The Internet has opened up a new chapter in business commerce globally, through website development. It has also opened up a new way for criminals to steal your information and your life. Customers are rapidly becoming more aware of the websites they visit and where they input their information.

If you want to set up a client base, before you really pursue internet marketing, any seo consulting firm will tell you that you need to gather their information, somehow. List building is a marketing strategy to connect with more potential customers. You have the option of setting up direct marketing or e-mail campaigns. Creating your own list will yield a far more focused group of potential customers than simply buying one.

Successful business people make sure that they employ the strategy of “opt in” as they build. When you get visitors, you want them to give you their e-mail addresses and other items of data, so that you can send them free information, coupons or other correspondence. You will need to include the disclaimer language at the bottom of your opt in areas. Essentially, you are assuring these people that you will not share their information with other parties. On the other hand, if you do intend to share, do your utmost to give clear information about who, what, why and where. If you think you could use some advice, consider professional seo consulting services, to help with website security, and ranking advancement.

There are different types of security measures that you can take to protect your virtual storefront. The information given by the customer has to be private to the rest of the world, not be able to be tampered with or altered in any way, authenticated, and then received properly. Whatever types of security you use, place a digital representation of that authentication on your storefront checkout page. It’s like hanging a certificate behind the counter in a physical store.

Digital signatures are a way of authenticating the sender and receiver of information. When making a transaction you can ask for a password as a digital signature. Have you seen those boxes with jumbled letters and numbers they ask you to copy in the box? That can be used to verify who you are.

Remember the digital certificate on the storefront? This helps customers to be confident that you are who you claim to be. This prevents you from being “had” by bogus merchants wanting your money.

The acronym SSL means “secure socket layer.” Look for an icon of a padlock, or even those exact initials on any given webpage. Clicking on the icon will take you to a copy of the actual certificate, so that you can satisfy yourself that the encryption is sound. Behind the scenes, information is encrypted using a public key and a private key. Technically speaking, the public element is used to encrypt and a private one used to decrypt. There are a number of different security layers between the customer, server, payment gateway and the issuer of the credit card.

If you want to keep any potential hackers out, firewalls are your best defence. You almost certainly have one on your personal computer at home. Make sure that you have a firewall on your website, so that others cannot access any customer data that may be stored on your server.

From both the point of view of the customer and your own business interests, pay particular attention to security. There’s plenty of technology to help you keep all this data safe from the frightening number of criminals, out there.

Why do some websites do extremely well and others just barely crest for a while and then sink under the surf? It’s necessary to look at the bigger picture. By looking at websites statistics you can learn a lot about how an online business is faring. Let’s take a minute and look more carefully at these stats.

Setting It All Up.

When you decide to roll out your website development, it’s going to be important to monitor your progress. It might not be possible to visit every day. You may want to but there are other tasks to tend to. It’s best to try and automate everything so that your site can take care of itself and you will only have to concern yourself with additional content and site upkeep.

To do this, will require a well thought out approach. Fundamentally, you need to be able to measure what goes on, on a daily basis. People visit, read articles, click on ads, view products and use the shopping cart. Look at each one of these activities to help you determine how your business will grow in the future.

You can add files to your web page yourself to capture certain stats. Alternatively, you can use a website statistics program to help you. Choose something like Google Analytics. If you already use other Google services to help promote your business then you are already familiar with the variety of tools they can offer you.

Analyse the following with Google Analytics:

* Traffic.

* Marketing Strategies (ads).

* Keywords.

* Conversion rates.

This is only the beginning. Once you have signed up you can look at what the program has to offer, but be ready, because there is a lot to understand.

Making Changes.

Now that you have a way to track changes on your website, it’s time to see how they can help you over not using anything at all.

* Make Sure Your Keywords Are Optimised – you might even find that the keywords you had decided upon are not really appropriate. You will be able to see which keywords are performing best using page statistics. For those under-performing ones, exchange them and see if your sales improve.

* Improve Your Content Offerings – The low number of page views for a specific page could signify that people aren’t finding your content on the first page of search engine results. Look again at your content. Is your keyword density within the right range? Make sure you don’t use too many. Search engines don’t look kindly on keyword stuffing, and in such conditions will not rank your work favourably. With content, provide useful information using only as many words as you need to get your point across.

What are your site stats telling you? Remember to change one parameter at a time to find the right mix that will help your website development succeed.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a highly-qualified Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps businesses and individuals accomplish every detail of their professional aspirations. Want to discover more about these insightful online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Today!

