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?

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.

In a hurricane even turkeys can fly. In retrospect, quite a few turkeys were caught up in the initial ecommerce vortex and most have long since crashed to the ground. Now that the storm has passed and the battered feathers have settled, what have we learned about what it takes to build an ecommerce business that can not only take off, but also maintain altitude over time?

Whether ecommerce can add value to your business depends on a number of factors.

• The nature of the goods or services you offer
• The type of customer you sell to
• The size of your business and the role played by your existing distribution channels.

To best understand how these factors will influence the success of your online store, it is vital to look at things from a customer’s perspective.