A subjective look at ecommerce, search engine optimisation, selling more online and Actinic.
Gabriel Crowe
16:38 17/04/2008
Recently, a lot of people have been trying their best to squeeze more out of Actinic's already good SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). If you're new to the internet, and to eCommerce, this document will try to help you better understand what this is all about, and hopefully, get some more sales.
First off, lets talk about the main reasons why you'd do badly online. I know that this is an odd starting point, but you'll see that when we discuss how things are broken, we can take better steps to fix them. This topic has a rather large scope, and so i'll try to stay within the single notion of 'things that will help you sell more'.
So, here are the common causes for people not buying from your site.
The site is not functioning properly
This may sound obvious, but if its broken, then people cannot order. Go through your site online, using a computer other than the one you develop Actinic on with a fine tooth comb. I suggest using a link checking tool such as xenu.
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Check all links to make sure there are no 404 errors. 404's in the wrong place are bad for search engines and frustrating for customers. Imagine a corridor with all the doors labeled with wonderful products, only to find that the rooms are empty.
Similarly, Actinic uses a set of scripts in a language called 'Perl'. These scripts are stored in a folder called the 'cgi-bin'. Technicality aside, these scripts have to be configured properly. If any of your shop cart scripts, or search scripts are broken, then you'll lose sales. Make sure you check them all. Trust me, its important.
The site is confusing to them
Some layouts and concepts are great for e commerce. The default layout in v8 and v9 is actually quite good. all the things are in the right place. this is important, because people expect certain elements to be in the correct place. Take a look at this website, that uses real data to explain the expected locations of certain elements.
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/u...bject-ecom.htm
Though a little dated, its still very revealing. Comparison with major retailers now, shows that the concepts still stand true.
The product prices are too high
Open a spreadsheet program. Down the side, list your products, and across the top, list your online competitors. Make sure you include amazon, ebay and other large sites. put everyone prices in there. The logic is, that when you do come up with the big boys in the search engines, if your prices stink, and you're getting greedy, you'll find that people shop elsewhere. This rings true, if their site looks 'bigger' than yours. I dont want to preach to the converted, and i'm sure you all know your business like the back of your hands, but you should keep your competitors in mind, at all times. Your online competitors will most likely have a different pricing structure than your bricks and mortar competitors. Try putting the RRP on your site, or using a special offer, or free shipping, to get people to choose you, over a competitor.
The delivery prices are too high
Actinic calculates the shipping price, when the customer adds the item to the cart. Plenty of times, people are hit with a scary number after they go to checkout, and simply drop the cart. To see exactly the extent of this droppage, try this url:
http://www.yoursite.com/acatalog/error.err
this (amongst other errors) shows the date and time that a cart was dropped, due to inactivity. If you ahve millions of these, then you might be scaring people away, at the cart. try to make sure your shipping and handling are fair. If possible, calculate by the cheapest option, and dont try to profit from the shipping, send it at cost.
You are not coming high in search engines
This could be for a number of reasons. Coming high in the search engines is important. People will go to a search engine looking for a product. they will type a term, that they think will lead them to that product. Your job is to anticipate the term that they will use, and then ensure that this term appears in the appropriate place, on your website. This isnt as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, the term they will use isnt the term youd think. For example, lets assume that i want a surround sound system for my home. I may type 'home cinema speakers' into Google. I diddnt type 'Logitech X-540 5.1 Surround Sound Speakers'. But thats the product i got. The reason is that the owner of the site optimised for the term i typed, not the name of the product. In some cases, you'll want the name of the product, This is required when your products are niche items.
SEO is a black art, and really needs some research. Help with SEO is a huge topic, so we'll assume that you search the web later for more help with that. In short:
- You need relevant terms in your pages
- You need inbound links with relevant terms
- You need healthy (error free) pages
- You need relevant meta and title tagging
- You need relevant page names
Your cart is too long winded
In Actinic, the cart can be many stages long. thisc an increase your cart dropout rate. There are steps you can take to reduce the amount of stages and to make the cart simpler to use. I suggest you find and use them. A search of the forum will yeild, a way to shorten the catalog stages, and a way to let people to better know what stage they are at, in the cart procedure. this part might get technical, so, i'd find some help, if you're not up to getting down and dirty with html.
Products or site offend
For most, this is not an issue, but for those of you with offensive/sweary/racist/sexist products, this should always be on your mind. Some people are offended easily. Lets say for example, that you have a shop full of items that sell well. You add a racy product that shows something lewd, feature it and suddenly your sales drop a little. Watch out for racist and offensive products, bungling up your shops kudos.
