harges should be clearly shown on your ecommerce website. The majority of internet users shop around for the best price before committing to purchase so hidden charges such as tax and shipping costs that haven’t been factored in can cause shopping cart abandonment – something that all ecommerce store owners want to avoid! Avoid abandonment by clearly displaying these costs either on the shopping cart BEFORE you get to the payment screen or by including them on the product page and increase those conversion rates!

ptimisation, be seen in all the right places! Having a fabulous ecommerce website with all the bells and whistles is great but it is no good if people can’t find it! Optimisation such as including product and service names in page titles, keyword rich descriptions, an xml sitemap, Googlebase feeds, etc can all help to ensure your website is visible on the major search engines.

agento websites – giving you that little extra! All ecommerce websites designed and built by Impact Web Solutions are created using Magento. Magento is a feature rich ecommerce platform with more than 3,500 extensions allowing us to create fully bespoke websites tailored to your company’s individual needs. Having a website built in Magento allows you to present a robust shopping experience to your customers, encouraging cross-selling, social shopping and the all-important conversion to sale.

enu’s – leading the way! Having clear navigation on your website allows not only human visitors but also search engines to quickly find their way around your website to locate the information or products they are searching for. Many people base their navigation on the 3 click rule meaning that the information your visitors are searching for should never be more than 3 clicks from the homepage, although this is a good rule to work by it doesn’t necessarily have to be a maximum of 3 as long as there is a clear hierarchy that visitors can use to find the items again.

nquiries. Contact details on your website are a must! Whether you choose to include your address, phone number, email address or even social networking profiles, visitors should be able to contact you. Another way for visitors to contact you is to include a contact form on the website. Whichever you choose, responding quickly is important, within 8 hours if possible – good communication helps to build positive relationships with your customers and encourages brand loyalty.

eferrals – check it out! Happy customers may choose to tell others about your website, so including features such as recommend a friend and the ability to share links on social networking sites are helpful.

heckout – All work & no pay makes your website a sad store! The payment process on your ecommerce website should be as simple as possible to use. Providing the option of ‘Guest checkout’ can lessen the chances of shopping cart abandonment, as can single page checkouts which allow shoppers to shorten the payment process and make their payments quickly.

asy peasy! Make your ecommerce store easy to use, easy to navigate and easy to buy from! If everything is quick and simple, your sales such flourish!

For more info about Impact Web Solutions Ecommerce visit http://studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Ecommerce Web Design Leicester

I have seen many websites that contain great content, yet basic mistakes are stopping them from ranking well in searchengines. Although these tips won’t necessarily catapult your website to the top of the search engines, these 6 quick tweaks can only have a positive effect on your search engine rankings.

1. Exchanging your Flash animation for JQuery or similar Javascript solution. Flash animation content cannot be read by search engines, whereas the Javascript solution allows the search engines to find the information within the html source making it more seo friendly.
2. Exchanging image based menu’s for text based menu’s. Search engines cannot read the content of images so having a menu made up of images removes this crucial piece of information from your pages. If you decide that your navigation MUST be made up of images, it is important to remember to include image tags so that search engines can understand the content of the image. Changing your menu’s to be text based will allow you to include important keywords within the pages of your website as well as linking those keywords to relevant pages within your website.
3. Exchanging image based content for text based content. One thing that occurs often, especially within self-built template websites, is that the text is added to the website in image form often to allow for pretty backgrounds or text effects. I have seen perfectly written copy that is keyword rich added to a website in this way, so the text has no effect on the search engine rankings at all because… search engines cannot see it! Make sure that your website copy is added to the pages in text format.
4. Exchange your keyword tag for keyword rich copy. Most search engines are either no longer using the keyword tag or only giving it minimal relevance, so ensuring that the content of your website and the important title tag are keyword rich are a must. Instead of concentrating on search engines, choose a couple of keywords to include per page and then write the content around these words while concentrating on your human visitors.
5. Exchanging your duplicate content for fresh content. Ok, so this can be a bit tricky when creating content for example with an ecommerce websites where information can apply to multiple products and can also be included in product categories. This is definitely an area where your search engine optimisation company can help you out by including things like no follow links and canonical url tags. This is also where detailed product descriptions can allow you to include keywords linked to that specific product and to create unique page content.
6. Exchanging your automatically generated urls for correctly formatted urls. Some CMS & blog software can automatically create page titles but often these titles are formatted badly including random codes filled with question marks and irrelevant mumbo jumbo that will not allow search engines to link the title to the content of the page. Including correctly formatted urls that include important keywords and product names, hyphenated rather than underscore separated (Google doesn’t see underscores which can cause it to read your title as one big messy word!) will allow search engines to associate the words in your page title with the content of your page.

