Few things are more frustrating in the realm of online business and e-commerce than succeeding in driving traffic to your website instead of the million others offering similar products or services yet see your visitors exit your site so quickly it was as if they were never there. And the tragic sense of loss incurred from being on the verge of making a sale only to find out that your prospective customer actually left their selected items in your e-commerce shopping cart upon exiting is enough to make a grown businessman cry. However, abiding by some key principles will help you dry those teary eyes and ignite your online sales.

An Online Shepherd Tends his Flock with a Sales Funnel

Even though today's online consumers are increasingly more adept at using the Internet to its full potential and are quite familiar with the online buying experience, you should still think of them as sheep that require herding, directing them to a common destination; your e-commerce website's shopping cart. Among the most effective means of herding prospects and converting them to paying customers is maintaining clean website design that incorporates well-organized page layouts, promoting a strong sales funnel throughout your website.

If your site is designed properly then each of your individual pages or "deep links" will be indexed by the search engines which means your visitors can potentially land on any of your pages directly from the search results page. Without sufficient organization or site navigation capabilities set up throughout your site, any website traffic that lands on a page other than your homepage is at risk of a virtually instantaneous bounce back to the search results. It's much like trying to land a plane coming in from Fort Knox on a runway without any lights: So close to bringing in the money only to have the plane redirected to another airport with runway lights.

North Star Website Navigation

Among the simplest methods of ensuring that your website visitors are able to find their way around your site regardless of the page they land on is to include a sitemap, providing a constant means of orientation much like the North Star. A sitemap provides a barebones listing of all the links to your website's internal pages, allowing your prospective e-commerce customers to quickly orientate themselves and locate the exact page they want to view.

Sitemaps are usually organized according to topic hierarchies and parent pages, allowing website visitors to look through a structured tree of links. You also have the option of including a site index on your site which is simply a listing of all your website's internal pages in alphabetical order. Some websites elect to include both but you should keep them on separate pages. An added benefit of including a sitemap within your website is that it supports thorough indexing by search engines, but it will do more harm than good for your site's indexing if the search engine spiders crawling your website assess this page as keyword stuffing or spam due to the combination of two sitemaps on the same page.