With fictitious holidays all over us like a bad rash, “Cyber Monday” stands out with the most blatant aim – Getting our money. Still, you have to congratulate whoever came up with this concept, it is genius and it’s bold and not afraid to deliver its message, almost like a Lynx advert, except you’d have to swap the genius part for overt misogyny.

Cyber Monday is the Monday that follows Black Friday; the opening of Christmas gift hunting season on the high street.

However, instead of scaring shop workers with demanding requests for life perfection, people will face a friendly looking website and avoid the rage caused by too many people in little space.

Though they may still be faced with those annoying pop-up surveys…

The Marketing aspect of Cyber Monday is genius, no question about it. And when there are millions of people flooding the internet with card details at the ready, it’s even more vital to have a functioning website that will not collapse under the pressure of this 24-hour feeding frenzy.

The Virtual Shopping Basket

If the navigation works like a charm, customers are of course more likely to buy the products, but the last hurdle before getting an order in is that dreaded checkout process.

Until then, shoppers are frivolously adding bits and bobs to their virtual baskets, so when it comes to paying, it’s make or break.

Good SEO will not only get customers through the online shopping gates but it will keep them there, preferably with no easy way to navigate away without a page refresh, until they make a purchase that is.

Good Website/Bad Website

An easy to navigate website that finds the right products within seconds will not only satisfy the demanding shopper, but also make them reach again for that worn out piece of plastic.

However, a bad website is the equivalent of a cold atmosphere after stepping into a deserted cafe on a Sunday morning, trying to catch the attention of a grumpy barista, and getting served instant coffee for the price of real espresso (true story).

The experience is spine-chillingly bad, and one vouches to never visit that place ever again.

But with so much competition on the internet matched with its large-scale reach, no one has to.

A website is never the only one of its kind on the global high street, and so this reception is the last thing a company wants pushed on a customer.

Looming Deadline

This year’s Cyber Monday has now passed but Christmas is only now getting into the hot zone, where the looming deadline of the last day of the timely Christmas delivery gets ever closer.

Instead of bombarding customers with SALE products that never ever seem to be out of sale, improving the website and its usability is the first important step in any business’s lifespan.

So getting ready for, what will surely be another record breaking spending day in the next year, think about a friendly user interface, and good SEO.

Customers may not be aware of it, but it should be top of Santa’s wishlist for any online business in 2011.

We speak to a lot of Clients who don’t realise that it is extremely important for their site navigation, (commonly referred to as internal links or information architecture) to be extremely well considered so that the right pages get indexed easily and regularly by the search engine spiders. Connected to the site architecture is the preference that no one page contains more than 100 links, this keeps the quality score assigned to each link at a respectable level and helps the spiders move through the site properly.

Crawl Priority

To start, it helps to understand how the spiders prioritise the pages, and then crawl the site.

Spiders will visit popular pages more often, popular pages are defined by the number of back-links and the site architecture should correlate with this. For example:

• Your homepage, and chosen landing pages, should be the most popular with the most back-links
• First and second level category pages should be fairly popular but containing less back-links than the homepage
• At the bottom of the priority are the deepest pages, these will be pages such as news pages, product pages, service price lists etc

The spiders will enter the site via a landing page, this doesn’t need to be the homepage, they will then follow links through each page looking to index the whole site. They don’t like being sent in circles and they don’t like feeling lost in too many links, so it’s important that your site architecture makes it as easy as possible for the spiders to do their job, whilst getting all the pages which need indexing, indexed. Ideally you want the spiders to be able to index everything within three clicks of arriving on the site, regardless if that is your homepage or your deepest category page.

XML Site Maps

XML site maps are seen as the quick fix for architecture issues, and this is what they are. They do not resolve problems in the site architecture and internal navigation, they merely hide the problems so that you are unaware of them.

In an ideal world, you would not add an XML site map until you know the website architecture is sound and secure and most importantly indexing on it’s own. Below are some basic architecture tips to get you started.

Keep Architecture Flat

You want to keep your architecture as flat and easy to navigate as possible, whilst retaining the three click rule (if a spider lands on one of your deeper pages, can they reach the other pages within three links?)

In a brand new website the following structure is a common one used with the 100 links per page being the absolute maximum you should have on each page.