There are many different search engine techniques that can be applied to your website but by making these basic changes it will have a positive impact on your websites rankings and start to provide visible web results.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

Branding strategy > This is all about creating awareness of your company and not necessarily about driving sales. It’s about the volume of impressions, which in other words means that the more people type in a keyword and see your website, the greater the impression you create. Keywords that would be used for a branding strategy are broad terms such as ‘furniture’ or ‘jewellery’.

Acquisition strategy > When users have an idea of what they want to buy, they will type in a more specific phrase into a search engine. This is where you need an acquisition strategy to make these potential customers come to your site. To do this you will need to understand what customers are actually entering into the search bar. An acquisition strategy will use more narrow keywords such as ‘discounted mahogany garden bench’ or ‘gold crucifix necklaces’.

As a search engine marketing company, we know how to make a search engine optimisation campaign work to reach the goals of your business. If you wish to discuss the advantages of using an SEO campaign, then give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

Images are essential to a website, and although users will enjoy them, search engines will basically ignore them. So how can you overcome this and help make images work well for your search engine optimisation campaign? The answer is simple; ALT tags.

ALT tags are used as a textual description of an image and more importantly are readable to the search engine crawlers. So if the search engines are reading this text, it would be an ideal place to include your keywords. Remember though not to simply stuff your keywords into the tags, as this is viewed as a spamming technique.

As a leading Search Engine Optimisation agency, and the only SEMPO Platinum awarded SEO agency in the UK, we know the techniques to use, and not to use, to help your website rank well. If you wish to discuss the advantages an SEO campaign then give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

1. Duplicate internal pages – If your site has duplicate pages, the best method is to choose one as the main copy, and then use a 301 redirect to take users to the same copy.
2. If you have the same paragraph of content located on a number of your sites pages, you can place it within an IFrame  to reduce the chances of it being viewed as duplicate conent by the search engines.
3. After you have sent out a press release, it could possibly appear on another site and be counted as duplicate content on your site. Make sure you are credited as the original author of the article to avoid this happening.

If you need help making sure your website stands out, then as a leading search engine marketing company, and the only SEMPO Platinum awarded SEO agency in the UK, we know what can work for your business. If you wish to discuss the advantages an SEO campaign could offer your business, then give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

• Pick the right website name

For example, jargons.com will not do for a company selling watches, instead jargon-watches.com is a much more suitable name. If possible include your keyphrases in the domain name.

• Pick the right keywords!

Generic keywords won’t do, statistics don’t lie! A long tailed keyword has a higher conversion rate than a broad search term. For example, hotels v luxury hotels leicester

• Structure your website well

By having a sensible website structure i.e. directory folders and sensible file names, your webpages will make more sense both to a visitor as well as the search engine robots crawling your site.

• Suitable Internal Linking

A very strong SEO strategy much overlooked! Create a rational path linking the various web pages of your website based on a logical theme. By doing this you are guiding the user to your important pages which will help increase the enquiries or sales.

• Link building

There is no easy way to do this. It’s a tedious process but eventually very rewarding in terms of SEO.

Find the right inbound links to your website from free quality web directories, or post informative content to quality blogs creating links back to your website. By gradually increasing these links from other quality sites and having your keyword in the linking text, you will be building the authority of the website for your chosen keywords, hence ranking higher with the search engines.

• Monitor rankings and website activities

Finally, keep a close eye on the progress of your keyword rankings and use online tools like google analytics or smarterstats to monitor your website activity. This will help you gain an insight into the most popular webpages of your website, paths taken by the visitor, statistics on the number of visitors, working keyphrases and much much more!

This is just a brief outline of some SEO techniques to keep in mind while optimising for the search engines. For more information on how we can improve your search engine rankings why not call us on 0116 2758456 to see how we can help you website gain visbility and increase your sales revenue!

Mariam Shariff

Search Engine Optimisation team
Studio 2 Online – Search engine optimisation Midlands

1. Using keywords unrelated to your site.

You may think that having the words ‘John and Edward’ and ‘X Factor’ on your homepage will currently improve your search engine rankings and therefore bring in more visitors, but if the content of your site is not actually related to these words, then the search engines will know and your rankings will suffer.