If your eCommerce website development is going to be used to run a virtual store, your customers will need to be able to select the items they want as they continue to shop. They will need a virtual shopping cart for this purpose. To enable you to provide this option for them, consider the purchase of shopping cart software as a good investment.

What does shopping cart software entail? It is represented by the icon of a basket or shopping cart at the top of your product pages. It lets customers know that they can select as many items as they want, and put them in a central place until they are ready to make their purchase and checkout.

It works in a very similar way to the shopping cart that you push in front of you as you walk around your local grocery store. You can place whatever you want into it, remove items you decide you don’t want and keep a running tally on the untaxed cost of the items before hitting the checkout.

You will need access to the appropriate software before you can add a shopping cart utility to your store. Take a good look around the Internet to see the options that are available to you, because there are a large number of shopping cart software solutions out there.

Always make sure that you get what you pay for, as there really are a wide variety of options. There is more to setting up shop online than just displaying the icon. Software can be a daunting proposition sometimes and people tend to shy away from technical jargon and lengthy sets of notes. Don’t forget that if you need assistance, online business consulting may be just what you’ve been looking for.

- Find software that is easy to set up and install. The use of wizards will often guide you through each step with help menus available in case you get stuck or have a question. Shopping carts can be fairly easily integrated into websites where no store existed before.

- Choose a package that is search-engine friendly. You want customers to be able to find and learn about your products. Always use optimised keywords throughout your product descriptions. Images that have the option of being viewed as thumbnails and as larger images are great for attracting customers.

- You don’t have to use a generic shopping cart option. Look for software that allows you to set up your store the way that you want to and customise your shopping cart in a variety of ways. Incorporate a variety of visual icons for navigation and think about different ways to display your menus.

Software does come with a price, as you might expect. There’s a large variety, according to what you are looking for and you can expect to pay anywhere between £100 and £1,000. You don’t need a sledgehammer to crack a nut and you don’t need to opt for the most expensive shopping cart available, if it’s not necessary.

Merchants come with a variety of different requirements and shopping cart software is designed accordingly. In addition to the features discussed above, it helps you to:

• Create and input coupon codes

• Inventory management

• Shipping and tracking

• Keep a customer address book

• Web hosting options

• Set up a merchant account/gateway

• Report generator

• Establish a secure payment network

Any online business consulting firm will say that you have many options when it comes to shopping cart software. Choose the one that works best for you needs, for the lowest fee.

Do you currently have an active bank account? It is quite common today. After all, who wants to try and hide their money underneath the mattress! Specific accounts are often set up for business owners, to look after the money that they accumulate from credit card transactions.

In this day and age, there is certainly no shortage of people who are regularly looking for ways to defraud others. This is very prevalent in the credit card business unfortunately and the industry itself makes sure that merchant accounts are established for businesses that accepts these cards. The account can be either on, or off-line. In a bricks and mortar operation, credit cards are processed through a machine, manually. However, here we are going to talk about merchant accounts that are made for an eCommerce situation.

With eCommerce website development, any merchant that accepts credit cards uses the services of a payment gateway to facilitate their transactions. They are handled automatically through this service account and each transaction is logged in detail.

A merchant account is not at all like your typical savings or checking account. Only the credit card payments are handled within this account. A merchant account can be selected in several different ways. Choose according to fee schedules and additional services provided to you for using their bank.

An Internet businesses has an additional account known as an “Internet merchant account.” The purpose of this account is to handle the related credit card funds on a temporary basis. According to a given schedule, money is subsequently moved from this account to your merchant bank account.

You probably already guessed it, but there is a trail of fees along the way that you are subject to pay. As an example, you would expect to pay fees for maintaining a merchant bank account, as you would with any other. You will have one time fees and monthly maintenance fees. For each transaction that they process, expect to pay a fee. In eCommerce situations, with the Internet merchant account in place, more fees are expected.

Any decent seo consulting services and website development firm will tell you an account set up to service payment gateways is another fee eater. To set this up, you will have individual fees and periodic, normally monthly attachments. Transaction fees can be expected at the gateway, as well.

When choosing any of these services for your eCommerce business, take all the time you need to investigate them carefully, and be as prudent as possible in your final selection. Always look into this comprehensively and ask the relevant questions. Fee schedules need to be clearly listed and broken down by the banks and service providers so that you know exactly what you are paying and if it is worth it. Any financial institution that withholds this information could be hiding something, and if that’s the case, you may want to pass them by. If you think you could use some advice, consider professional website and seo consulting services, to help with website security, and ranking advancement.

There is always a cost to doing business online and offline. Therefore, make absolutely sure you know exactly where your money is going and verify that you’re able to track all of your transactions through reliable merchant accounts and payment gateway services.