Your site code is not compatible with a sufficiently large demographic of browsers
For most people, Internet Explorer, is a way of life. When designing websites, you have to ensure that your site looks the same in all the major browsers. In some cases, the different browsers can show radically different designs, and in those cases, the one to lose out, if Firefox. Firefox and Opera, gain ground daily on microsofts browser, and for every Firefox user that cant see your site, you'll lose a sale oppertunity. At the moment, Firefox is more standards compliant than Internet explorer 7. What this means is that it renders html, 'properly', and IE7 renders it 'sufficiently'. Internet explorer sometimes requires hacks to make the content display proerly.Its long been a battle to get both browsers to look the same, and a frequent headache for designers.
Another paper on this topic (that is a work in progress) illustrating some of these points, can be found here:
http://www.interact-studio.co.uk/int...tinic-css.html
Your site code is confusing for search engines
When a site code is malformed or has errors, Search engines are less inclined to rank you properly. There are site checkers that check the validity of your code. Actinic has never been entirely compliant, due to its proprietary <actinic> tagging, but there are steps you can take to make it better.
- HTML elements have a start and a close tag. Like this: <span>My Text</span> respect that.
- Certain elements are single tags, like this: <img src="xyz.jpg" /> respect that too.
- HTML has proper nesting, like this: <div><span>My Text</span></div>
- NOT like this: <div><span>My Text</div></span>
There are plenty of other simple guidelines, such as the structure of list elements and nesting of certain more volatile elements. For this, you'll need the trusty search engine, to teach yourself proper structured html.
You use dynamic elements such as javascript or flash to draw SEO important elements
google, yahoo and msn (and indeed all search engines) are interested primarily in the text on your site. this means that if you use an image, with text on it, it'll not be as good for you as a text link. The same goes for flash content. If it was a choice between image tabs, flash tabs, or text tabs, I'd choose text tabs every time. CSS tabs can look pretty too, with hover effects and such, and are much better for SEO. Here are some examples, of simple css tabs.
http://www.exploding-boy.com/images/cssmenus/menus.html
and here is a piece of software to help you design personalised ones:
http://www.highdots.com/css-tab-designer/
Other types of dynamic elements, dont help your SEO. A one that springs to mind, is any content built in javascript. Javascript is executed in the browser, and not at the server, so this means that it'll be useless for SEO. this also includes anything inserted into the document, using AJAX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
A favourite amongst the web2.0 generation. some versions of Actinic can use a javascript menu to link to sections, 'Yahoo' style. This is not good enough nowadays, you should use <ul> lists at the very least.
A very good menu can be found here:
http://www.drillpine.biz/v8collapso5/
a php one for v8 can be found here:
http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=35767
Gabriel Crowe
16:38 17/04/2008
Recently, a lot of people have been trying their best to squeeze more out of Actinic's already good SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). If you're new to the internet, and to eCommerce, this document will try to help you better understand what this is all about, and hopefully, get some more sales.
First off, lets talk about the main reasons why you'd do badly online. I know that this is an odd starting point, but you'll see that when we discuss how things are broken, we can take better steps to fix them. This topic has a rather large scope, and so i'll try to stay within the single notion of 'things that will help you sell more'.
So, here are the common causes for people not buying from your site.
The site is not functioning properly
This may sound obvious, but if its broken, then people cannot order. Go through your site online, using a computer other than the one you develop Actinic on with a fine tooth comb. I suggest using a link checking tool such as xenu.
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Check all links to make sure there are no 404 errors. 404's in the wrong place are bad for search engines and frustrating for customers. Imagine a corridor with all the doors labeled with wonderful products, only to find that the rooms are empty.
Similarly, Actinic uses a set of scripts in a language called 'Perl'. These scripts are stored in a folder called the 'cgi-bin'. Technicality aside, these scripts have to be configured properly. If any of your shop cart scripts, or search scripts are broken, then you'll lose sales. Make sure you check them all. Trust me, its important.
The site is confusing to them
Some layouts and concepts are great for e commerce. The default layout in v8 and v9 is actually quite good. all the things are in the right place. this is important, because people expect certain elements to be in the correct place. Take a look at this website, that uses real data to explain the expected locations of certain elements.
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/u...bject-ecom.htm
Though a little dated, its still very revealing. Comparison with major retailers now, shows that the concepts still stand true.
The product prices are too high
Open a spreadsheet program. Down the side, list your products, and across the top, list your online competitors. Make sure you include amazon, ebay and other large sites. put everyone prices in there. The logic is, that when you do come up with the big boys in the search engines, if your prices stink, and you're getting greedy, you'll find that people shop elsewhere. This rings true, if their site looks 'bigger' than yours. I dont want to preach to the converted, and i'm sure you all know your business like the back of your hands, but you should keep your competitors in mind, at all times. Your online competitors will most likely have a different pricing structure than your bricks and mortar competitors. Try putting the RRP on your site, or using a special offer, or free shipping, to get people to choose you, over a competitor.