At the top: Homepage with no more than 100 links per page
First Level: Categories – no more than 100 pages (each page has no more than 100 links)
Second Level: Sub-Categories – no more than 10,000 (each page has no more than 100 links)
At the bottom: Detail/Products – no more than 1,000,000 pages

Index and rankings are determined by how much authority each page has, the higher the domain authority of your site the more links you can realistically get away with including on each page. As a rough guide, if your website already holds some domain authority (DA) you can increase the links on each page as follows:

DA 7-10 = 250 links
DA 5-7 = 175 links
DA 3-5 = 125 links
DA 0-3 = 100 links

So, the smaller the number of links the spiders have to follow to index the whole site, the happier they are and the more weight each page will hold.

Faceted Navigation

This is a common and useful aspect of ecommerce sites, which allows you to pick facets of a product which are important to you. For example, you could pick the category of T-Shirts, pick the colour black, and the size Medium, the results you are shown then directly correspond with what you specifically want. In essence the website has ignored anything which doesn’t contain the facets you have chosen.

Setting up faceted navigation can be tricky, and you need to keep in mind that the primary facet pages won’t rank, you want the deeper facet pages to rank as these are the one’s that will help the spiders discover all of the product pages.

When setting up faceted navigation, some of the things to keep in mind are:

URL

You must have a unique URL for each facet level. The URL’s should be clear and not complicated and hard to follow:

Clear URL: www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/black/medium
Unclear URL: www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/all/tshirts/all/black/all/medium

You also want to ensure that whatever route somebody takes to reach this facet level the same URL is shown so for example:

Somebody clicks on Tshirts, then Medium, then Black the URL they end up on should still be www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/black/medium and not www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/medium/black which would result in you creating unnecessary duplicate content issues!

Adding & Removing Facets

You should make it easy for your customers to add or remove additional facets as they see fit.

As they add facets to their search these should be displayed as follows so that any or all facets can be removed by the user:

Tshirts [remove]
black [remove]
medium [remove]

So that they can easily choose which facets can be automatically generated from the results meta data so it is easy for you to display the number of results within that facet, for example:

Blue [35]
Green [23]
Yellow [1]

No Index

Any pages which could be considered as duplicate content should be no-indexed, the spiders will still visit these pages but they won’t index them. To keep a page out of the index you want to add some code to the page as follows:

<meta name = “robots” content = “noindex”> – This will make the page no index
<link rel = “canonical” href = “domainname.co.uk/tshirts/black”> – This will take the spiders back to the correct page.

Filtering & Pagination

Another common aspect of ecommerce sites is filtering results. This is where you can choose a filter which will sort the products in a certain way, for example only showing 10 items per page (creating pagination or multiple pages), or showing lowest priced items first.

The ideal way to deal with pagination in category results is to programme the page to show all results rather than writing each page of results as page 1, page 2, etc.

Once the main category page has been created you can then use javascript to create the pagination. Search engine spiders don’t follow javascript so you don’t risk duplicate content from having multiple pages under each content, but all of the products are indexed.

Plan, Plan, and Plan Again

Don’t under-value the benefit of properly planning your website. Most of our examples have referred to ecommerce sites, but the same principal applies to brochure sites. Plan to succeed and your website will be a spider’s navigational dream and you will be rewarded with good search results and no duplicate content issues.

In summary, the number one rule for you to keep in mind when you are planning your navigation is that you want as few pages as possible to be indexed, whilst allowing for each and every product page to be indexed.

To increase traffic to your website is of course a major part of an online marketing strategy but don’t overlook the importance of what your visitors might be experiencing when they get there. Afterall, high volumes of traffic are useless to you if these visitors are not converting. There can be many factors to consider when looking at low or falling conversion rates.

Little glitches or errors will frustrate the user and more than likely turn them away; like a search function that doesn’t work properly or a slow loading page. Worse still, a shopping cart that fails to add the products or forms that have errors.

There is one particular tool that you may find very helpful for looking at how your visitors are interacting with your site and in particular handling your forms. Have a look at www.clicktale.com

Broken Links between pages or image links that go to the wrong place will not inspire confidence in the potential customer.

