The point of this post is to discuss some of the things that I tell my clients in the course of designing their website.  Inevitably, as any project moves towards a go-live, the client wants to talk about Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  This is natural, as any one who has spent their hard-earned money on a website wants to get it in front of as many people as possible.  My response to them is always the same.  If you are concerned about SEO, you should be concerned about your content. Your job, as the client, is to explain your website through content that is relevant to what you’d like your site to be searched under.  It’s my job, as your designer, to ensure that that content is structured in such a way that the search engines can find and index it correctly.  So below are a few things that I tell my clients to think about when they are concerned with SEO.

Choose Your Keywords

The first step of any optimization is to decide on a small set of keywords that they would like to target.  Most clients I’ve worked with are in the Austin area so they often find that they want to target keywords like “Austin Landscaping” or “Austin Family Doctor”.  The general idea is that, the more specific the keywords, the better as it will be very difficult for any new site to gain traction on Search Engines for broad keywords like “Family Doctor” or “Landscaping”.  You really have no shot at these unless you are able to get 100s of other sites to link to you, thus upping your PageRank.

Make Your Content Keyword Relevant

Once you’ve chosen your keywords, make sure that your content is relevant to it.  If you create a site about landscaping and are targeting landscaping related keywords, but you’re page is just images and never mentions landscaping…you’re completely missing the point.

As an example, I recently authored a post about image slideshows in jQuery.  I knew before going into it that I wanted to target very specific keywords such as “simple jquery image slideshow”, so I made sure that the title of my post included those keywords and wrote my content in a way that it was relevant to those keywords.  I now receive 20-30 visits per day on that post for those exact keywords.  I know I’ll never be on the front-page for “jQuery” or “slideshow”, but I’m okay with that because the post I wrote is really not targeted for those keywords.

Create Fresh Content and Keep Your Site Updated

This is the one recommendation I make to clients that is very rarely accepted.  You need to take the time to keep your site updated and create new content about your topic so that your site will stay relevant.  No one wants to go to a site that hasn’t been updated since 2003.  Stale content gives the impression that your company is either lazy, doesn’t put importance on its web interface, or is out of business.  So start a blog and talk about your industry or subject-matter expertise and keep the posts flowing.

Get Others To Link To You

This is the strategy where most SEO firms act unethically.  They take your money and pay for links to your site that come through bots, pay for click, or blog spam.  You don’t need this.  What you need to do is seek out other sites in your industry and discuss either advertising on their site or link exchanges.  Blogging also helps out here as others in your community will pick up on your posts and link to your site.  Google’s algorithm is based on links, so the more links you get here (and more importantly, the quality of your links) the better off you will be.

The important thing to remember is not to try to trick anyone.  People don’t like to be tricked and won’t stay at your site long if it advertises itself for something that it’s not.  Don’t paste 100 keywords in your meta tags.  Don’t blog spam.  And most importantly, don’t write content for search engines, write it for your users.

1. Payment – How will the site accept payment?  There are a variety of options: Paypal, Google Checkout, or Credit Card gateways like Authorize.net.  There are pros and cons about each.  Paypal and Google Checkout generally have lower fees for accepting payment but they often require that your customer have a Paypal or Google account to complete the transaction (Paypal allows customers to use credit cards if they don’t have a Paypal account, however).  Accepting credit cards directly on your site is often the simplest method for your customers, but requires extra effort when building the site to integrate with the gateway, secure the transactions, and record orders.  Credit card gateways often have a monthly gateway fee on-top of the per-transaction fee so they are often more costly than simply using Paypal or Google Checkout.
2. Shipping – How will you ship your products and charge your customers for shipping.  I’ve generally seen a variety of methods of dealing with this issue.  Some sites charge a flat rate per item for shipping.  This is the simplest method but can often lead to inacurate shipping charges (the customer is either over-charged or under-charged for the actual shipping charge).  Other sites charge a rate based on the item’s weight and the shipping destination.  This is more accurate, but requires that you weigh each item you plan on selling and be able to store that weight on each item for your checkout process.  Additionally, you need to think about who you want to use to ship your packages.  Do you want to use USPS, UPS, DHL, or FedEx?  Do you want to provide a real-time shipping calculator for each service on your site so that customers can determine their actual shipping charges when they checkout?  All of these things need to be planned so that the designer building your site can correctly implement the shipping process for your site.
3. Communicating with Customers – How will you communicate with your customers?  At a minimum, you should always send the customer an email when the order was placed.  However, you may also want to send additional emails when their order has shipped.  Also, will you want to provide your customers with an option to sign up for special offers?  This requires some extra functionality for your site that keeps track of customers who are signed up for your special offers and their email address and also provides you with a way to send out a bulk email.
4. Order Processing - When you process orders, what pieces will you want to automate?  Do you need to integrate your orders with QuickBooks?  Do you want to be able to print shipping invoices automatically for each order?  Do you want to automatically send your customers their tracking number when their order has been scheduled to ship?  Do you want to be able to issue refunds through your website?  All of these are features that clients often over-look but could make their lives much easier when it comes to processing orders from their online store.
5. Organization of the Products – Many clients know that they want to provide items in their store, but they’ve not thought about how they should be organized.  There are many questions you should ask yourself:  Will I want to feature certain products in certain areas on the website?  Will I need product categories and sub-categories?  If an item is out of stock, do I want to continue to offer it on the site and fill the order when the item comes back in stock?  Do I want to schedule sales on certain items or categories?  All of these questions, if answered before construction on your website has started, will help you get a more robust and reliable site.  Modifying your site after it has gone life in order to add one of these features is always possible, but can lead to bugs or broken functionality.

These are just a few things to think about when building an e-commerce store.  Generally, the more thought you put into your site, the better your experience will be.  I always encourage clients to put together a thorough request for proposal.  This has two major benefits: 1) it enables you to get accurate estimates from various web designers (and be able to hold them to the estimate when they later balk at adding functionality) and 2) it gives you a good vision of what you expect your site to do when it eventually goes live.

If you are interested in an online store or daily deal website, please contact us through our contact form about your project.  We’d be happy to answer any of your questions and provide you with an accurate estimate of how long it would take and how much it would cost to build your website.