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So you've built the site, the stock's in the warehouse ready to go - all you need now are some visitors and, once you've got them, a compelling enough proposition to convert them from casual browsers into committed buyers. So how do you get people to your site in the first instance, and once they're there, what do you need to do to make sure that enough of them place an order?

In the early days of ecommerce, it was all about search engine optimisation (SEO), the process of ensuring that, when a given search term was entered into a search engine, your site was returned at or near the top of the results. The way you do this concerns the use of the appropriate meta tags - pieces of code that are not seen by visitors to the site, but that are used by the search engines to help them rank your website. Choosing the right keywords can boost your search engine rankings considerably, and it's something that any web-design or marketing company should be able to help with.

Ask anyone in the search business about SEO and they will tell you that it remains as important as ever, but it has been joined by several other tactics. The first is paid search, which involves bidding on keywords that consumers might use to find the sort of stuff you're selling. Whatever you bid for any given keyword, you pay that amount to the search engine in question each time someone arrives at your site as a result of clicking on your ad after searching on that keyword.

So if you sell washing machines, you might be prepared to bid 50p for the term "washing machine" and, when you do so, you can see exactly where that bid would leave you in the paid results. Each time someone clicks on your ad, assuming you had bid 50p, it drains 50p from your paid search budget. Daily, weekly and monthly spending caps allow you to prevent overspending.

In essence, it sounds simple enough, but as Edward Foster, business analyst director at The Search Works explains, it can soon become quite complex.

"It is easy to get into but it can be very time consuming," says Foster.

"If you're a big retail site, the chances are that you may be marketing hundreds or thousands of products, so it's worth bringing in a specialist search-engine marketing agency."

In addition to its expertise and experience of how the paid search engines work, what the agency will also offer is some sort of bidding engine to help you manage all those keywords. The Search Works, for example, has BidBuddy, which was the first automated system on the market when it was launched in 2000.

In the past few years, affiliate marketing has also grown in popularity.

A 2005 E-consultancy report, Affiliate Marketing - A Buyer's Guide, estimated that in 2004 the UK market was worth between £500 and £600 million.

Affiliate sites can often look like just a list of links, but they can be a useful way of driving traffic to your site, as they tend to be very good at promoting their own sites, and you only pay them each time someone clicks through to your site from theirs and completes the required action, whether that be making a purchase or registering their details, or whatever has been agreed.

There are lots of affiliate networks to choose from, as a search on the term will confirm.

"A good way to start choosing an affiliate network is to go on an online forum and ask if people have used them," advises Bruce Townsend, marketing manager for ecommerce software company, Actinic Software. "Look at the set-up costs, as these can be quite high in some cases."

Reward schemes like ipoints.co.uk are another option. Non-competing retail partners offer loyalty points that consumers can aggregate by shopping at partner sites. And according to ipoints managing director Geraldine Tosh, they tend to spend more. "We have seen that people who opt in to collect ipoints have 60 per cent greater basket size and a 40 per cent increase in frequency of purchase compared to the average online shopper," she says.

With online advertising booming, an online campaign targeting the right sort of sites can drive traffic. And finally, you might consider using some sort of incentive to drive visitors to register on your site for email updates with news of special offers and promotions. And don't forget to promote your site on all your offline collateral, too.

Making your site attractive to shoppers and easy to use is also important, if not more so. As anyone who has ever bought anything online can testify, there are good and bad websites. Make the ordering process a challenge and potential customers will click away. It's just a matter of common sense.

"You have to do some real-world testing to see what the issues are," says Zoe Johnson, channel development manager at Zendor. "We once came across a very expensive website where no-one could buy because it was impossible to see how you could enter your credit card number." To identify these problems, Zendor offers clients an Online Customer Experience Review, where a consumer is asked to visit the website in question and given a number of tasks, including searching for products and placing an order in order to identify any barriers to purchase.

Customer-experience company Foviance offers a similar service. For a fee of around £10,000, a consultant will take a brief, write a research plan, and give the users a set of tasks that are representative of all the things that they would be required to do on the site. Test sessions are then run with around eight to 10 people who fit the target audience.

The sessions are filmed and the findings, and the video, presented to the client.

"You need all the key stakeholders in that meeting," says Foviance director of experience management, Marty Carroll. "When you watch the users struggling to do the tasks you've set them, it's very difficult to argue that there's not a problem."

Speed is another issue, as Matt Cannon, commercial director of outsourced mail-order fulfilment provider Braywood, points out. "We advise clients to keep the website as pretty but as dumb as possible and use their fulfilment company's server to serve pages in real time to the consumer, which reduces the cost and complexity of the website," says Cannon, "The consumer builds the order and hits the 'Buy' button and that then talks to our server to see what is in stock, so the consumer can decide what they want to do if any of the items they want are not available."

And Steve Dole, solutions development manager at DataForce, advises against creating unnecessary barriers. "Some sites insist on you having to register before you can buy anything," he says. "A lot of people take exception to giving away their personal data, and you will get it if and when they place their order anyway."

In the early days of online shopping, trust was a big issue, with various website "Kitemark" schemes, none of which seemed to catch the imagination of the public, or the website operators. Arguably, with online shopping now more established, trust is less of an issue, but it should not be ignored.

"Give people the option of ordering by phone if they are nervous about entering their credit card details," advises Dole, while Actinic's Townsend says that simple things can go a long way toward reassuring customers.

"Let people know who you are," he says. "Include your address and phone number, use customer endorsements, and make sure people are available to answer phone calls and respond to emails. Put yourself in the consumer's shoes and ask them if the experience they get is the one you'd want. If it isn't, then do something about it."

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TOP TIPS FOR A USER-FRIENDLY SITE

- Keep the pages clean and free from clutter.

- Make it clear how to start the order process.

- Don't require visitors to give personal details before allowing them to browse your goods.

- Make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. Allow them to search by keyword, brand, product type and price.

- Tell shoppers up front if the item they are interested in is out of stock. This requires a link between the website and the warehouse/

stock management system, but the goodwill it generates is worth the investment.

- Include full contact details, with telephone, email and a postal address to give consumers confidence.

- Offer a telephone ordering number for consumers nervous about entering their credit card details on your website.

- Invest in good photography and well-written copy to entice consumers to buy.

- Test the usability of the site.

Give consumers with no prior knowledge of the site a series of tasks, such as searching for a specific product, and placing an order, and see how they get on.

- Label action buttons clearly and unambiguously, eg, "Proceed to Checkout" rather than "Continue".

- Use online surveys to find out more about your online customers and their interests in order to reflect these on the site.

- Use dead time while an order is being processed to put up a message that reassures the shopper that everything is in order, rather than leaving them staring at a blank screen.