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Shopfitter provides an excellent platform upon which to build your web based business - but there's a lot more to selling online successfully than just building the web site itself.
Follow these guidelines to improve your chances.
Home page
It may seem obvious but the home page is the most important page on your website; its value in terms of page rank and search indexing is around 50% of the total site with respect to search engine robots. Firstly, it is the only file that truly exists at 'root' level; that is, it is the default page on your domain (www.site-name.com) without having to type in a further filename (/contact-us.htm, for example). As a result you need to ensure that you have relevant key words and phrases included in the text. This should be written in proper sentences and paragraphs rather than just a list so that it is indexed as valuable content rather than keyword 'spamming'. Its also advisable to alter the text content of the homepage regularly, once a month as a minimum. This provides a 'creation/modified date' on the web server that the robots log and they compare the content to see if its changed, fresh content tends to be given a higher ranking.
That covers the SEO and getting visitors to your site, but what do they see when they arrive? The page should display images of your goods, quick alternative links, such as to your special offers category and leaders for information your site provides. In general, a simple layout with images, links and key words and phrases in the text will work best.
Mail Order Trees and Atholl Glens homepages are good examples, they have a mail list sign up form and special offers links.
Categories
When creating your product catalogue you will need to add categories for the products to be part of. Ideally, these should be given names that both describe the goods within and be a search term that prospective customers will use when looking for products.
For example, one of our customers (The Mountaineer Shop) sells outdoor activity clothing; one of their ranges is waterproofs by the manufacturer Paramo. They entitled this category 'Paramo Waterproofs' and if you click here it will show you the results of a search on Google using the search term suggested.
As
a standard feature Shopfitter creates category pages with thumbnail images
and 'buy now' functionality. The layout on these pages is determined
by the template, however, you can add your own content, text and/or
images, above and below the product listing by using hotspots 1 and
2. To enter your content double click on the category name or 'C'
icon, a new panel will open which will display a summary of the products
in the category. Click on the 'Hotspots' tab just to the right of
the summary tab to open the appropriate hotspot panel. Hotspot 1
enters content above the product listing and hotspot 2 adds it below.
For an example look at 15mm.co.uk.
The category hotpots give more opportunity to add relevant, key word rich items that assist with search engine optimisation.
Products
The product details are added by filling in the fields on the panel, some of these are critical from a search engine optimisation point of view. The product name entered is used as the page title and appears in the browser window, this is matched with content by the search robots to give 'relevancy' points. Therefore if your customer searches for "Lavazza Gold" and, like Pennine Tea & Coffee have done, you have a product with that name then your web page is highly relevant in the search.
The Summary Description field (also known as 'One Line Description' in some versions of Shopfitter) is duplicated on the category page so should not be left blank. The Detailed description is where highly detailed, product specific descriptions should be typed; these should contain important key words so that the search engines index information relevant to your prospective customers.
In addition, include the key words and phrases in the 'Keywords (meta data)' field, separated by either ; or , so that higher relevancy points are scored.
Product images are essential to help convert browsers in to buyers. A
picture give the customer a much better idea of what your product
is and therefore more confidence in parting with their money. Its
worth taking trouble over images, poor quality pictures won't do
your products any favours so if you take them yourself learn to enhance
the images using Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro or a similar package.
Info Pages
You can create as many information pages as you like in Shopfitter and
these can be used for all your non-product content. These should
include terms of trade, contact details as well as pages for other
info that will be of interest to your customers. Once again, content
on info pages can be used to attract targeted visitors to your site,
they can be loaded with current news on your market sector which
will give higher ranking; or used for gift ideas, recipes, advice
or instructions on how to use your goods.
Info page naming is important in the same way as product and category names are, try to use search terms where you can.
Ethical web marketing
Any attempt to trick the search engines, such as white text on a white background or a css class with display="none" is likely to get your site banned from Google. These are termed unethical methods because they attempt to cheat the systems. Google stated in their recently published patent that a huge amount of their time is spent in combatting these techniques and that when a site is found using them it will be permanently blocked, and will never be reinstated. Given that 80% of all site traffic arrives via a search engine using unethical techniques, despite any short term gains, are not worth the risk.
Image Optimisation
Images should be added to your site to illustrate the goods or services that you wish to sell. They don't really add anything for search engine optimisation (except for the alternative text which MUST be added to all pictures) but they are very important for converting site visitors into buyers.
The images should be one of three formats, jpg, png or gif. Some sites use bmp files however these are not really recommended for web use. The image files need to be created at the correct size for the site; generally a large image no more than 400 pixels wide is best. Shopfitter creates the thumbnails automatically so you don't need to worry about those. File size is a very important factor, the larger the file the longer it takes to display on your customer's screen. To resize and save optimosed for web it's best to use a graphics package such as Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro or something similar. We have recently discovered a free package called Xnview and it has lots of useful image manipulation tools as well as web optimisation. Download it free from http://perso.orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enxnview.html.