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Getting found by the search engines has been the traditional way of selling products on the Web. It has been essential to online retailing. With the advent of eBay’s rise to prominence, however, getting found by the search engines is no longer the only road to online retailing success. eBay Stores combined with eBay auctions now presents a lowercost alternative. Nonetheless, it is worth taking a look at website optimization to understand the alternatives.

Website Optimization

Website optimization is the process of creating webpages that get a high ranking in the search engines. What does this mean? This means that you want the home page of your website to not only be found by the search engines but to be listed by the search engines in the first page of returns. Even being listed on the second or third page—a lower ranking—is probably OK, but certainly not ideal. Beyond the third page, your business might as well be invisible. Thus, a high ranking is essential to online retailing success. And website optimization becomes the name of the game.

Unfortunately, the optimization process is not only for the home page but for all the other important pages on your independent website. If you are selling many products, at least the important pages that head product categories need to be optimized.

Cost

The cost of optimization is high. The cost depends on the niche, the amount of competition in the niche, and the character of the domain name. It can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks of labor by both you and your optimization consultant—most likely the latter. A typical optimization fee for an independent consultant might be $6,000—less for a narrow niche with little competition and more for a wide niche with plenty of competition. Then there is the follow-up task of ongoing optimization which will cost an additional amount. If you have the optimization done by a consulting firm instead of an independent consultant, it will cost even more.

Unfortunately, in the website optimization business, there are a lot of con artists. They promise to get your website found by the search engines for a one-time registration fee of $50, $500, or $1,500. Optimization is expensive, and you need to beware of consultants (vendors) that offer to do it for you on the cheap. One way to beat the high front-end cost is to engage a vendor that does it for a high monthly fee. A $1,500 to $2,000 per month fee is typical for professional optimization services. A one-year or two-year contract is normally required.

In addition to the amount you have to pay a vendor, it will require a great deal of work on your part (or by your webmaster). Only you know your business and website well, and a vendor will work with you to create the webpages necessary to optimize your website. If the website optimization vendor does not require you to do a lot of work—and help you to do such work—you will probably find that you are not getting competent assistance.

It’s Not the Fees

Obviously, it’s not the fees that determine the competence of an optimization consultant. Good consultants (good firms) charge healthy fees. But bad consultants can charge high fees too. So, choose an optimization consultant carefully.

eBay Stores

eBay is a terrific brand name for selling at retail on the Web. It draws millions of potential buyers. By establishing an eBay Store instead of an independent website, you take advantage of the eBay brand and do not have to worry about website optimization for the search engines. If the traffic generated by eBay stores is not enough for you—and it probably won’t be—you can use eBay auctions to promote your Store, thereby creating additional traffic for your Store.

eBay has a close relationship with Google and spends plenty of money promoting and advertising on Google. Thus, by virtue of having an eBay Store—and even using eBay auctions—you will get traffic from Google, the Web’s leading search engine. It seems, therefore, that for many small businesses, there’s no longer any reason to have an independent website to sell products.

Datafeed

Google has created Froogle as its retail search engine. You use a datafeed to make Froogle work for you, not optimization. And the datafeed is free. Thus, optimization for Google becomes even less important, and maintaining your datafeed becomes crucial.

Portals

If you operate a Web portal, you will have reason to optimize this portal. Although you don’t need to optimize it for customer service—you can direct your customers to the website where you provide customer service—you will need optimization to make your content (attractors) work. The tutorials, articles, checklists and other informational content that constitute your attractors are not likely to be found by people unless the attractor webpages are optimized for the search engines.

Since many attractors are also customer-service devices as well , attracting the general public may not matter to you. That is, your purpose may not be to generate additional traffic. But if your purpose in putting up the attractors is to generate additional traffic to your eBay Store—via your independent website— you will need optimization.

Unfortunately, optimization for an independent website is an expense you’re not likely to be able to afford until your business has become profitable enough to carry on expensive advertising and promotional campaigns. Hence, the good news is that you don’t have to have an independent website to be a successful online retailer today; but the bad news is that if you want to use a portal with attractors to generate additional traffic for an eBay Store, you’ll have to spend the money and put in the effort to optimize your portal.

Search Engines

For which search engines do you need to optimize your website? Google has over a 50-percent share of the search-engine market. Yahoo, second-place runner up, has about a 20-percent share of the searchengine market. That means between the two of them they generate 70 percent of searches on the Web. This shows that when you optimize your website for the search engines, the only important search engines are the top half-dozen. Beyond that your time, effort, and money will earn quickly diminishing returns.

Regretably, maximizing for Google is different than maximizing for Yahoo. One of the things a good optimization consultant can do for you is to help you create webpages that will optimize your website with both search engines and perhaps three or four more at the same time.

Then too, there may be specialty search engines that are particularly important to your business. For instance, if you sell gourmet food, there may be a search engine that specializes in helping people find gourmet food websites. It would be worthwhile to make sure that your webpages were optimized for such a specialty search engine. But that would be the exception to the rule. The rule is that it is only worth your effort to optimize for the top half-dozen search engines that have the top half-dozen market shares.

Cat and Mouse

The search engines endeavor to help people find exactly what they are looking for without any outside influence. Web retailers seek to influence the search engines to give their webpages priority. The retailers and the search engines have played this cat-and-mouse game since search engines first appeared on the Web in the early 1990s. It is a very complex cat-and-mouse game, and the rules change every day. Website-optimization consultants tend to be smart people who work hard at keeping up with the latest changes, rules, and algorithms used by the leading search engines. That’s why optimization is expensive. And that’s why those who claim to do it for small fees—and without much work on your part—are likely to be scammers.

An Alternative

An alternative idea to that expressed in this article is to forgo using eBay and eBay Stores and just use Google (Froogle) and Yahoo (Yahoo Shopping). Naturally, this would require an independent website. The most effective way to make this work, however, doesn’t have to be optimization; instead, it can be advertising. You can buy keyword ads on Google—ads that appear only when certain keywords are used to make the search—and place products in the product comparison directories, which are growing quickly in popularity. In other words, you don’t ever have to optimize.

This works best for successful businesses with substantial advertsing budgets that list products in large volumes. You will save a lot of money on eBay fees, but the savings have to be enough to pay for the advertising and the fees for placement in the product comparison directories.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

At one time website optimization was the only dependable Web marketing technique. Sure, online advertising and offline advertising drove traffic to a website too. But that approach was usually more expensive than optimization. Consequently, optimization was considered to be a cost-effective means of creating adequate retail traffic to run a business.

Fortunately, eBay auctions and eBay Stores have created a retail environment which no longer requires you to spend money on website optimization (or advertising). For this reason, optimization must now be considered less cost-effective than it used to be. I do not recommend that you have an independent website specifically for selling products, and therefore I cannot recommend optimization as a means of driving traffic to such a website. Nonetheless, there are several considerations to keep in mind.

First, if you are operating an independent website where you sell products successfully and are using optimization to do so, keep on doing it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as the wags say.

Second, if you decide to operate a Web portal with content that includes attractors to generate traffic for your retail business, optimizing such a website for the search engines is something that you will probably need to do. But such an approach to generating more traffic is available only to eBay retail businesses that can support an expensive marketing campaign.

Third, there will always be businesses that will be exceptions to any rule. In this case, retail businesses with high listing volumes may find that using Google (Froogle) advertising and placing products in the leading product-comparison directories will incur lower costs and will still achieve success. They will do this by not bearing the expense of using eBay auctions, eBay Stores, or optimization .