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Building a successful website for selling online – from a search engine optimisation view
The internet offers new opportunities and challenges in selling online. It allows companies to sell into new geographical markets without having to invest in a presence there. Internet Marketing is an umbrella term for many different types of online marketing strategies – banner advertising, search engine optimisation, newsletters and the websites themselves. Organic or “unpaid” Traffic from search engines is the Holy Grail of internet marketing – it provides a constant, free and growing source of traffic of people looking for the products/services on offer. Organic traffic tends to have a lower bounce rate and a higher conversion rate. The cost of the SEO isn’t directly linked to the number of visitors and it is very cost effective.
In traditional marketing, such as storefronts, printed advertisements - look and feel or branding are very important. Storefront design, logo’s and colour schemes are used to set the company apart from the competition. On the internet, people can only see the branding side of the company once they arrive at the site. If people aren’t visiting the site, it makes no difference if the site is beautiful or not. Even when people do arrive, there are much other more important considerations.
The very best designed and most aesthetically pleasing websites are heavily flash based or use graphical text. This means that every user will see logo’s and web layouts the very same way, text positions and layouts will be fixed. For sites that need to grow traffic from web searches, this isn’t an option. Search Engines can’t take text from images and so the sites search-find performance will suffer.
Our priority list to take into account when planning a new website or a website redesign and development are:
- First and foremost the site must be easy to be found – careful consideration to wording used, text and accessibility are paramount
- The site must be well publicised on the internet and have information about it spread on different sites to gain popularity and show importance
- The site must have full and proper visitor statistics, preferably server side and page tracking (for example AWStats and Google Analytics respectively)
- The site must be designed so that the user can find what they are looking for easily and without the need to navigate more than 3 clicks to find:
a. They have the right site
b. The site provides the right solutions
c. They can contact the company easily in their own preferred means
- The site should provide easy to read and comprehend content.
- Technical faults such as DNS issues, missing pages and links should be rectified
- Localised versions of the site must be present for regional search effectiveness.
- Specific solutions, services or offerings should have their own dedicated website.
- The site should be aesthetically pleasing and correctly reflect the type of organisation it represents
Our top website features list for best presentation of information in the SEO game is:
- A content management system
- A news centre
- Contact forms and thank you pages (for small sites)
- FAQ and Support pages
- Regionally localised site for each region being targeted (where applicable)
- A blog (where applicable)
The Content management system (CMS) will mean that the pages are easier to edit, add and appear as newer content to the search engines. Adding new content will be a key part of a successful SEO campaign.
A news centre can be updated as frequently as needed but adds great SEO friendly content. Users can upload news articles at will and old articles are archived but still searchable.
Contact forms with thank you pages are great ways to track SEO and other advertising methods’ conversion rates.
Regionally localised sites are sites that have a localised version for each country or region (such as a US state) where the seller has a local operation or distributor/service provider and therefore wants to show up where people using Google, Yahoo or MSN want only pages returned from websites that are hosted or are from their region.
There are a number of ways to do this; the best is to buy the country specific domain name (e.g. mydomain.ie and mydomain.co.uk). Note that aliasing the new domain to your existing site is not recommended at all and my result in penalties or worse.
In order to be found in the UK, especially under UK only searches, there will be no alternative to a separate localised UK site, preferably a .co.uk version of the .com domain. This can be hosted alongside the existing site.
The search from Ireland and the .com is proof of having separate websites for each distinct part of the business. Typically a Google search will only return two results per page from the same domain name.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Pages
FAQ’s are very popular as they pose information in the way the site user is thinking. A proper FAQ component can make managing and updating an FAQ very easy and reduce administration overhead. FAQ’s also tend to reduce support queries and administration overhead.
Blogs
Blogs can be very useful but can be very time consuming and only suit certain websites. Blogs are generally expected to be independent and have known to back-fire when used as commercial advertisement features.
