Web Design Discussion

Many e-commerce sites don’t bother to optimize their
product pages because they only contain images. This means
you will be losing out on attracting lots of extra traffic
to your web site.

Search engines spiders will only index pages that are
correctly designed and contain lots of quality content.

Here are 10 ways to optimize your e-commerce web page:

1. Professional Design

Create a design that is attractive to visitors. Make sure
the colors blend well together. Don’t use background colors
that make the text hard to read. Black text on a white
background is still the easiest to read on computer
screens.

Vischeck shows how your site will appear to color blind
people. It provides a computer simulation of the entire
process of human vision.

Vischeck
http://www.vischeck.com/

2. Simple navigation

Don’t use images as search engines only read text. Don’t
use javascript as some visitors deliberately have this
turned off on their computers.

3. Validate code

Run your e-commerce web page code through an html validator
to check for html (xhtml) errors. HTML errors will slow the indexing
of your site by search engine spiders. HTML errors will
also slow the loading of your pages. This will cause
visitors to click elsewhere as they wait for your page to
load.

W3C Markup Validation Service
http://validator.w3.org/

Most search engines utilize links to build your search engine presence. The quantity and and quality of the links determine how well your site ranks. A common misunderstanding about links is that site owners think that links to or from any site will be good for them.

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Read Google’s Aging Delay for New Web Sites - Part 1

4. Create a subdomain

Web pages that are on subdomains are generally treated as part of the main domain.
Offer your client the option of building their site on a subdomain instead of using a new domain name.

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If you set-up a new domain/web site and want to get good rankings in Google right away, you will need to wait 6-8 months before your web site appears.

Why?

Artificial Link Inflation

One major factor for getting good rankings for Google is building links to your web site. Unfortunately this has resulted in people abusing the system by artificially inflating their link popularity and page rank for new domains by buying links, using special software programs or creating link farms. A link farm is created when you build a lot of mini sites then exchange links between them or build link popularity to your main site by pointing your mini sites to it.

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If want to get high rankings for your web site you need to find the keywords people would enter in the search engines to find the topic of your web site. If you design a site without the keywords people generally use you won’t get any visitors which means no traffic and therefore no sales.

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Google’s Universal Search feature now integrates news, maps, books, blogs, images, videos into its main search results. It now includes videos from youtube.com and video.google.com.

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1. Good Quality Content

Visitors link to content that provides information they want to read because it is interesting, entertaining or solves a problem.

2. Submit Content to Directories

Create an article from the content on your web site and submit it to ezine publishers and article directories. Place a link to your site in the resource box of your article. When readers place the article on their web site or in their ezine you automatically get a link back to your site.

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I only enjoy fishing when I catch lots of fish. Sometimes I fish for hours without catching anything, become bored and want to quit. Often the reason for not catching anything is because I am using the wrong bait. You need to use bait that is appropriate for the type of fish you wish to catch.

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Yahoo! recently announced a way you can specify what sections on your page you want crawled by their search engine spider. If you have parts of your web page that are unrelated to the main content (ie navigation, footer, etc) you can insert the “robots-nocontent” tag.

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To read my other posts about the robots.txt file, please visit:

What is robots.txt file?

How do you create a robots.txt file?

If you incorrectly format your robots.txt file, your web site files may not get indexed by the search engines.

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