With the majority of companies turning to the online community in order to either support their high street business or operate entirely via the internet, a clear and compelling e-commerce web design is more important than ever in generating custom.

A website must firstly have a professional appearance: images must be good quality, written text must have a good flow and be without spelling and grammatical mistakes, and it must be clear from the homepage the products and services you offer.

Once the viewer has been won over by your website’s first impression, there must also be a clear menu bar so that they can navigate further in order to find about more about the services that have caught their attention – or place an order if you are a retail-based business.

At www.clickconsult.com, we have a team of more than 25 expert web marketing professionals ideally suited to create the optimum website for your company. As well as creating the right aesthetics and easy-to-use layout, we offer an additional service in that we also have internet marketing experts among our staff.

The words you choose to use in your website copy will directly affect where it appears during internet search engine results. Therefore our internet marketing experts will work in conjunction with our web development team to ensure your site not only looks smart, but also generates traffic.

At www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk we know that every site has unique features and individual needs. That is why our campaigns are adjusted to fit the specificities of individual sites.

If a site is a showcase for goods and/or services then it makes sense that it should try to offer excellent value for money. However, taking part in a ‘race to the bottom’ will not be profitable long term. Therefore it makes sense that quality is central to what an online firm delivers, day in, day out. If a site bases its appeal squarely on high quality, it should not be afraid of reviews. If it gets a positive review it may get more traffic from users and it may also benefit from the reference in the competitive struggle for rankings in the search engine results pages. Even a mixed review may be a boon, because users may be interested by the evaluation and will appreciate its likely authenticity. Reviews may also bring links and link acquisition from relevant sites can be very beneficial.

The question, then, is not whether reviews are positive or negative for a site. The question is actually how they can be sought in an ethical fashion. This is something which can be discussed with a specialist search engine optimization firm. Getting a review of your products and services on a relevant review site is not always straightforward, but it can be accomplished. Once one review has been obtained, it is often a bit easier to get another. Blogging and guest blogging can raise your profile. Reviewing other sites in a positive fashion may also be of assistance. One recommended technique is to link with a suitable review site. However, links should be used in accordance with the advice of an experienced expert.

Some firms have received and understood the idea that good reviews are good for their business. However, their enthusiasm has tempted them into faking positive reviews. To avoid users detecting their malpractice, some firms have established review sites to house their own fake reviews. They have then mixed up highly positive reviews with some less impressive ones. Despite their subterfuges, such firms have often been caught out. If their services do not match their reviews, customers are likely to cause problems.

Trying to get your site reviewed is good SEO, but trying too hard or being less than straightforward can be a big mistake.

It is far more desirable to approach a specialist with some knowledge of their subject, and in SEO, that is not too difficult to do. Even so, there is a distinct possibility that when your SEO company’s assessment of your site comes in, a lot of the information on that assessment won’t be expected. A good search engine optimization company will be able to answer your questions, and you can discuss any optimization concerns with our experts at www.seoconsult.co.uk. It can also be a good idea to know what to look for on your site to estimate the SEO work to be done.

1. Assess your pages. The things you should be looking for on your pages include the amount of content you already have, your existing link profile, any disputes with the search engines you’ve had in the past, and your current site structure. It can help to draw up your site structure on a page to check for clear paths. Use some of the free online search engine optimization tools available to give you a head start on where your current site is in terms of SEO.

2. Sort out your desired outcomes. It’s a good idea to look at your current desired outcomes for SEO, and any outcomes you’ve aimed for in the past. Having made some attempt at optimisation in the past is something that should be taken into account in your current optimization attempt. Your previous work could either help your current campaign, as there will be an established good history with the search engines, or it could hinder it if the work wasn’t done well.

3. Sort out areas of concern. If everything was going swimmingly with your site, it’s unlikely that you would be approaching an SEO consultant. Make a list of the problems you think need to be addressed.

These three steps won’t enable you to prepare an SEO plan yourself, but should help you to get an idea of what needs to be done.

Before you start your assessment, it’s important to consider the time factors involved in SEO. Although it might take you only a few hours to review your site, SEO professionals can take between 30 and 70 hours to properly assess a site and build up an optimization plan. The time required will depend on the size of the site, and the kind of work involved. A small site is generally considered to be anything under 1000 pages.

Most SEO companies work on several sites at once, so it’s important to allow a suitable period for your optimization. Although a company may estimate that they’ll take 30 hours to assess your site, they are likely to require a period of weeks to get the results back to you. This needs to be allowed for in your schedule.

Recently, SEO has been getting some bad rap. It may deserved or undeserved, but that really shouldn?t concern you if you stick within what is called ethical SEO. Experts would say that this is the best way to get search engines to notice you and give you lasting results.

