In case you were not aware, Google's market share has extended to the vast majority of internet searches. Needless to say, having a high Google ranking for keywords relevant to your business can make a huge difference in your traffic and sales.

What is a Google PageRank? In brief, PageRank is Google's proprietary algorithmic ranking of the importance of every page it has found on the web. Every page is assigned a value, a ranking, of anywhere from 1 through 10. The most important pages, like Google.com, are a 10. Everything else scales downward from there. See http://www.google.com/technology for a more detailed explanation from Google. To determine the Google Page Rank of your site or any other site, you first need to install the Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. This toolbar allows you to see the Page Rank of any site, allows you to search from your browser while visiting any other site, includes a pretty good pop-up blocker, and more. The best thing about it is that it is free. Very few webmasters go without this valuable tool. The only downside is that if you are a Mac user, you’ll have to borrow a friend’s PC since the Google Toolbar is only available for the Windows operating system.

Having a high PageRank helps you to appear higher in Google search results. There are many other factors involved in how Google ranks sites and it is all subject to endless speculation and "expert opinions" (see http://www.webmasterworld.com/category3.htm for more information on that) in which literally volumes have been written but PageRank is undoubtedly an integral factor in determining your position in the results pages. For example, install the toolbar if you have not already done so and then do a search for any number of keywords. Those pages that appear at the top of the search results almost always have higher page ranks than those at the bottom of the page or on subsequent pages. Of course, other factors from the usual suspects come into play as well, such as on-page keywords, where they are and how they are positioned and their density, the number of inbound links from other sites, the page rank of the pages that send you those inbound links, the anchor text used in those inbound links and more. Again, see webmasterworld.com for the millions of pages of discussions as to what is important and what works and what does not. There is a wealth of information to be found there, provided you have the time to sift the wheat from the chaff.

How do you increase your site’s PageRank? It is easy in concept, but does take some time and effort. First, you need to develop more inbound links to your site. You need to get other pages and other sites to link to your pages and your site. Google considers each link to your site a vote for your site. The more votes you have, the more popular your site will be. Also, the more votes you have from popular sites, the better off your site will be.

You can do this by just asking someone to link to your site, or offering to exchange links with their site to yours and vice versa, or you can buy text links or advertisements at any number of sites. Secondly, you need to develop inbound links to your site from pages (not sites) that have high page ranks, preferably higher than your own. For example, if your home page has a PageRank of 4 and you can get a site that has a home page PageRank of 5 to link to you, that would be great. It is, however, more important to look at the PageRank of the actual linking page, not the home page, of that other site to your own. It is important to note that it is PageRank, not SiteRank. This means that PageRanks throughout the course of a site can have varying values. Third, it is speculated that the linking page should not be a link farm and should contain other links that are somewhat closely aligned to your industry. You can usually tell a link farm when there are hundreds of outbound links, often filled with shady pharmaceutical ads and links to adult sites or online casinos. Those won't help your cause nearly as much as being on a page of links that are arguably in the same industry as your own. Each increasing link on a page dilutes the vote so try to be on pages that have fewer links. Lastly, it’s not only the number of links that point to you but the PageRank of the sites that link to you that matters. Each link is a vote for your site and if it’s coming from Microsoft.com it is better than from areallysmallsite.com.

One sure fire way to increase the number of links to your site is to have all the pages interlink to one another by adding a site map, or at the very least have each page of your site link back to your home page, preferably with your target keyword phrases in the anchor text and/or image alt tags. Also, if you manage multiple sites as part of a network or family of sites, it would be a good idea to exchange a few links between them. As always, check out your more successful competitors and see how they are doing this.

Another great way to find such pages offering links is to do a search for the keyword or keyword phrase for which you'd like to rank well and see who comes up first. Check out their PageRank and then do a backlinks lookup on their site. You can do this in one of two ways. First, you can do so right in the Google Toolbar. Go to the Google drop down menu to the left of the search term entry box, then go to options, check the box for Page Info menu, then you should see a small blue "i" in your Google toolbar on the right of the PageRank area. From that drop down next to the "i," choose backward links for any site currently displayed in that browser. Alternatively, you can just do a Google search for link:www.sitename.com or link:http://www.sitename.com. Be sure to use exact punctuation here and don't use any spaces between "link" and the site name.

Now that you see the backlinks of your leading competitor's sites, take a look at those pages and contact those site owners and see what you can do about getting yourself listed on those pages. Another easy way to start finding suitable link partners might be to go to Link Partners and do a search for link swap partners. Here, you can search for those sites that are willing to swap links with you and are categorized by industry. It takes time, continuous monitoring and effort but in the end, there is no better source for free traffic than high rankings in search engines. If you don’t have time to work on inbound links, consider hiring a search engine optimization company to do it for you.

As you go about trying to make the most of your marketing budget for your e-commerce store, you've surely considered marketing online, whether by buying text links or banner ads in targeted locations or buying pay-per-click (PPC) advertising from the likes of Overture and Google AdWords. Hardly, any online business goes without at least a small dose of one of these. Besides being important that you use some sort of affiliate tracking software to track your online marketing expenditures and your return on investment (ROI), it is equally important that you cater to your buyers’ desires when they click on your advertisement. For example, if you sell Nike Air Max sneakers and you buy this keyword in a PPC ad campaign, you should direct your users directly to that page where you sell Air Max sneakers, not send them to your home page where they again have to begin the search for Nike Air Max sneakers.

As we all know, buyers can be fickle and that can lead to frustration. If they don't see the item they were searching for in the first place upon arriving at your site, they will often times not have the patience to then search your site for the same item and just click back on their browser window and try the next result down the line. So, what has happened here is that not only did you lose a potential sale but you also paid for the sales lead only to lose it. In cases like this, it is important that you either send your users directly to the product display page, in which case it is important to use a shopping cart technology that create unique identifiable URLs to which you can send users for each and every product, category and even sub-category and not just to your home page or store front. This is the basic approach.

A more personalized approach that usually tales more time but often produces better results in terms of increased sales and conversion rates is to create a soft landing page. By this, you should anticipate how the user is arriving to the site and create a page that caters to their needs in conjunction with how they get other. For example, say you sell Nike Air Max sneakers and you have partnered with the Los Angeles Lakers website and they have created a link from their site to yours. An example of a soft landing page would be a page that talks about Los Angeles Lakers that wear Nike products, in particular the Air Max sneaker. It allows the user to transition more smoothly from one site to another and identify with the product based on their previous point of interest. This approach works well with paid advertisements and other sponsorships.

Consider also your PPC ad campaigns. Perhaps you have worked hard to compose a list of hundreds of relevant keywords that you are bidding on for top billing. Maybe you’ve spent a lot of time making your titles and descriptions just the way you want them in the hopes of leading them to a sale. The last thing you would want to happen is for them to click on your item, incurring your expense, only to get to your landing page and not see what they were looking for. It is for this reason hat you need to consider your buyers needs. What is his or her language? Does the landing page talk about the item they were looking for specifically or does it discuss many of your products, as if it were the landing page for all Nike products, not the Air Max or at least jogging sneakers? Not only is a landing page important, but also these are all factors you must consider when making a good "soft" landing page.

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