Many ecommerce owners have spent tons of time and energy on their home page, but remember, we live in a long tail world.  Your home page is not the only welcome mat to your website.  In fact, one of MPE’s top strategies are to target long tail keyword phrases.  So, are your deeper landing pages a nice greeting for your visitors?  If not, here are a few tips:

1. Reassuring Policies – Trust is key.  If you have privacy assurances, guarantees, rebates, returns, or whatever else, tell your first time visitors about them.  Don’t keep them to the home page only, and don’t sink them to the bottom of your page.  Reassure your visitors when they first enter.
2. Testimonials - Do you have reviews on your site?  Again, a customer testimonial goes a long way in earning a visitor’s trust.  Don’t hoard these on your home page only.  Amazon does a great job at this.
3. No Credit Card Forms – Think of your first time visitor as a first date.  Are you really going to try to round third and head for home the first time you go out?  Yes, we want the sale.  Yes, lead them to the next step.  But, let’s not get too pushy here.
4. Email Collection - Invite them to come back. If you have a newsletter, blog, or another way that you maintain an ongoing conversation with customers, you should offer a field for people to subscribe via e-mail and RSS.
5. Look at Bounce Rate by URL – Dig into your Analytics.  Don’t only look at your home page.  Look at all of your landing pages.  Try to identify what’s working and what isn’t.  Then, make changes that will impact accordingly.

So there you go.  Break the myth that visitors are coming to your site only through your homepage.  Realize that your landing pages are just as critical to driving sales and work at upping your conversion rate.

• The main thing here is to have specific brand “home” or “landing” pages on your store.
• On this page,  include a picture or logo of the brand to make it look more like an official destination for that brand.  This will not have much of an SEO impact but will increase conversion rates.
• Show the brand name in h1 container at the top of your page.
• Include a 2-4 sentence description of the brand itself, also at the top of the page

Brand Categories:

• On your brand home page in the main content section, include a table of all categories that this brand’s products are in (alphabetical order) just below your h1 container.  When clicking on these links, it should only show you products that match that Brand->Category combination.  For example:  Levi’s Shirts should only show Shirts that carry the Levi’s brand.
• Also, where ever your main navigation is located on the site, make that automatically show only categories for that brand as well.  This gives the customer 2 ways to get to where they want.
• One last thing: on these category pages, I would only carry the brand logo and h1 over, but not the larger brand image. 

We’ll talk about the Admin/Management changes you’ll want to make in Part 2.  Go get ‘em!

1. There are many way to program dropdowns and most of them are not “search engine friendly”.  This means that if the main navigation of your site is not usable by the search engine spiders (that come regularly and index all of your pages), that means that many pages on your website will no longer be accessible (other than direct access to the URL) by the spiders.
2.  The potential impact of #1 is that the internal linking architecture of your site is massive when it comes to competitiveness on the search engines.  Making sure your main navigation is usable by the spiders and that your navigation also takes you deep into your subcategories can help you compete better.

So, be careful with dropdowns.  If you have to do it, I would suggest using DHTML (not Flash) and supplement with another navigation of your categories/subcategories elsewhere on your site template (that’s accessible on each page).

I’m sure most of you are aware of the design evolution of Amazon.com.  Their latest revision deviates from what I’m sure will go down in the annals of ecommerce design history, as the worst site navigation ever.  Do you remember the massive hover menu they had at the top.  Absolutely terrible.  It’s no wonder they changed it.  The new design is MUCH better.

Retailers take note.  Simple is better.  Better for your customers AND better for Search Engine Optimization.

Case in point, the new Amazon primary navigation which is now on the left hand side of the site.  As you can see, this menu now shows most of the shopping categories, but does so in a very simple, clean way; making it much easier to locate the category you wish to visit.

Each of the primary categories is Bold and a Brighter Color, while subcategories are indented with a normal font weight and darker color.  This allows an easy-on-the-eyes method for presenting a lot of information, as well as helping your customers get to exactly what they want in the fewest amount of clicks.

Just remember, whatever part of the brain that keeps saying you need a flashy design to have a professional website, tell it to back off and learn from Amazon’s mistakes.