For past few years, search has meant Google for quite a lot of people, with Bing and Yahoo just closely following. The latest news anyway is that the alliance that Bing and Yahoo have formed has increased their market share, which might turn out to be a bad news for Google. Whether you are optimising for Google, Bing or Yahoo, the truth remains that you need to put some efforts in bringing your website to gain better positions in their search results. Here are, therefore, some of the common principles that search engines follow in ranking websites:

Improved Click through Rate (CTR) and reduced bounce rate

Your website’s CTR, in other words, the number of times it is clicked in the search divided the number of times it is displayed, depends on where exactly the site is placed in the search engines. This indicates that it is not enough to just bring the website to the front pages but you need to make the visitors click on it. The number of times visitors click and the number of times they return to your site make a difference here. In fact, even the time frame that visitors take to return to the site is taken into account, which means that you cannot get away with just a better position in the search engine, but you need to make the visitors come to you and convince them to return to you some way or the other.

Logically following the CTR is the bounce rate, which represents the number of visitors who reach your website and bounce away to other sites almost immediately as they couldn’t find what they required. Today, search engines, especially Bing, has started measuring the bounce rate, if the visitor returns to the result pages within less than minute, it doesn’t really look good for your site as it would mean the site couldn’t provide what the visitor wanted. On the other hand, if the visitor could stay in the site for a longer duration the search engine would consider the site compelling.

Schema.org

A protocol supported by Google, Bing and Yahoo, Schema.org helps you to mark your content according to their type so that the search engines can recognise them as they are such as images, product descriptions, locations, reviews, etc. Schema also helps you in defining the semantic relationships between the different components. Schema is still not known to boost your rankings; however, being promoted by search engines to reduce their own costs and efforts, we can safely assume that they are definitely going to add extra weight to those websites that use the protocol.

Original and quality content

This is perhaps the most common and oft-repeated requisite in any SEO related article or blog post, that a website requires quality content to boost its ranking. And there is no surprise in that. If you want visitors to come to your site and spend their time there, you definitely have to offer them what they need. A good website needs information relevant to its users that would help them do transactions with you. And original and quality content does not mean some random words, keywords, obviously, but well thought out ideas logically and sensibly put together in sentences that have no errors.

User friendliness

A user friendly website is not one that has a lot of images and interaction; in fact, it is far away from that. User friendliness is a combination of different factors, the content mentioned above being one of them. The right images in the right resolution, informative videos, faster loading time, easier navigation are all part of the combined effort of making a website user friendly. It is easy to put one or two of these factors in the site, but users tend to stay back in a website when all these elements are put together to make the site attractive and relevant and helpful. Besides, you need to know the right balance in which you need to include these items. For example, if you add too many videos, the site would load slower. At the same time, you cannot completely avoid the graphics to make the website totally empty of colours and graphics. In other words, it is balance that you need here.

Social media

Of course, there is no website now without a link to its social networking profile. In fact, adding the necessary buttons for social media like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is not just necessary but not adding it can take away points from you in the eyes of search engines. In fact, Bing has admitted that it uses the data from Twitter and Facebook in its algorithms to check the website’s popularity among the users. You can make use of this fact is by adding these buttons at the strategic locations of your web pages.

Relevant URL, keywords and meta descriptions

The links and URLs you choose for your website play a pivotal role in making users click them. Choosing a random link that doesn’t seem to have any relation to the business you do or the keywords you are focussing can make the users ignore your site even if it is in the front pages of the result pages. Therefore, keyword-rich links could divert visitors to you who might end up converting once you convince them to buy from you. The same rule applies for the keywords and meta descriptions you choose for the site.

It is important that you realise how important the keywords you choose are. For this you might have to do a detailed research on the keywords you have chosen as well as keywords of your competitors. If your website is not optimised for the keywords related to your business, no matter how much you try to make the website attractive, visitors might not come to you and convert. To ensure that your website is optimised adequately for the keywords, make sure you do a thorough analysis and optimise the website for those keywords. This also means that you should not stuff the website with the keywords and thus give an impression of spamming.

The descriptions that you provide for the website to accompany the URL in the search pages is as important as the positions they occupy there. Most visitors would be reading your titles and descriptions before they choose a website to click. Providing relevant details that are short and at the same time to the point can make a favourable impression on the users and they would click your website.