Poor Quality images of products will not show them to their best advantage or entice people to buy.

These are just some of the reasons visitors may exit your site and seek out your competititor. It is important to have your usability testing done by someone who is not already familiar with the site as they will pick up navigation issues for example. A new user will really tell you how intuative or easy it is to buy from your site.

Remember too that webusers can be fickle and unforgiving as they scan for the results they want. They also have increasingly high expectations making them harder to satisfy with sub standard websites. Don’t make them search too hard or make them fill endless forms or they will quickly loose interest. Website usability testing finds out how much time users might take to search for a particular product or item on your site; what are the difficulties faced by them while conducting the search; do they face any problems related to your website design and features, such as navigating from one web page to the other, opening up links, downloading images or content, and the like.

In a nutshell, website usability testing is an approach to calculate the ease-of-use quotient of your site. Here at SIM we have perfected a system of usability testing that has been invaluable to our clients. Give us your target audience demographic and we can arrange for comprehensive testing of your site with a full report.

Based on the website usability testing analysis, you can then apply the changes and correct glitches and errors in the knowledge that you will be improving your customer’s experience.

The credit crunch isn’t going to dent the volume of sales made online this Christmas, in fact its more likely to bring increased sales as people search for bargains.  The season starts early on the internet so now is the time to ensure your site is ready for all those lovely visitors.

Here are some tips to get your website ready for Christmas:

• Have Special Offers on your home page – not too many to overwhelm people but enough for them to see that these are great deals.  Think of offering loss-leaders and products that will encourage sales of additional products.
• Have Featured Products on your home page – these get indexed by the search engines quickly and attract more attention from browsing visitors.
• Make your Delivery Policyvery clear – free delivery under X £££s and say how many days it will take to arrive. At this sensitive time of year make it very clear what is your last date for ordering to ensure delvery by Christmas
• Can your Images be improved? Great images sell product, its a fact!
• Make sure shoppers can easily find your Returns Policy – it will give them confidence that you have their interests at heart.
• Make your shop window Seasonal – the same way that shop windows in high streets are decorated for Christmas your website shop front can do the same to inspire that seasonal spirit.
• Customer Service is essential, especially as the big day approaches – make sure people feel they can get the support they need.  A phone number is ideal and online support is also effective for demonstrating that your website is attended.  We recommend Provide Support for this.
• It may sound obvious but do your visitors know what you sell?  I have seen many ecommerce websites that sell such an eclectic mix of products that its really not clear where they are positioned.  You have only 3-5 seconds to make a good impression and grab your customer’s attention so don’t confuse them with anything – keep it really simple.

Good luck for the coming season – CapGemini recently predicted that online sales in the UK will increase by 60% in the three months up to Christmas so this is definitely the time to be paying attention to your online marketing strategy.  Give us a call on 0845 838 0936 if you are interested in driving more traffic to your website this season – there is a very good chance we can help you quickly.

As the singularly most important thing that the vast majority of websites want to achieve it is essential that you measure your conversions from all your different sources.  If you don’t care whether your website brings you conversions then this post is not for you.

However, if you want your website to make you money… read on!

A well optimised website will bring targeted traffic not only through search but through referrals too (referrals are visits that come from links on other people’s websites).  Getting targeted traffic to your site is fantastic but then you have to convert them.

Most SEO companies stop at getting traffic to your site, in fact the vast majority of SEO companies stop at getting you rankings! Because our company is all about Strategy we look to the very end of the process and understand your business objectives and what the goals are for your website.

Think about what you are trying to achieve…

• Are you looking for completed sales?
• Sign-ups to your newsletter?
• Completed enquiry forms?
• Contact by phone or email?
• Increased and consistent traffic so you can sell advertising?

Whatever you want your website to achieve, whatever your conversion is, you should be measuring it at every stage so that you can get more of them. Do you know where your best traffic comes from? Do you know which are your money phrases?  Do you know what aspects of your site are your conversion factors? What is the route from landing page to conversion that works best? Do you know where the weak areas are on your site? How does your competitor offer a better experience than you do?

Knowing the answers to questions like these will improve your conversions so that your website makes you more money.

If you are looking to increase targeted traffic to your website so that you can increase your conversions contact us today.