1. Hiding text within your content

One technique to sneakily add more keywords and phrases to your webpage is to make the colour of the font the same colour as the background of the website. The idea behind this is that the search engines would still crawl the text even though its invisible to users. The clever search engines are aware of this technique though and will punish your site’s rankings.

1. Doorway pages

Have the ever visited a site where the homepage contains very little text and only contains a link? This technique means that the first page is heavily optimised for the search engine crawlers, but offers no content for actual visitors. Search engines do not like sites that are not built for visitors, so trying to use this technique will again have a negative effect on your rankings.

There are many more Search Engine Optimisation mistakes that are often made, so if you don’t want to get in the bad books of the search engines, contact us to see how we can help you and your business climb up the search rankings ladder.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

If so then that website was lacking a very important aspect of good web design – a site map.

A site map is as useful to a website user as a road map is to a driver, and here are 5 useful tips:

• Your site map should include a link to every page within your website; from the homepage, to your contact details, to your deepest subpages.
• A link to your site map should be included on every page of your website. This means that every page within your site is only ever two clicks away, which is not only good web design, but also useful for getting your pages indexed by the search engines.
• Keep your site map under 100 links, and if more are needed then split into multiple site maps.
• An XML site map is important for search engine optimisation as it allows search engine crawlers easy access to index every page within your site.
• It’s important to understand the difference between a HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap. A HTML sitemap is useful to the visitors to your site, while a XML sitemap is designed to give information about your site directly to search engines.

If you’re lost and in need of some direction with anything to do with your website, or if you are after a brand new site, as a leading web design agency, Leicester we can provide excellent web designs and search engine friendly services to promote your business and increase your enquiries and sales.

Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting. If you need a map to find us, then there is one on the website…we wouldn’t want you getting lost after all!

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Web design Midlands

• Don’t change URLs: indexed URLs are precious!! Don’t change them!! Search engines crawl a website and index pages on your website that they then return for relevant search terms. It is alright to change heading, images and other content on the webpage but avoid changing indexed URLs.
• Optimise Website: Apply search engine optimisation to the website before it is launched, not after it’s live and up and running on the internet. Basic SEO techniques can be applied to a website during the build. This also helps to strengthen the information architecture of the website so a user can be led through the website as you planned it. For example, a user may enter a product page and actually be guided through to the information on the product and ultimately the ‘buy now’ webpage, hence changing a visitor into a customer.
• Website Content: for the above to be possible it is important that your website copywriter understands your business and its target audience completely. A good copywriter will write copy for the target audience, speaking their language. Good web copy will also help lead the user to the right web page once a visitor has entered the website.

To find out more of such useful tips contact our web design midlands agency based in Leicester to have an informal chat and see how we can help redesign your website and promote it in Google and other key search engines through SEO.

Mariam Shariff

Studio 2 Online – Web designers Midlands, Leicester

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… IP: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… IP: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Some points to consider:

• Choose:

1. A professional Website Design Company who will spend time understanding your needs – very important!
2. A good copywriter who can appreciate your company ethos and your target audience to turn your website visitors into customers
3. A visually powerful website design that reflects your business
4. A website structure that is easy to navigate for a site visitor as well as a search engine robot, especially if you’re selling products/services online.
5. A website navigation system that is simple and easyto use, with information or products no more than three mouse clicks away. A copywriter specialising in websites will be able to help you with this.

• Make your website accessible in accordance to the W3C Standards
• Allow external links to open in a new tab or window, but avoid too many or it just becomes distracting
• Include a good user sitemap that is easy to navigate

Things to avoid:

• A website that is not accessible to everyone, including those with visual impairments. Indeed if a website is not accessible to everyone this could lead to legal action
• A completely Flash based website – it may look good, but it’s likely to take ages to load so people will lose interest before they even enter the site, and search engines don’t like Flash
• Too many back grounds – less is more when it comes to website design
• Too many external links – you want people to stay on your website, not wander off elsewhere!

For more advice on choosing the right web design for your business contact our Midlands based web design agency on 0116 275 8456 to have an informal discussion on our web design and other web services.

Mariam Shariff

Studio 2 Online – Web design Leicester, Midlands

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… IP: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…