We are provides of market leading ecommerce solutions to UK Businesses, our team combine the best of creative design with simple to use but powerful and functionally rich ecommerce websites.
For businesses, “Location, Location, Location” is as critical for websites as it is for a retail outlet. In the case of websites the ‘location’ is the site’s ranking with search engines. Getting a good ranking with search engine can make a big difference in the number of people who visit your site. This is where Search Engine Optimisation comes in.
For Europeans users, Google controls almost 95% of the market, with Microsoft controlling 3% (split between Bing and Yahoo). The rest of the search engine market is controlled by smaller search engines; most of these use either Google or Bing to provide the search result. Based on this when most people talk about their rankings, they usually mean Google.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is the art of increasing the ranking of a website or page within search engine results. With the calculation of the results being a carefully guarded secret and search engine providers always looking to improve the quality of the results, Google is leading the way by introducing usability data into their calculations, codename Panda.
There are many factors which affect your rankings and of all of these, content is King. Many of the other factors have a relationship or dependency on the content of your pages. Content should always be written for the reader, with a clear understanding of the key phases you are targeting. Over use of key phrases will make the content difficult to read and Google will reduce your rating, use too few and your content will not be considered relevant (or not as relevant as other content).
One of the main external factors which affect your website’s ranking is external linking. It is clear from research that links from quality sites in the same field as yours have a much greater positive effect than from poor quality or non-related sites.
Achieving good quality links to your site requires you build relationships with other organisations within your field. If people feel your content has value, they may add links from their site to your content.
You have a limited time to persuade a user to choose the link to your website over your competitors. This pitch is made up of two sections - a title and a description. These two elements are controlled at each individual page level and are worth spending time over.
If you are providing Services then it’s more important to also ensure your details are correct on directory services like Yell.co.uk and that these sites link to your website(s).
CPC or Pay per Click as it is commonly referred to is an additional option to increase the visibility of your website. In basic terms, you pay the search engine provider every time someone clicks on an ad that takes them to your website. When considering this, remember just because you paid Google for the user to visit your site does not mean they will actually purchase anything. If you’re not careful you can spend a large amount of money for little sales success.
If you are getting a good ratio of visits to purchases then Cost per Click may be worth looking at. You should be thinking about the ROI (Return on investment) of CPC.