Your search engine marketing efforts are no doubt doing a great job of getting visitors to your site, but turning these visitors into paying customers is a whole other story.

You need to ensure your website is in tip-top shape to make it as easy as possible for visitors to purchase your products or services.

I recently stumbled upon a new blog “Conversation Marketing” which has a great article called “32 Tips to Make Online Customers Love You”.

I have pulled out some tips to share with you. Don’t worry; I haven’t included all 32 tips here. If you would like to check out all the tips, just click here.

1. Make sure your site loads in 3-4 seconds or less on a standard broadband connection. Your customers will thank you!
2. Use large type. Some of us aren’t as young as we used to be.
3. Make stuff easy to find. Clear product links, sensible categories and a good search engine on your site will all help.
4. Be secure. Your customers won’t thank you for security, but they’ll sure curse you if you let someone make off with their credit card info.
5. Forget about cool. Just because you love the idea of a Flash-based slide show using the best page-turning techniques 2002 had to offer doesn’t mean your customers will.
6. Offer ways to stay connected. Let folks sign up for an e-mail newsletter or subscribe to a latest news feed. Let them find you on Twitter. You’d be surprised how many folks appreciate that sort of thing.
7. Write scannable content. Use bullets and the like to break up the page. Have no more than 14 words on a line. Don’t make folks read 10-line paragraphs, because they won’t.
8. Have a friendly 404 page. Help customers find what they need, even if they did get your page URL wrong. Use a friendly 404 page, not the hideous default page that your server delivers.

Do you have your own tips to make your website attractive to new customers? We would love to hear them.