Keyword Technology Over the past year we have seen major changes in the online e-commerce and search positioning fields. Major shifts in Yahoo, Google, All The Web, Overture and MSN are affecting any and all sites currently online. Our site tracking stats on hundreds of domains and thousands of visitors shows that 95% of traffic to a site originates from a search engine, up from industry standard 85%. On new sites and sites with no incoming links, this could even be as high as 100%.  No Positioning Means No Traffic - our studies and statistics indicate that many sites will simply lose existing traffic without a positioning strategy and eventually be removed from the search engine index or be buried so deep as to never be found. Yahoo announced in February they would no longer use the Google database for search results, this left millions of sites who had not positioned for Yahoo with no Yahoo traffic. Yahoo is now the second largest provider of traffic to the e-commerce sites we track, competing with Google as the leader. MSN is pushing extremely hard to replace Google and Yahoo. This leaves webmasters with the task of positioning on all three, a feat that is becoming increasingly difficult. With the onslaught of new sites that are being built each day, the emergence of specialized positioning firms catering to each specific engine, website owners no longer are going to be able to generate traffic, or for that matter even be found anywhere without a fully implemented, ongoing positioning strategy. Keyword Technology clients can rest assured their sites are found, that traffic is arriving daily, anyone else is simply going to be buried. There is one area that each website owner can make a difference though, right at the customer level. As we mentioned above almost 100% of the traffic to a site arrives through an engine, each website owner needs to work at what they can do to increase traffic from other sources. Beginning with your existing search engine traffic is the easiest place to start. Begin by bringing these visitors back. Repeat traffic = Sales. Study your site, what would prompt a visitor to bookmark your site to return? The obvious, although not used in most cases is to ask them to bookmark your site. Do you offer a newsletter of specials, tips, etc. which allows you to provide valuable information and offers where the client can again revisit. Catalogues provided for download have proven very effective on the e-commerce sites we have tested them on. The basics are you create a catalogue of your products, provide it free to anyone who wants it, they download it, now your products and links back to your site are residing on your prospect/clients computer, ready to work for you. Contact us about implementing these strategies, we can offer advice, assistance or perform entire customer development programs for you. [ Home Keyword Tech ]