The rapidly approaching Thanksgiving holiday in the United States will be swiftly followed by "Black Friday," with shoppers heading out to begin dispersing parts of their credit card limits to retailers.

Your site should be among those receiving generous servings of dollars on Friday. Getting from sadly watching log files to rapidly processing orders may be a matter of following seven steps recommended by direct marketing organization SendTec.

First, it is not too late to jump in to the mix with search engine marketing. Skillful bids for the right keywords can draw traffic to you. These next few weeks will require you to keep an eye on which keywords perform for you and make on the fly adjustments as needed.

Shoppers who abandon shopping carts tend to do so for a couple of reasons: shipping charges and a higher total than anticipated. Build the cost of shipping into product pricing and offer shipping for free. It's also a good idea to implement a running total of the cost of items in the shopping cart where visitors can always see it.

Track where visitors come from with your analytics program. It's important to know where visitors arrive from as this can suggest more effective keywords to draw them to the site. But stay within your ad budget, and use targeting options like demographic, geographic, and time-of-day to make the best use of your dollars.

Search engine optimization, the process of crafting your site for better organic results, won't help in the short term. That will help next year, where SEM for pay-per-click ads will pay off much faster. Save the SEO refurbishing for after New Year's Day.

SendTec suggested lastly that TV needs to be part of the equation. For many sites today, TV is probably not a viable option, but could become one as search advertising companies like Google begin to sell ad space on certain channels.

We'll disagree with SendTec on the TV concept for now, but not on video advertising in general. Some online ad networks offer video options, and choices for advertising on video or audio podcasts exist today. Those can offer a very targeted niche audience for certain sites that may justify the cost.

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Tag: Online Shopping

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