It’s been long established that consumers are more willing to buy a product when more information is available. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research confirms that consumers choose products with more technical specifications offered.

In a series of five studies asking participants to choose between two kinds of products ranging from digital cameras and cell phones to towels and potato chips, study participants across the board chose the product with the most specifications.

They did so even when the specifications offered little to no additional information. All that detail, though, didn’t have an effect on the product experience after purchase, so while offering more information seems to directly influence buying, a merchant in business for the long term will have to back up his products.

The results make sense under various theoretical frameworks, especially Uncertainty Reduction Theory. Under this framework, consumers (and people in general) continuously seek information to assuage their anxieties, solidify beliefs, and justify their decisions.

For web marketers, the implications are pretty straightforward: The more information you offer a perspective customer, the more likely that customer will buy from you over the competition.

Google put out a nice holiday checklist at the Webmaster Central blog to help Web marketers prepare for the holiday season. Given that the season is nearly over, if you haven’t already done these things, try to remember them for next year.

Well, one supposes this is good advice for those that do business year round, which is everybody, right? To follow are some of the better suggestions:

1. Verify your site is indexed and returned by Google with the right snippet and page title. Cut down or eliminate on duplicate titles and meta descriptions.

2. Label your images. Nobody likes (and some distrust) images with only the generic number tag as a description (i.e., 001.jpg). Use alt tags to label your images so that when they show up in Google Images, the text matches the picture. It helps Google identify the images, too.

3. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, double check and claim your business listing in Google Local.

4. Make sure your site is compatible with all the different browsers out there.

5. If Google returns Sitelinks for your site, give those a quick review, ensure the destination pages are functional or remove unwanted sitelinks through Webmaster Tools.

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is performed on the internet through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is completed by submitting your website to a search engine.

No amount of press releases, newspaper or radio ads, banner ads, spam emails or newsletters will achieve the same results, although it may be effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise an automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are most times nothing more than false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

As with many things, researching or getting referrals from other companies that have had great success with an SEO company is always the safest way to ensure that your website is going to be in genuinely caring hands. There are so many websites on the internet trying to make a quick buck by any means necessary.

Business dealings with the wrong types of people can be very cut-throat if you're not careful in considering and researching where you decide to go in finding your marketing partners for life.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines, it is best to ensure that your websites are thoroughly designed to a professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and appropriate, relevant content. Don't submit websites that are incomplete.

While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

The creation and growing life of your website in the infancy stages are always going to come with many great challenges. But once you have overcome those challenges and beaten the odds, you will most likely be able to repeat this pattern over and over if you wanted to do so.

You could also decide to become a consultant and help others to become better with their dealings online. They could learn from your mistakes and discoveries just as you had with your wonderful mentors.

Mere submissions alone to search engine companies will not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be at the very top. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite some time before they take up your site for review by human editors.

One important factor to remember while submitting your website is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like Google hardly consider submissions without sitemaps.

It just makes sense to do everything that you can think of to make the robot's job in crawling your website as easy as it can possibly be from your end. It can also be referred to as optimizing your website to just flow very smoothly without hardly any interruption at all from the search engine programs that hit all kinds of dead ends and errors as people place businesses online.

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with software packages available all over on the internet.

The best way, as with anything, is to get to know your prospective source of help and information as much as you can. Over some time this will develop in your mind as a trustworthy source that you can always depend on for a very long time, you hope.

You will hear from many users online that you should stay as far away as you can get from these automatic submission companies. This is very much the case in most of what you may stumble onto online.

I repeat that there are a few good, solid and dependable companies that you can find by knowing the right people and being associated with a good network of business minded people.