When optimising your website it is important to get the right balance of keywords, enough to help return decent search engine results but not too many to get penalised.

A good site to check your your keyword density can be found here.

Online shopping in the UK is expected to reach an all time high this year (2009).

Different research estimates that between 80%-90% of all UK populations will shop online this Christmas.

People are drawn to online shopping at Christmas because they can easily compare prices and make sure they get the best deal. In addition, they don’t have to leave the warmth of their home and fight with other shoppers in busy shops or pay high parking charges. Online shops are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so online shopping can be done any time of the day or night.

To attract online shoppers, many ecommerce retailers are offering free delivery and other options to entice shoppers. E-commerce shops have far lower overheads than retailers in high street shops so can afford to offer lower prices and other incentives, whilst still making greater profits.

If you are a retailer without an online ecommerce facility, speak with Gator Web Design.

Statistics published showed that approximately £4.2bn was spent online by shoppers in the UK during October 2009, which represents a month on month growth of nearly 8.5% and is better than traditional sales on the UK high street.

It is widely thought that the sales figures would have been even higher had the UK postal strikes not occurred.  However, a lot of UK ecommerce retailers have switched away from the Royal Mail to reduce the impact of any further postal strikes (although no more are currently scheduled).  Ecommerce retailers cannot afford in the current climate to miss out on vital Christmas sales so are ditching the Royal Mail to protect consumer confidence.  Companies such as DHL, City Link and UPS have really benefited from the postal strikes.

Which results do you think are best and which are most valuable?

It is simple to get to the top of a Google or other search engine results. All you need is to put in the highest bid for a particular keyword or phrase. However, this can be expensive and not necessarily profitable. (You may get lots of visitors, each costing you your bid amount) but few or non may convert into sales. If you are working to tight margins and have an expensive keyword, you could be playing a very dangerous game and end up with a high PPC/adwords bill and few sales or profit. Pay Per Click/PPC is more likely to be successful if you have good/high profit margins on each sale and are able to purchase a popular keyword at a reasonably low PPC rate. If setting out for the first time with PPC adverts or Google adwords, make sure that you set a limit you can afford so that you don’t get caught out. You can also assess if the campaign has bought you sufficient sales to justify continuing.

How do those searching and potential visitors perceive PPC results versus organic?

Personally, I put more faith in sites that have achieved top rankings organically than those that have purchased their position on PPC adword adverts. There are of course ways to get to the top of search engine results being a small or start up company through clever search engine optimisation/SEO, but a lot of people (rightly or wrongly) consider those at the top of organic search engine results to be bigger and/or more reputable companies. Therefore, achieving top organic search engine results can potentially add more value to your site in terms of perceived reputation and visitor confidence. If visiting a site through PPC adverts, I always try to establish before placing any business how reputable the company using the site is. If they cannot be found easily via organic means (I mean checking them out with the website name after having visited) it could be they are very new or that something dodgy is going on (although not necessarily the case). Knowing many people that have been stung by scam websites, I am very cautious with unknown web companies. Therefore, in addition to saving marketing money by gaining organic search engine sales, good organic results can help your business status and help convert sales from new visitors.

SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimisation and is essentially the manipulation of a website or webpage to achieve the highest possible ranking on search engines. Most people focus on the most popular of search engine, Google, but consideration should also be given to Yahoo and increasingly Bing by MSN/Microsoft.

The ultimate key to a successful website is fresh, original and relevant content that is frequently added to and improved. You want a site that people want to visit and return regularly to. You want visitors to tell others to visit your site.

However, unless you have a decent advertising budget, a mechanism to mass publicise your website or a strong existing brand, most have to build their website by getting traffic from search engines. For now we are not going to look at Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine advertising, but will stick with organic, normal search engine results.

The first thing you should do is submit your website with the main search engines so that they know you exist and they include you in their searches/index your website. Click here for links to the submission pages of the main search engines. It can take a few weeks to appear within the search engine results, but normally takes just a few days. If a website links to your site and it is already indexed by a search engine, the search engine will pick up your site without needing to submit your site.

Once the search engines are indexing your site, you need to get the search engine to rank your site higher than your competitors so that you appear ideally on the front page and as close to the top of search engine results as possible.

You need to brain storm to decide the key words or phrases (that people might use to find your site) and then include these within your web page title, description, meta tags and page text. You need to make sure that you don’t overdo things and repeat keywords too much else the search engine is likely to penalise your site.

One of the main ways that a search engine rates websites is by the volume and quality of back links to your site. By this I mean search engines pick up and assess links to your sites from other websites. Be careful though because search engines identify bad sites; normally sites set up solely for the purpose of linking to other sites. Such link farms are deemed to be spam and links to your site from such link sites often incur penalties.  Search engines also pick up if your site suddenly sees a huge hike in the number of links it receives and is likely to penalise as it thinks you have bought links.

Make sure that you vist Gator Web Design and then contact us for all your web design needs