So what is ethical SEO? The main point in ethical SEO is not to use any illegal means to advertise on your website. Neither does it cover the use of ?shady? methods to increase traffic. The major drawback to ethical SEO is that it does not give immediate results. It is a strategy that requires A LOT of patience and hard work. You have to develop and form your own strategy to suit specific needs and target your specific market. There is simply no shortcut to ethical SEO. On the other hand, with ethical SEO, you get lasting and real results. With impeccable content and excellent service, your hard work will pay off and you will gain the trust of your customers as you continue to rise in the page rankings. With ethical SEO, you get reliable results and permanent benefits. At the end of the day, that?s what really matters. You may get to your goal slowly but you?ll get there eventually, and when you do, you will be ready for the windfall.

Some of the features of Google Analytics are given below.

Firstly, it is much easier to use. With the special AdWords feature, Google provides more flexibility with the keywords and also provides you immediate ROI results. It also provides good suggestions as to which keywords can make the site or product more attractive. Nextly, it focuses on only those modifications (in your website) which will gain you profits. As the service is available in many languages (English, German, Spanish, Korean, etc.) there is a wider scope for improvement of the site along with the marketing campaign.

As Analytics is powered by the same server which runs Google, it can be reliably used for even top corporate projects. Also, it is very much easy to use. For e.g. instead of purchasing or downloading some software or script, just pasting the tracking code in the web pages directly begins the tracking. Google Analytics also provides Executive summaries of the conversions, traffic directly to you so that you don?t have to hunt for the reports. You can then comfortably compare keywords, revenue & basically, the performance of the website. It also provides you the comparative reports of the performance, for e.g. if you need to compare this weeks performance with last week?s you can very well get the entire tabular data. This service extends so much that you can tally this winter?s reports with last summer?s reports. Google Analytics can also be used for e-commerce websites, as you can compare revenues, arrange & modify campaigns & get a whole view of the metrics.

Another special feature of Google Analytics is the Funnel visualization. Sometimes it so happens that a visitor starts exploring your site but quits in the middle. Mostly, it is due to puzzling or maze-like data or irrelevant information on the site that confuses the visitor. Google tracks the positions of the quitting & hence provides you the opportunity of modifying that particular area of the site. Google also provides you the segmented visitor report, which includes sorting of visitor information by location, by action, by new versus returning visitor, making it easier to compare the keywords and the traffic. Geotargeting helps in tracking the location of the visitor and also gives your information about markets in various areas & their potentials.

Hence, it provides you a better option of the market analysis & gives you more options of setting up or modifying your campaign in order to increase the market value of your website.

We’ve been talking about RSS feeds and what it can do for your website. We know that incorporating RSS feeds into your site results in more frequent visits from search engine spiders and thus leads to faster indexing.

Have you realized however that by syndicating your RSS feeds successfully you can achieve the same results? How so?

If you have subscribers when a search engine spider crawls your subscriber’s site (assuming that your subscriber incorporated YOUR feed into his own website) the feeds will of course contain a link back to your website. Once the spider follows the link it will notice your website and so index your site as well. Now if you have a lot of subscribers the chances of being crawled through back links are much greater. In addition to this the spider will of course notice the plentiful back links, which will result not only in faster indexing but in a higher page rank.

To get noticed fast one thing you can do is to subscribe to your own feed using Google Reader, MyYahoo, and MyMsn accounts. Surely the three search engines will at least pay attention to their own services.

The reason for this is that according to Advertising Age, a consulting group, “moms control $4.3 trillion of the $5.9 trillion U.S. consumer spending total, or 73% of household spend[ing].” Ruth Nightengale of Searchviews then expounded on what this means for internet marketers, including search and social media marketers, since moms are very much active in the internet.

According to Ms Nightengale this means that search marketers should learn target moms by paying attention to long tail search terms. She then discusses the various search habits of moms (read her article for the full discussion) including not going beyond the landing page (so make sure your landing pages have the info they need!) and not looking below the top results on the very first page of SERPs (so you need to get your ranking up!).

For those who still hasn’t made it to the top of SERPs the good news is that moms are also very much active in social sites such as Facebook and targeted social mom sites such as BabyCenter. Because of this ad placement for moms can be very much effective, especially if you offer coupons online. In fact according to Ms. Nightengale moms look for coupons online all the time and “are discovering new brands and products this way with 71% saying that they will buy a brand twice after trying it once with an online coupon.”

So remember, this year aim for the moms and hopefully you’ll see results in conversion and not just traffic.

Make yourself popular by making connections
Whether you like it or not, the blogosphere can sometimes be akin to high school, where popularity is something important. The more people like you (or your blog, rather), the more visits you will get. The more visits you get, the more word will get around about your blog and the more popular you will become. It’s a cycle – like the chicken and the egg. How do you make yourself popular? Write great content in your blog and network. (We will talk more about networking in the future.)

Interact with your readers
This is actually related to the previous tip. You need to make your readers feel that they are wanted and appreciated. You can do this by creating all sorts of venues to interact with them. Reply to your comments all the time. Use a chat box. Leave comments in their blogs.

Happy link baiting!