As a pro web designer with over 10 years experience it pains me to say this but if you’re starting out with an online business the key is do do things as cheaply and more importantly basic as possible and once the site achieves a high search engine placement, then you can use your experience, not guess work and expendable profit to reinvest in the design, branding and features of your website.
Time after time we get briefs from new business start-ups who dont have any cash but have grandioso ideas about the features and functionality required of their online store. Most of the time this is all wishful thinking an not really based on customer objectives and in the end our quote often makes them lose faith in becoming an online business.
So do yourself a favour…
Get an SEO involved for advice
Buy a domain for a few pounds, get some hosting (beefier the better if you plan on using Magento… more on this below)
Set up the email properly and integrate with Outlook
Find some open source ecommerce software like Magento Commerce, Prestashop or others
Use the standard theme!!!!! just change the logo (make sure it matches the colourscheme)
Ask your SEO how you should format your product titles, categories and ask for pointers on how to write effective descriptions
Populate the site with information
Ask the SEO to promote it.
Total cost (est) £100 plus SEO fees.
Then working with the SEO begin writing about your products from a non commercial viewpoint
The SEO should begin building links and making changes to the site to make it more search friendly
Make money
From this point on the plan should be:
Listen to the customers, find out what features they require
Look at your business rpocesses and work out what systems could be created to simplify/automate time consuming business tasks
Reinvest in hiring a designer to change the theme and branding with guidance from the SEO
Make more money
Repeat
You can even read the FREE online book Getting Real by online application developers 37 Signals which gives you an idea as to how theyve built and managed successful websites without the masisve overhead and complicated initial featureset.
As I’m now SEO Manager at Blueclaw I thought it only right that I help promote the work of the team starting with an SEO Guide created by Monica our Senior SEO consultant. This guide is aimed at people who are new to SEO and contains practical guides and information on the SEO process and how to impliment key elements of success.
This is refreshing as many of the guides and e-books out there simply spout the same old un-practical and out-of-date rubbish that does no one any good.
The SEO Guide is available as a free PDF download and will soon be published as an active document which will form the basis of a knowledge-share like SEO Bible.
If you’re heavily into SEO and link building then you should be into content aggregation and Guest Posting is a great way of not only getting your content out there but also a way of building your brand (and the brand of your clients). If you don’t know what guest posting is then its simply the act of having an article posted on a 3rd party website.
There are pleanty of guides to how to effectively guest post out there and key to this is tailoring what you have to say around what the target blogs community wants to read so I’d even go so far as to say you’d be better of writing completely unique content for this purpose.
Theres a new resource in town created (I think) by the world famous Anne Smarty and this is myblogguest.com. It’s basically a forum of publishers and SEO’s/writers who are looking for their opposite party within the guest post relationship.
The main reason for this post is to encourage UK bloggers and SEO’s to get involved as at the moment its mainly USA focused and the good ol’ UK needs to represent!
If you want a guest post from me then look me up on there.
I have a friend from a while back who’s recently become an in-house SEO for a niche retailer who has asked if i could help provide an independent eye on the project with the view to creating some workable actions because he’s been thrown in at the deep end and can’t see the wood for the trees. Always eager to spread the knowledge, I took a few hours the other night to go through the site and produce some ideas for him, a list that I think might be useful for someone else who’s site is stuck in a rut.
Note: I’m having to be ambiguous as I haven’t had the go-ahead to promote the domain and I hope the genericness of this post will help broaden its reach and help you identify with the issues without the relevancy to a foreign product. Continue reading →
Just been reading a blog post about 13 things you can do to optimise an ecommerce site and am astounded by how paper thin the advice is so I took it upon myself to flesh out the issues with some real meat.
Check the original post and then view my comments below (sorry you’re going to need 2 monitors for this lol)
1. Meta descriptions have naff all to do with your rankings, best to make sure they support your point of sale message as they’re not much use for anything else
2. In the real world ecommerce sites have a hard time generating any useful content, most cant even be bothered to create a unique product description. What you can do here is perform some simple keyword research around your subject matter and add them to a blog (hosted on yoursite.com/blog) making sure that the terms targetted dont detract from your product categories i.e. don’t have a blue widget category and then blog about blue widgets!
3. There’s more to optimising images than having alt text and a file name. when ever possible have your image surrounded by descriptive text i.e. have something written before and after the file, this will help you with google image search.
4. Don’t you mean domain canonical issues? the simplest solution for this is telling google how you want to be indexed www. or non www. Secondly don’t link to index.php or whetever, just use the raw domain http://www.domain.com the same goes for folders.
5. Folder structure wont hurt your sites serps, in fact, it could add context i.e. widgets/flexible/red.html when it comes to navigation thing about common groups of products, this may be different to how you catalogue products. In addition if a product needs to be linked under multiple categories dont duplicate them, instead have both category listings link to a centralised product page.
6. Great advice but don’t forget to link singluar and plural terms and remember that it’s the first links anchor text on a page thats going to carry the ‘weight’ so optimise for this, the rest can be anything.
7. Loading times is far too big a topic to add under a simple bullet, things like caching, compression, use of sprites, whitespace and carriage return removal can all help.
8. If people need to use a sitemap page then your site is too hard to navigate so look there first, it is a great idea to get all of your products listed in some form of directory, just dont go mad as google doesnt like a single page with 1000′s of links on it, its just going to ignore most of them and stop after its got bored, if your navigation is 3 or 4 levels deep then consider categorising your site map and flattening the cats into a 2 tier system
9. Recent tests (check SEOMoz) show that H1 etc tags dont effect SEO, theyre great for semantics and do help if it contains a link, so use them for this and not for any seo reason as they don’t give extra weight.
