So, what does the acronym stand for and how can it help a Magento website?

A is for Attention or Awareness: The first part of the sales process is to attract the customer and to make them aware of your products or services. By optimising your Magento websites pages individually with product specific keywords, your products and services will appear in a wider range of search engine results ensuring that relevant prospects can find your website. When the prospect clicks through to your website, it is vital that your website makes a good first impression. Make sure that your Magento website loads quickly, presents a professional image and is easy to use. Most visitors to a website have a question in mind or a product that they are looking for, make it clear what you’re offering and tell them how they can get it quickly and easily!

I is for Interest: Once you’ve got their attention, you want to make sure that you gain their interest by demonstrating and focusing on the advantages & benefits of choosing your products or services over those of your competitors. Ways that you can gain interest are by highlighting special pricing, showing linked products and recommending relevant products. Anything you can do to make the process easier and to assist the customer will allow you to keep their interest for longer.

D is for Desire or Decision: By providing as much information as possible about the products and services you provide, showing reviews from other customers that have purchased the product and found it useful, or by creating a sense of urgency by showing an offer valid until date, you can help to convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.

A is for Action: The most important part of the whole process is getting your customers to take action and to purchase your products or services. Having a well laid out Magento website with lots of product information and cross selling are great for getting customers to this point, now you need to make sure they can easily locate the shopping cart (add a link to every page!) and once they have, give them the choice between registering and guest checkout and make the payment process as simple as possible (why not even cut the whole thing down to a single page?!).

For more information about Magento web design by Impact Web Solutions visit http://www.studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php or call 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

Many people I have spoken to have asked the question “how can social networking help my business?”

They have set up an account on the main social networking sites and have posted regular adverts about their products and services but still their efforts have rewarded them with a big fat fail whale!

So where are they going wrong? Well, the clue is in the title ‘Social Networking’.

Let’s break it down and get some definitions:

Social – An informal social gathering

Networking – Interacting with other people to exchange information and develop contacts

Now let’s put it all together ‘An informal social gathering, interacting with other people to exchange information and develop contacts’.

Makes things a little clearer doesn’t it?

I want you to imagine that you are at a networking event at a local hotel. The event is in a big room filled with people you have never met, all from different businesses and they are all mingling, discussing everything from that extrovert ladies shiny red shoes to the state of the economy and you pull out your megaphone and stand in the middle of the room shouting “I have a shop, come and buy my products, I repeat, I have a shop, come and buy my products” – how long do you think it would be before the rest of the people in the room got annoyed and you were asked to leave?

And that is exactly how social networking sites are! We don’t want to hear about your company manufacturing match boxes while we’re trying to talk about Mikey Way and Torchwood!

We want you to join in with our conversations, throw new subjects into the mix and then we won’t mind if every now and then you tell us how great your company is. And since we’ve built up this relationship, I will probably ask about your company or what it is that you do, and when I need your products or services you will automatically spring to mind.

Sure, the major brands don’t need to chat about anything other than their products and services but even they spend time talking with their followers about the weather, barbeques and their biscuits of choice!

As a rule you should spend about 20% of your twitter time talking about your business and the other 80% of the time ‘social networking’.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

“Feeling v disillusioned with Twitter! Can anyone persuade me that it will actually help my business?!”

Now anyone that has spent more than two minutes on Twitter will know that it is not always the most intellectual of content; with everything from a page of Tweets from a cat standing on a keyboard to the insanity that is planetjedward! Although these pages may be amusing, you can’t help but to see why this business owner was feeling more than a little disillusioned.

Well, in response to the plea for someone to persuade them that Twitter will actually help their business, here are a few reasons why Twitter may actually be beneficial:

• Social networking sites attract millions of visitors on a daily basis, from all over the world.
• Having a Twitter account for your business allows you to expose your brand to a wider audience and to make your business more accessible to both new and existing customers.
• More people are looking to social networking sites for recommendations when they need to purchase a product. People regularly tweet for help to find services such as printers and hotels, these tweets are usually retweeted by lots of kind people who very quickly find someone that can help. A couple of days ago I saw one lady say that Twitter had pretty much arranged her whole wedding and that she would be tweeting throughout the day with updates for anyone that couldn’t attend the wedding!
• Each individual page on Twitter has its own SEO page rank, much the same as your website has. Pages with higher ranks give more authority to the website links they share.
• Google and Bing both confirmed that they receive a ‘firehose’ of Tweets with active ‘follow’ links, which do effect the search engine placements of regular websites.

