One of the most overlooked aspects of ecommerce sites is the search experience your site visitors encounter. People have been trained to enter keywords to find anything quickly by the search engines since the late 90’s from AOL to Google. Miva Merchant’s ecommerce software includes basic search functionality so every store front can provide search to visitors. Beyond the default search there are many site search solutions from modules to hosted services that integrate nicely into a Miva Merchant store providing advanced search functionality. Some of the internal site search tools available will even help with your SEO campaign by automatically optimizing your site for customer search phrases.

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Rick Wilson, Vice President of Miva Merchant shares advice on why you need to be sure that your website is working right – and that means working FAST. Speed is the key, and while it may be tempting to try to save on hosting costs and go with a slower service, this could actually cost you more than it saves.

“Imagine walking into a coffee shop, and in front of you there are five or six people. Often times, you turn around and you walk back out, and that’s a sale lost for that coffee shop,” says Wilson. “And that’s exactly the same thing that happens online.”

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Keyword research is the first vital step for anyone looking to start a successful SEO or SEM campaign to boost traffic, sales and customers. One of the greatest insights you can gain from keyword research that should impact every part of your sales and marketing message is discovering customer lingo. Similar to the professional jargon common in every industry customer lingo is the way your prospective customers are talking to each other on their own terms. The best way to join this conversation is to mimic your customers’ vernacular giving you a back door entrance into their community.

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First off, thank you to everyone who volunteered their site and attended the webinar today. A special thanks to Jerry from SportsCardsUniverse.com and Candy from BestFriendsGeneralStore.com for allowing us to analyze their respective sites live to the public.

Here are a list of tools mentioned during the webinar that we use to analyze websites from an SEO Perspective.

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