10. Google Webmaster Tools is better at finding 404 links as it also shows internal and external links that are faulty. Also consider that your product inventory isn’t going to remain static, so make sure your ecommerce solution 301′s removed products to the parent category.
11. Yes encourage review, but for SEO purposes try and get them on 3rd party websites, if you use froogle you can quickly see which sites google rates for product reviews so this would probably work best if incentivised through after sales email marketing or a competition or something. You can always post the results on your product pages with a healthy ‘independent’ review validated by the 3rd party website.
12. Great tip and one I use all of the time… think about your order complete page and add some widgets, banners and cut and paste code for use in facebook, blogs and twitter and don’t forget to PROMPT them to use it!
13. Sounds like good advice but you just have to jump in sometimes as it can take a week or so for a change to be picked up by google and even longer for you to be able to get any metrics from it. My advice is to progressively work forwards with an eye on what youve been doing which can quickly be reversed via SVN and worked forwards methodically should something bad happen.
At Click 4 Beds and Distinctive Chesterfields we’re rapidly approching the cut off time for deliveries to arrive in time for Christmas its time to think about the next big sales period, the January Sales. Even though most retailers have pre-christmas sales, January’s offerings are still a big draw for many customers seeking to fill the post Christmas void with some bargains… And we all want a healthy slice of that Pie.
So, how can this be achieved? Well, some quick tinkering with your sites title tags and a few well placed blog posts are a good place to start and if you act now you should be indexed in time for the Janrary sale season. Heres a few tips to optimise your site for this season:
Add in motivators such as the terms ‘January sale’ and ‘January sales’ into your title tag
Change your Meta Description to reference January
Get new voucher codes distributed to your coupon network
Create a nice splash banner highlighting some of your more prominent deals
Blog post about key deals
Send out PR highlighting key deals
Update your prices
Contact your affiliates and provide new banners and other materials
All in all this should help you optimise your potential (if you can do such a thing) and get the most out of january sale sales.
I have a quick question as I’m new to the SEO world. I think I’m getting a handle on things but I’m curious about those city based directories full of useless information. For instance, doing a search for Oklahoma Graphic Design, the first few hits are directories (pasted below).; How do you compete with those? They are full of keywords, often in the domain.
My SEO Advice is:
There are a few things you can do to dominate here (tho the traffic is really low for this term!) the first thing is to use the term "Oklahoma graphic design" in your body text, this is a hard one to squeeze in there, but having references to this term across your website is a must to be relevant to this term a technique i often use is to tag the term as a strap-line to your identity i.e. ‘mark rushworth – oklahoma graphic design’ which you can use as text under your logo and on your footer as part of the copyright statement (gets you 2 impressions) you should also <strong> these to give emphasis…
Use the term in your title tag
And lastly, get links to your website using the term as the anchor text… if you create websites and put a footer link as a credit consider changing these links from ‘web design by company name’ to ‘oklahoma graphic design by company name’ (and just link the target term)
For some quick linkage, start some free blogs on blogger.com and wordpress.com etc and try and get oklahomagraphicdesign.blogspot.com and oklahomagraphicdesign.wordpress.com and create some articles reviewing the works of your peers tell them you’re critiquing their works in an email… they may link to your blogs which helps you get some relevancy which you can pass to your main site just put a sitewide link to your site using the anchor on these blogs.
Going to the extreme you can buy oklahomagraphicdesign.net, put your site onto it and set all your links to absolute paths using the full http://www. path to the new domain and tie up all the cross domain canonical issues to migrate your site to a non branded domain.
I’m a massive advocate of never working for free. No pitches, no free samples, no work on spec.
And heres why…
If you’re a website designer youve probably experienced all of the above as clients try to buy a Farari for the price of a Scoda. I’m not hostile to customers, its just that with so many agencies and studios willing to work for free on the promise that they maybe possibly might get the job (at 1/2 the projected budget) it just makes no sense to me for our industry to keep doing this.
ive had a site with both www. and without www. indexed so its rather a mess.
Ive decided to keep it without www. did a 301 on htaccess, and put it to preferable in webmaster tools.
Now my question is the site comes up on page 4 with a specific keyword, but its indexed with www. if I remove all indexed sites with www. from Google and submit a new sitemap to Google without www.
How will my placing be on those keywords that i use to get some results with, will it be gone completely and will have to wait a few months to see some new results, or will it just replace the existing www. sites ?
My Advice is:
I wouldnt remove any URL’s, by correcting the canonical issue with GWT then you’re in good stead
It will happen at the same rate as your re-crawl so anything from a few days to a few months. 301 is a good interim workaround and you’ve done the right thing by using webmaster tools.
It’s also beneficial for you to do an inbound link check and make sure your IBL’s are using the correct www. address to link to you! as this is probably the only thing that could maintain your duplication issues.
The site is www.andrewlitten.com and to be honest I think he’d be pretty happy just to be on page 1 with the term ‘Andrew litten’. I wouldn’;t have thought that would be too hard – but alas six months on and I’m still not getting anywhere with this one.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
My Advice:
As you’re not after a majorly competitive term it shouldnt be too hard. Here’s what I recommend:
Try and get the words Andrew Litten in the body copy of this page (possibly a copyright statement at the foot of the site) and anywhere else that isn’t a link currently the only reference is the <h1>
I'm now SEO Manager at the award winning Leeds based SEO Services company, Blueclaw. If you would like to hire my team for your SEO project or would simply like an over the table discussion about how your businesses SEO can be improved please email mark@blueclaw.co.uk with your questions, expectations and project details.