And a few tips to build your Twitter following:

• Many businesses make the mistake of just following companies and people they know; although this is a great place to start it is unlikely to bring new business to your company. Following various ‘real’ people and interacting with them on a regular basis allows you to build new relationships. People buy from people, so building up relationships will increases the likelihood that when they require your product they will come to you first.
• Friday is a great time to find awesome people to follow. In the ‘search box’ to the right hand side, enter #ff or #followfriday and this will show a list of people recommending people they interact with that others should follow. These people are more likely to interact allowing you to build strong online relationships.
• Now for one of the less sensible but still important (in some cases) tips! Animal lovers on Twitter often recommend other animal lovers with tags like #meowmonday or #woofwednesday. Is your business animal friendly? Look them up!
• If someone shares something helpful or amusing, be it a tweet or link to a useful article – pass it on! Hover over the tweet and in the bottom right corner you will see retweet, click this to share with your followers.
• If someone follows you, visit their profile. Do they interact with others, post regularly, etc? If so, follow them back. Following your followers back encourages others to follow you.
• One thing to be wary of is that Twitter does have a lot of Spam ‘bots’, these are accounts that usually post automated tweets which will be of no value to you at all. The unfortunate thing is that bots are becoming more intelligent and it is often hard to tell them apart from the real people. One way to check is to Tweet them and thank them for following you & initiate a conversation, the chances are that a real person will respond and a bot won’t, this also allows you to interact with your new follower.
• A lot of people don’t like companies who are there just to sell and often class these people as spammers. By all means link to your website, share regular updates about what your business is doing but don’t make your business the only focus of your page. Talk to people about different subjects, share articles that interest you, tweet photo’s, write and share blogs, etc. Useful and funny tweets are often retweeted increasing your visibility, and people who interact with their Twitter friends are more likely to be added to their follow Friday lists which will also attract new followers.

Twitter can be beneficial to many businesses but social networking is similar to seo in that it is not an overnight thing (unless you are a celebrity or have an existing well known brand). Investing time into your social networking strategy should be an important part of your marketing plan – and the best part about this form of marketing? It’s free so you have absolutely nothing to lose!

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

Three of the best ways you can do this online are through search engine promotion, social networking and with the use of email marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Optimisation

The goal of a search engine optimisation campaign is to make your website as search engine friendly as possible so that search engines recognise your website as being the best match for your keywords when they are typed into the search bar. By optimising your keywords, search engine promotion aims to give you greater visibility on the web.

With over 85% of the search engine market, Google is the most important search engine in terms of rankings.  Search engine promotion is not just about rankings though (although 36% of online shoppers do associate search engine placement with company prominence) but also about making sure people can find your website under a variety of relevant keywords to increase your traffic and in turn increase your enquiries, sales and profit.

As search engines crawl and rank various different pages on each website they visit, it is important that search engine optimisation is completed throughout the website. By optimising each page of the website individually, you can ensure that your website ranks well within various search results – this is especially helpful if you provide a broad spectrum of products and services.

A large majority of users won’t enter a website through the homepage, so each page should be treated and optimised as though it is the homepage. Important things to include are:

• Navigation – Don’t leave your visitors stranded once they’ve found your website! The rule is that you should never be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage, although this is a good rule to follow the most important thing is to make sure your navigation is clear and easy to follow no matter how many clicks away you are. Having clear navigation also help with search engine promotion as it allows robots to gather additional links from your website and crawl them.
• Content – Make sure that each page is content rich. Yes, pages are ranked individually but where they are ranked will be based on the content of each individual page. Having good product or service descriptions containing relevant keywords partnered with search engine promotion strategies provided by your search engine optimisation specialists will help to push those pages further up the rankings.
• Tags – Individual page tags are important from a search engine point of view. Page tags should reflect the page contents rather than being generic i.e. Company name or Contact, Product, etc.
• Don’t leave your customers or search engines in any doubt about what your product is – make sure it is reflected in the title tag, page description, image tags and product descriptions. Don’t keyword stuff your page, but make sure important information such as product names, colours, sizes and common alternative names are included.

Search Engines are changing the way they rank websites with an increasing emphasis on providing good quality content. Off-site links are still valuable but are beginning to have much less overall impact on how a website ranks. Good quality links are as important as good quality content.

Social Networking

Social Networking is fast becoming an important part of most companies’ marketing plans. Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook attract vast amounts of visitors on a daily basis, so they are the perfect place to make sure your business is seen.