The delivery prices are too high
Actinic calculates the shipping price, when the customer adds the item to the cart. Plenty of times, people are hit with a scary number after they go to checkout, and simply drop the cart. To see exactly the extent of this droppage, try this url:
http://www.yoursite.com/acatalog/error.err
this (amongst other errors) shows the date and time that a cart was dropped, due to inactivity. If you ahve millions of these, then you might be scaring people away, at the cart. try to make sure your shipping and handling are fair. If possible, calculate by the cheapest option, and dont try to profit from the shipping, send it at cost.
You are not coming high in search engines
This could be for a number of reasons. Coming high in the search engines is important. People will go to a search engine looking for a product. they will type a term, that they think will lead them to that product. Your job is to anticipate the term that they will use, and then ensure that this term appears in the appropriate place, on your website. This isnt as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, the term they will use isnt the term youd think. For example, lets assume that i want a surround sound system for my home. I may type 'home cinema speakers' into Google. I diddnt type 'Logitech X-540 5.1 Surround Sound Speakers'. But thats the product i got. The reason is that the owner of the site optimised for the term i typed, not the name of the product. In some cases, you'll want the name of the product, This is required when your products are niche items.
SEO is a black art, and really needs some research. Help with SEO is a huge topic, so we'll assume that you search the web later for more help with that. In short:
- You need relevant terms in your pages
- You need inbound links with relevant terms
- You need healthy (error free) pages
- You need relevant meta and title tagging
- You need relevant page names
Your cart is too long winded
In Actinic, the cart can be many stages long. thisc an increase your cart dropout rate. There are steps you can take to reduce the amount of stages and to make the cart simpler to use. I suggest you find and use them. A search of the forum will yeild, a way to shorten the catalog stages, and a way to let people to better know what stage they are at, in the cart procedure. this part might get technical, so, i'd find some help, if you're not up to getting down and dirty with html.
Products or site offend
For most, this is not an issue, but for those of you with offensive/sweary/racist/sexist products, this should always be on your mind. Some people are offended easily. Lets say for example, that you have a shop full of items that sell well. You add a racy product that shows something lewd, feature it and suddenly your sales drop a little. Watch out for racist and offensive products, bungling up your shops kudos.
Your site code is not compatible with a sufficiently large demographic of browsers
For most people, Internet Explorer, is a way of life. When designing websites, you have to ensure that your site looks the same in all the major browsers. In some cases, the different browsers can show radically different designs, and in those cases, the one to lose out, if Firefox. Firefox and Opera, gain ground daily on microsofts browser, and for every Firefox user that cant see your site, you'll lose a sale oppertunity. At the moment, Firefox is more standards compliant than Internet explorer 7. What this means is that it renders html, 'properly', and IE7 renders it 'sufficiently'. Internet explorer sometimes requires hacks to make the content display proerly.Its long been a battle to get both browsers to look the same, and a frequent headache for designers.
Another paper on this topic (that is a work in progress) illustrating some of these points, can be found here:
http://www.interact-studio.co.uk/int...tinic-css.html
Your site code is confusing for search engines
When a site code is malformed or has errors, Search engines are less inclined to rank you properly. There are site checkers that check the validity of your code. Actinic has never been entirely compliant, due to its proprietary <actinic> tagging, but there are steps you can take to make it better.
- HTML elements have a start and a close tag. Like this: <span>My Text</span> respect that.
- Certain elements are single tags, like this: <img src="xyz.jpg" /> respect that too.
- HTML has proper nesting, like this: <div><span>My Text</span></div>
- NOT like this: <div><span>My Text</div></span>
There are plenty of other simple guidelines, such as the structure of list elements and nesting of certain more volatile elements. For this, you'll need the trusty search engine, to teach yourself proper structured html.
You use dynamic elements such as javascript or flash to draw SEO important elements
google, yahoo and msn (and indeed all search engines) are interested primarily in the text on your site. this means that if you use an image, with text on it, it'll not be as good for you as a text link. The same goes for flash content. If it was a choice between image tabs, flash tabs, or text tabs, I'd choose text tabs every time. CSS tabs can look pretty too, with hover effects and such, and are much better for SEO. Here are some examples, of simple css tabs.
http://www.exploding-boy.com/images/cssmenus/menus.html
and here is a piece of software to help you design personalised ones:
http://www.highdots.com/css-tab-designer/
Other types of dynamic elements, dont help your SEO. A one that springs to mind, is any content built in javascript. Javascript is executed in the browser, and not at the server, so this means that it'll be useless for SEO. this also includes anything inserted into the document, using AJAX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
A favourite amongst the web2.0 generation. some versions of Actinic can use a javascript menu to link to sections, 'Yahoo' style. This is not good enough nowadays, you should use <ul> lists at the very least.
A very good menu can be found here:
http://www.drillpine.biz/v8collapso5/
a php one for v8 can be found here:
http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=35767
i just think that things like this are helpful for people who need a push in the right direction.
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