Good crawlability and structure

To ensure that your website is crawled and indexed by the search engine robots you need to make the site easily crawlable. Adding an HTML sitemap could help you in this as you can include all the necessary web pages that you wish to be indexed. Similarly, each time you add a new page, make sure that you add the page in sitemap. Remember that unless you add the pages in the sitemap they will not be indexed by the search engines.

Good internal navigation is also important for the search engines to go through all the important and optimised pages in the website. Also, this is important for the visitors also that they can move from one page to another and find the page they want quite easily. Hence, if you have added external links in your web page, do make sure that the search engines do not leave your site through them. Add proper alt tags for images so that search engines could read them.

To make your website a favourite for your targeted audience the list above is not entirely sufficient. However, you could concentrate on them as the first step in optimising the website so that you start improving your position in the result pages. After all, these preliminary steps would help you in establishing your position in search engines first before you starting moving up to reach the front pages.

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Historically a website has between 5-8 seconds to perform the initial conversion – keeping them on the site. If a visitor is unable to see something of interest within that time then they will simply leave the page and visit someone else’s. This is why it is so important to have eye catching ‘calls to action’ in prominent areas of the home page.

So what is a ‘call to action’?

Simply put, a ‘call to action’ is something that will raise interest levels in the visitor sufficiently to do something. This is why many websites ‘showcase’ offers and promotions on their home page.

Every website home page should have at least one call to action, inviting visitors to act now rather than later. But how do you encourage visitors to act? How do you create an effective call to action?

An end user will only complete a call to action when they see the benefits of a product to them or feel the need for that service. It is massively beneficial to quickly outline your item or offer as efficiently as possible. Combining an attractive image of a featured item with a highlighted special offer price can work very well, but where you place this ‘call to action’ is also very important. Make sure it is visible as soon as the site is loaded rather than having to scroll down to see it.

While it is a web designers main role to ensure that the asthetics and functionality of a website are up to the task, whose job is it to look at the conversions after it goes live? Very often you are left to work this out for yourself if your e-commerce package is off-the shelf. This is where we are different. All of our bShop v4 clients have the benefit of a personal E-commerce relationship manager to assist them in the successful management of their online store.

If you are not already using Bshop4, then please contact us now and ask how we can help you convert your under-performing e-commerce site to our sophisticated online marketing system.

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So, what can you do about it? If you are a webmaster you’d know that most of the search engines consider website speed while ranking a page. This is a blessing and a bane for you depending on which side of the line you are. If your site loads faster it gets an upper hand over all others that loads slower. Whereas, if it loads slower you are in for trouble as your site might not even be seen by users.

Website speed becomes a crucial issue if your website is an e-commerce site, or in other words, if you do your business through your online presence. If you find your website becoming listed among those slow loading sites, well, it is time to wake up and do something about it. So first of all, what is a slow loading website? Today, if a website takes more than even 2 seconds it is considered to be a slow loading site. So you know how important it is to get it faster and smarter. Let’s check out a few ways in which you can make a website load faster.

Get a fast server host

Most of the shared hosting servers are cheaper but slower as well due to high traffic. Hence, if you find your site getting slower and slower to load its time you change the hosting server. The best option would be to get an independent one or go for lesser known ones.

Use fewer images for your web pages

An image-heavy page can take time to load. Same is the case for a page with Flash and animations. For a site that sells a product it could be difficult to lessen the number of pages. However, fewer images can make your site load faster. Even reducing the resolution can make a difference to the site, even if it is that of milliseconds.

Use external Java

Javascript can slow down your site for many seconds. Of course, you cannot help using Java and what you could do here is to externalise it so that viewers find it after the page is loaded.

All these methods can increase the website loading speed considerably; however, at the same time you cannot simplify your website so much that no user is interested to browse it. Also, if it is an e-commerce site you’ll definitely have images of products that you cannot help adding. There are in fact many ways in which you can keep up the speed while making the page attractive. Check out a few of the methods here – http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html.