Companies with social networking profiles can keep their customers and fans up to date with all the latest news and offers whilst also making their company or brand more accessible. Satisfied customers can ‘share’ your information and offers as well as their own experiences with their friends – an important part of the growing trend for social ecommerce.

If your target market is other businesses rather than consumers, there are social networking sites such as Linkedin and ecademy that allow you to link with other businesses whilst promoting your company and selected products or services.

The majority of social networking websites are free to join and create business pages on. Some social networks such as Facebook allow you to place a paid advert on the website.

Although social networking content is offsite, some search engines such as Google and Bing have started to include social networking content when ranking websites so this may have a positive effect on your search engine rankings.

Email Marketing

As I mentioned in Ecommerce & SEO: Your People, email marketing is a great way to keep your brand and products fresh in the mind of potential clients.

Offering a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ box on your website allows people who are already interested in your products or services to sign up for regular updates from your company.

Sending a regular newsletter allows you to keep subscribers up to date with the latest product launches and company news as well as allowing you to pass on useful tips and information. With email marketing campaigns you can also set up landing pages providing further information, and a good email marketing system should allow you to monitor the success of your campaigns.

Email marketing is also perfect for sending promotions and special offers to your subscribers keeping them up to date with all your best offers and encouraging brand loyalty and regular purchasing.

Newsletters can also be added to your website providing a new source of keyword rich information which integrates perfectly with a search engine promotion campaign.

Email marketing can be a steady source of enquiries and sales for your business.

Email marketing provides almost instant feedback, allowing you to monitor bounced email addresses and remove them from future mailings, view who opened your emails and what they did with them and see who has clicked on your links so you can see exactly what your customers are interested in and send better targeted emails in the future.

To read Parts 1 – 4 of the discussion visit the links below:

Ecommerce & SEO: The important part you play
Ecommerce & SEO: Knowing your market
Ecommerce & SEO: Your People
Ecommerce & SEO: Technical Requirements and Scalability

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
Search Engine Promotion Midlands

Successful online stores can generate large volumes of traffic and sales, and just the same as your bricks and mortar shop you will need someone to deal with the various stages of the transaction.

Some online stores choose to include a virtual assistant to answer any questions the customer may have before purchasing; if you use virtual assistants it is important that someone is available at the computer at all times in case a chat request comes through to ensure that you deliver a high standard of customer service.

Once the purchase has been made online, someone needs to process the order – to ship the product to the customer, resolve any issues upon receipt, deal with any returns – basically anything you would do for a regular customer entering your shop.

Considering the size of your business and existing client base can give you an idea of who is best to manage your online shop. If you have a small business with a couple of orders a month online, you will easily be able to manage the online shop as well as the running of your bricks and mortar business.

If you have a medium sized business generating regular daily orders, you may need to allocate the management of your ecommerce website to another member of staff.

Large businesses may require several people to concentrate on the management of their online store only.

Not only do you need to consider who will process your orders, many online stores are CMS based (content management system – this allows you to update the website yourself) so you will also need someone that can make regular updates to the site. Your ecommerce web designers should offer training on the system, meaning that changes such as adding new products, making changes to text and even changing images (although some images may be part of your websites template so you may not be able to edit them all) can all be completed in-house.

Regular website updates are critical, not only do they offer your customers something new and give them a reason to keep returning but also, search engines love to see that you are regularly updating your website so they know the information is current.

It is also important to consider who will work with your search engine optimisation company to ensure your campaign is targeting the areas that are most important to you. As your business progresses and the market changes, your keyword focus may also change. You may choose to expand into new locations or related product markets so your campaign will need to grow with your business to include these changes.

As you suggest new focuses to your SEO engineer they will be able to come back to you with suggestions and data for the best possible keywords and phrases to drive traffic to your website.

Your SEO engineer will also be able to provide regular reports showing where your target keywords are currently ranking, this along with regular telephone contact will allow you to monitor any changes and focus on any problem areas to resolve them quickly.

The social media aspect is also important to the promotion of your website. Google and Bing both recently confirmed that content posted on Twitter and Facebook can have an effect on the rankings of regular websites. Building up relationships through social networking sites also opens your business up to a wider audience and helps build better brand awareness.

Writing regular blogs on topics relating to your target market also provides a great opportunity to include your websites keywords. Sharing useful information through social networking websites via your blog can also attract your target market and new followers as many people use the search facility to find posts relating to specific interests.

Finally, online marketing such as email newsletters and promotions emails are a great way of keeping your subscribers up to date. Offering a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ link allows visitors to ‘opt in’ to receiving your updates so you already know that the people receiving the information are interested in your products or services.

