Consumers expect more and more out of the e-commerce Web sites they shop, and yours must keep apace of changing technologies and techniques. They want the ability to accommodate mobile devices and provide location-based tie-ins, new layout techniques that put the products first, personalization options and more. Does your site deliver?

Optimizing a website to be a top result in search engines can be one of the cheapest ways to draw traffic, according to Web Marketing Today Editor-in-Chief Ralph Wilson, who spoke at the SES Conference and Expo. However, several SEO strategies must be implemented correctly -- and there are plenty of ways to get them wrong.

Search engine optimization is the least expensive method of getting visitors to a website, Ralph Wilson, founder and editor-in-chief of Web Marketing Today, told the audience at the SES Conference and Expo in San Francisco Tuesday.

In a presentation on SEO basics, Wilson outlined tips on how to get the most out of SEO.

He also mentioned several mistakes commonly made in website design, even by professionals.

The ecommerce shopping cart is a software package that accepts customer payment and shipping information and facilitates the distribution of that information to merchants, payment processors, or others.

At the surface, an ecommerce shopping cart is really something that every beginning online merchant intuitively recognizes. For example, almost no one would consider opening an online store without having made a few purchases online themselves.

In the course of buying books from Barnes & Noble or clothes from Gap, that new ecommerce entrepreneur no doubt encountered a shopping cart. From the consumer's perspective, an ecommerce shopping cart may seem like little more than a web form, little different than an email newsletter subscription or an online registration form.

In the organic search listings you’re probably familiar with Sitelinks. They are the collection of links that appear below the search result for your website, and they link to the main pages of your site. Sitelinks are there to help users navigate your site. They are created by analyzing the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time. Though they are generated automatically, if you are unhappy with these automatic links you can delete some or all of them using Google Webmaster Tools.Depending on how specific the search term is these Sitelinks are sometimes displayed on one line or across four lines. For example when searching for the broad term “broadband” one line of four Sitelinks appears below the first search result, and searching for the brand name “Vodafone” displays eight Sitelinks across four lines.

Sitelinks give your organic search listing more prominence in the results, and can also expose more of what your website has to offer. It’s not surprising therefore that Google have decided to introduce this feature to its paid results.

The growing interest in online shopping and the associated revenues realized by e-commerce merchants are causing a new wave of innovative Internet-based technology to be unleashed worldwide.

This week, British e-commerce technology developer Stratum Media announced that its new "Eros" technology was deployed by U.K.-based BE Direct, an online vendor of consumer electronics and household goods. The E-Commerce Times set out to view the new Eros system.

Upon entering BE Direct, we randomly headed for the Camcorder section, where two out of six camcorders were labeled "Eros Enhanced." To be precise, the "O" in Eros is actually the Greek Omega letter.

No matter how great your product is, or how great your website looks, your online business will be left spinning it’s wheels unless the search engines know you exist… and your potential customers can find you in the search engines!

We wrote on Day One about giving your website a thorough tune-up, and on Day Two about providing great content on your website to keep your visitors and customers coming back again and again.

Now we’re going to give you some tips on snagging more search engine traffic in 2010.

Revisit your keyword research regularly: If it’s been a few months (or a few years!) since you did keyword research on your market, you could be targeting keywords that no one is searching on anymore, and missing out on keywords that would bring great, highly targeted traffic to your website. Things change pretty quickly in the search engines!

We’d suggest that you revisit your research quarterly to make sure that your content and your SEO strategies are taking direct aim at your market.

Social tools are becoming increasingly important as the Web becomes more social -- yet retailers are struggling to find social tactics that drive real sales and ROI. Not every social activity is appropriate -- it depends on the product a retailer sells, the competition, consumer behavior and the retailer's commitment to invest in the resources needed to develop and maintain social initiatives.

For years, rumors have circulated that email marketing is dying and teenagers the world over have proclaimed email as, “something old people do”.

Whether you agree or disagree that email has one foot in the grave, many online marketers are finding effective ways to leverage email as part of a social media marketing mix.

Social sharing options embedded in online content have helped increase distribution and reach for thousands of web sites. One of the most common ways email has been used in a social context is “Forward to a Friend”. However, the tried and true ‘Forward to a Friend’ link has less than .1% CTR, so many marketers have taken it upon themselves to find a new way to circulate content amongst networks.

Alternatively, there is the ‘Share to Social’ (S2S) link. While S2S is relatively new, a .5% CTR gives early reason to be optimistic according to a Silverpop study.

The search engine industry frequently innovates as do consumer behaviors for discovery and sharing. Those changes require search marketers to take a fresh look at what search engine optimization (SEO) is and why companies should or should not engage in its practice.

Defining search engine optimization is often focused on the mechanics:
“SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.” (Wikipedia).

Google just announced that the meta keyword and meta description tags of websites have absolutely no bearing on search ranking via their Webmaster Blog. Google’s hand was forced on this announcement, as there are whispers that some lawsuits were arising as a result of companies using competitor’s brand names in meta keywords.