Search Engine Friendly Sites
Web designers are prone to letting down their clients in the ecommerce sector, especially the ones new to the world of online business. Before pricing is even discussed there is one major question that needs to be put to the potential client. "Is this website going to target organic search engine traffic, or will it be used via a PPC channel", the answer to this single question will set the tone for the site construction. A PPC targeted website is fairly straight forward, it needs to have good graphical representation as well as giving the visitor a feeling of trust, this can be done by
1. Listing a Telephone number
2. Listing an address
3. Being part of a Limited Company
4. Ties to other known organisations/governing bodies
5. Genuine testimonials listed
6. Links to charities
All of these things will help validate a website Sites that are targeting traffic via search engines need much more attention, before the construction of the site built particular attention needs to be placed on keyword research, this will form the cornerstone of the build, each page ideally targeting 2 to 3 good quality terms. This will also help form the structure of the sub page URL's. The problem generally lies with design teams ignorance or inability to provide the full picture to the client. The net result will generally be a good looking website, one the owner will no doubt proud of, but a year down the line warning bells start sounding. When consulting a web designer in relation to an ecommerce website ask the following questions
1. Will every page of my website be based around good quality keywords
2. Who will carry out the keyword research and what are their credentials in this field
3. Will my site have search engine friendly URLS, with hyphenated extensions
4. Will the site be clean coded, if you are simply looking for a lead generation site, I would recommend CSS, PHP
5. Will each page have good quality search engine friendly text, who will be responsible for its construction
6. Will h1,h2,h3's be implemented, with h1's related to the page relevant keywords
7. Will each page of the website have individual, keyword related meta tags
8. Will there be a good balance between text and images, search engines prefer text over images
9. Will the site contain semantically balanced anchor text
10. Will good quality, keyword and picture relevant, alt attributes (tags) be used
11. Will the site have a HTML sitemap
12. Will the site have a links exchange/resources page
13. Will the site have a mechanism for adding content
14. Will a Google analytics account be set up
15. Will an XML sitemap be published and authorised
16. Will an ROR sitemap be uploaded
17. Will URL redirects www. to none www be applied
18. If the site is a rebuild will the appropriate 301 action be taken, as well as the new 404 procedures
19. Will the design team be adding their own sitewide hyperlink to your website
Find a company who will do 1 -18 as well as producing a good looking site and you should let them have number 19 by way of a thank you, bear in mind there are very few designers who implement these features on their own websites, so you can see how difficult your search will be, however get it right and you will be taking a major step forward with your online venture.
Pete Arkwright
This article is sponsored by Peoplevox
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