Email newsletters can be quite time consuming to put together, often taking around a day to put together and check before sending. Although this can seem like a lot time and you may question the benefits, newsletters keep your subscribers up to date and keep your brand fresh in their minds until they are ready to make a purchase. Email newsletters can be a steady source of new enquiries.

Making sure you have the right people to handle all of the aspects of your online store allows you to decide exactly what you want your website to do and to consider the technical requirements and scalability of your systems and services.

To read Parts 1 & 2 of the discussion visit the links below:

Ecommerce & SEO: The important part you play
Ecommerce & SEO: Knowing your market

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
Ecommerce Web Design and Search Engine Promotion Leicester

Some things to consider when defining your target market are:

• What is your target area? Are you targeting local, regional, countrywide or global?
• Are you targeting businesses or consumers? If targeting businesses are they small, medium or large? If targeting consumers is it important to target families, couples or even the single market?
• Are you targeting the budget or premium market? Are you looking to sell lots of lower priced items or a few higher priced items?
• Who is most likely to purchase your products or services? Are they gender specific, for certain age groups or are they targeted to a certain activity, lifestyle or hobby?

Identifying your ecommerce stores target market at an early stage means that you can attract the right customers and not waste resources by targeting the wrong people. Targeting the right market allows you to achieve a higher return on investment.

Understanding your target market allows you to find the best and most relevant keywords for your website from the very beginning and gives you the perfect opportunity to ensure your website content is rich in these keywords. Knowing your market means you can search by location, price and specific interests and find the keywords that are most likely to drive traffic to your website.

Customers with a set budget may include words such as ‘cheap’ in their search terms, whereas people searching for more expensive products may include words like ‘luxury’ or ‘designer’. Using the correct keywords is important for successful conversion rates as targeting the wrong keywords is unlikely to attract suitable customers.

Knowing your target market is not just important when choosing keywords for search engine promotion but also when considering the design, layout and functionality of your website.

If your target is a younger market, you may want your website to be more eye catching with more activities and things to do. If you are targeting an older market, something cleaner and easy to navigate may be preferred. If your target is businesses then a professional look and feel are best.

From a technical point of view, this also allows you to decide the types of functionality you want to include. Websites targeting businesses may want to include features like having to register for an account to view prices or even special loyalty based prices for certain customers.

Consumer focused ecommerce websites may want to include features like ‘send to a friend’ so that visitors can share product recommendations and increase traffic through word of mouth; or shareable wish lists that allow visitors to save items for future reference or share on occasions like birthdays or Christmas.

Knowing your target market is important to the creation of your ecommerce website, but this is also the perfect time to identify your competitors and check out their online store to get a feel for how they target the market. I’m not suggesting you copy their website by any means, but knowing your competitors and understanding how they work will allow you to identify things that could work for you as well as things you wouldn’t want to include.

Having a list of websites you like (whether relevant to your target market or not) along with information about your target market gives your developer a better understanding of what you want to achieve with your website and allows them to suggest options to enhance your online store further.

Read Part 1 of the discussion at Ecommerce & SEO: The important part you play.

Please feel free to contact us with your comments via Twitter @impactwebsolns or ‘Like’ us on Facebook.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
Search Engine Optimisation & Ecommerce Web Design Midlands

In fact, 81% of all Internet users enter a website via a search engine. Search engines follow any link they can find and add lots of pages from the same website to the search results, making the chances of landing on the homepage just as likely as landing on any other page on the website!

So think of your online store as a bricks and mortar store. You want as many people as possible to enter your shop, so you open every single entrance – doors, windows and since it’s Christmas even the chimney! Now think about which departments in the shop these entrances are closest too and make a sign for each one e.g. ‘Enter here for Search Engine Optimisation‘, ‘Ecommerce web design this way!’.
Obviously you don’t want these signs to be massive, so little and often is the key. Make sure the signs are relevant, I don’t want to enter through the entrance marked ‘Search Engine Optimisation Midlands’ to find ‘Ecommerce Midlands’, that means I need to go searching for the right entrance and that will mean I’m unhappy by the time I get there!

This is exactly how your search engine optimisation should be, a handful of content relevant keywords per page giving you greater product placement in a wider range of search engine results, and a better chance of being found for all of your products.

