all about getting credible links pointing back to your site for each search term. This is due to search engine algorithms that enforce a requirement for linkage from other sites in order rank an existing site higher than it is already. Ultimately this means you will get great results from having just a few very relevant and very high importance links pointing to your site. It is important to point out that most search engines can detect a paid versus a non-paid link. This drives the most long-term players to focus on credible links through industry specific directories, writing blog-articles, submitting press-releases, etc.