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But imagine that you are shopping online and you enter a website to purchase a product. You choose a product and went through its descriptions and now you want to purchase it. What is the next thing you would do? Find more details about the company and how reliable it is. So which page do you need next? Of course, the About us page. And if you don’t find that page there? Check out for the contact us page, right? And what if you don’t find that either? Well, you wouldn’t think of spending more time in that website, however good the product is.

This is actually quite a common scenario for there are many websites that might have a lot of products but without providing details about themselves. Much as you would like to disagree, lack of details about yourselves can defeat the whole purpose of having an e-commerce website. So let’s check out some pages that are important for your website besides your product pages.

About Us

If you have browsed online many times you’d have noticed that there aren’t many sites that don’t have an About us page. Even if you have very little to say it is better to have a page where you can talk about yourself, your aim in creating the website, your business values and so on. It is not necessary that your visitors would read each and every word you have written there. Still, they would notice if the page is absent completely.

About Us page creates credibility. It gives the visitors confidence to buy from you. It tells your customers what you have to offer them and why they should buy from you and not from anybody else. You can give them some details like how long back you go and some recognitions that you have received like awards and accreditations. These details add to your reliability.

Another advantage is of course that you get another page of content with some of your key phrases that can be crawled by the search engines.

Contact Us

It is easy to just add your contact number at the footer of all the pages and forget about the contact us page. However, the message that your customer gets is something different. Lack of a proper contact us page tells them you are really not particular about being contacted! Besides, a physical address actually adds to your credibility.

So why not have a good contact us page with all the details like your email id, physical address and phone number? And if you have different products and departments, provide the contact details of each. In case you expect overseas customers provide the timings at which they can contact you. All these can add to the impression you make to the customers and, ultimately, increase your sales.

Also, this is a page that you can optimise for some local keywords. So why give up on an opportunity to make the search engines happy?

Sitemap

The search engine benefits of having a sitemap in a website, especially an e-commerce website, is huge, but as we are here discussing the benefits from the user point of view let’s focus on that. You might have a very organised and well-made website, however, a sitemap can take your users to the page they want in just1 or 2 clicks. It can also give the user an overall picture of your business and show them the whole list of all your product categories and sub categories. It gives them an idea of the website in a nutshell. So why hesitate? Give them a sitemap that is as well-designed as your website.

Legal information and policies

This is one page that most people might just copy and paste from somewhere else. Not only that is wrong but it could harm you as well. You need to be sure of the policies of your own business and make sure your customers know them as well. Legal notices and privacy policies are therefore highly important. Their absence will only create an impression that you are unprofessional.

Other than making your website unique, these pages are beneficial to you as they let you add more content and thus add value in the eyes of search engines. Hence, there is nothing that you would lose in spending some time creating these pages and uploading them. If they don’t add customers, they are sure not to reduce them, at the very least.

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• About Us

Put yourself in the shoes of a buyer. When you want to purchase a product online what is the first thing you’ll do? You’d visit their About Us page to collect some details of the company and its history and mission. The About Us page is where you reassure your visitors about your credibility and quality. It is where you could display your affiliations, awards and associations and thus create an impression on the visitor.

• FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

It is normal for a customer to have a lot of questions before purchasing an item from you. An FAQ page does for you what you cannot do in person for an online sale, that is, answer the questions that your customers might have. As easy as an online transaction sounds, it could be as confusing to some. Not getting the necessary answers to some of the questions, a customer might leave the website without making a purchase. Hence, make an FAQ page that is linked to all product pages (ideally there should be only a single click from the FAQ to other pages). This way, while browsing the products the customer can find his answers and thus proceed to click the “buy” button.

• Testimonials

Many times you would’ve asked for the opinion of your friends and acquaintances about a product or company before availing its services. The customers who have used the product before are the best option to get an actual idea of its quality and performance. Most customers therefore would like to check the testimonials of the previous customers before making a purchase. That is why it is effective to add a Testimonials page to your site. If it is difficult to get the testimonials in the beginning you could try distributing a few products for free and getting the feedback on that.

• Privacy policy

Many online customers wonder whether their information would be secure while purchasing a product. With the privacy policy detailed and explained you can let the user purchase in peace.

An ecommerce website, above everything else, needs user friendliness and ease of use. If you remember while creating a page that it might make a huge difference when a user is making his purchase decision you can actually create a website that can meet the requirements of a customer efficiently and effectively.

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