As long as the keywords are relevant to your products and services it should be easy to add them into the content of the website. Product descriptions are a must in an ecommerce store as the customers are unable to physically touch and see the products, so base their decisions purely on the information provided, and a high quality of data also increases conversion rates. For a successful online store, products don’t always have to be the cheapest but they should be the best value! Even if your competitors are selling the exact same product you should still convince them that yours is the best! One important way to convey better value is with a professional looking website.

Websites that have been created in free site builders or created in WYSIWYG editors such as Frontpage often find it hard to compete with websites that have been custom built by a professional web designer – remember ‘Beauty is in the eye of the mouseholder’ and the visual aspect of a store is a must for most serious shoppers who want to deal with a professional organisation rather than someone who is going to take their money and ‘do a runner’.

Another way of conveying your market value is with good search engine rankings for the products and services you offer. 36% of online shoppers associate search engine placement with company prominence, something that you would expect from a reliable company, providing great value and service!

Intelligent keywords are crucial for attracting customers to your online store, which is why we get to know your business before we provide suggestions for the keywords that would be of most benefit to you. If you would like to discuss how a search engine promotion campaign could help to increase sales for your ecommerce website, call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Studio 2 Online
Ecommerce & Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

The invisible web (also known as the Deep Web, Dark Web, Hidden Web or Deep Net) is the vast amount of information on the Internet that cannot be found or indexed by search engines.

In summer 2008, Google had indexed 1 trillion websites, and even though this number seems unimaginably massive, it is still only a small fraction of websites on the Internet.

Mike Bergman, a computer scientist and consultant who is credited with coining the term ‘Deep Web’, has said that searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean; a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed.

Why would a website be part of the Invisible Web?

There are several reasons for this:

• Some people choose not to have their website, or even certain pages of their website included in search engines. Adding a robots.txt page allows the website owner to ask the robot not to index either the whole website or specific pages, this page is advisory though and certain robots may choose to ignore the request, this especially applies to spam bots who crawl the website looking for personal information such as email addresses.
• Some pages may not be accessible due to the inclusion of Captcha codes and other technical codes used to prevent access by robots.
• Some pages may be invisible because the content is generated dependent on user input such as answering questions like name, year of birth and postcode to generate a random user-name. Some pages where the content is generated based on user specifics such as country or previous browsing habits may also not be included.
• Secure websites that require a user to login to access private resources will not have the secure pages indexed in search engines.
• Non-html pages which include content such as flash, which cannot be read by search engines, will usually not be included. Again, pages which are linked to by applications such as flash will not be found as the robots cannot read the content to find the link.

• Unlinked or ‘Orphaned’ content pages are one of the reasons that pages people often want to be found on search engines are overlooked. When a robot or ‘spider‘ is crawling the web, it will gather any links on that page and add them to the list of pages they have to index. If there aren’t any links to a page, the spider won’t know to look for the page.

How do I make sure my website is part of the Visible Web?

Until your website has been crawled and indexed, it doesn’t exist as far as search engines are concerned.

Having a search engine campaign to promote your website will offer the obvious benefits of having an expert promoting your website. Getting your website indexed by search engines is a pretty simple process but making sure that your website can be found once it is there is a trickier process.

A good seo engineer will be able to advise you of the best keywords to ensure that your website is found in searches that are relevant to your product or brand. Once your keywords have been chosen, your search engine promotion company should work with you to ensure that your website content is keyword rich as well as concentrating on the usability of the website (keywords are important but making sure your content makes sense is also important!).

Another important thing your search engine optimisation adviser should do is to make sure that all of the pages to be indexed are linked to, one way they can achieve this is by including a site map – something that many search engine robots automatically look for.

As well as the on-site optimisation, your search engine consultants should also work on off-site optimisation, building links on industry specific sites to ensure that your website is always part of the Visible Web.

These are just some of the many optimisation techniques that your search engine marketing company will implement to promote your website and improve search engine rankings for your website.

Studio 2 Online are the experts in search engine promotion and ecommerce web design in Leicester. If you would like more information on how to become part of the visible web and increase your enquiries by being on the first page of Google, please call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani Cass
Client Services Officer – Studio 2 Online
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

When your website is considered for listing on the different search engines, they check to see whether the IP address the site is being hosted on has been used for spamming.  If it is, or has been before, then the search engines are likely to block your site from being listed and this obviously means that potential customers will not be able to find you.

If you end up in this unfortunate position then there are only really two options available to fix it and get your search engine optimisation campaign back on track; either contact the block list administrators, which is difficult and time consuming, or to move your website to a clean server.

If you want to get off to the best possible start with search engine optimisation and avoid any pitfalls , 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