It’s that time of year again when we’re all finishing off our last pieces of work and heading for Christmas drinks in celebration of our two weeks off. Unfortunately though your website won’t be getting any rest this Christmas as it will be relied upon to provide great customer service while you’re enjoying your turkey and stuffing.

Providing excellent customer service online is essential and as you know, creating satisfied customers is they key to succeeding in any business. It is equally, if not more important to keep your customers satisfied when dealing with them online as it is when dealing with them in person.

So, how can you make sure your website delivers great customer service for you?

- Make sure you provide your customers with clear instructions

Customers do not like websites that are confusing and difficult when they’re trying to buy from you. Your website should provide clear instructions enabling your customers to shop easily. Make sure you give your customers concise details about the product, how to pay for their orders, how the product will be shipped and how the customer can track their order. If your website is providing a service, make sure you show your customers how to use your service and what it entails.

- Pay attention to customer’s questions and concerns

It is important for customers to know that they can contact you if they need to. Make sure you always provide a clear email address or telephone number your customers can use to get in touch. For times when you can’t personally respond to an enquiry, it is beneficial for you to provide a frequently asked questions page. This is an efficient way for you to provide answers to any questions your customers may have. The more efficient you are in responding to customer’s questions, the greater your customer satisfaction will be.

- Always ask for customer feedback

Asking customers their opinions on how they can be better served allows your business to improve your customer service. By taking customers suggestions into consideration you will be able to make necessary improvements. You will also provide your customers with the satisfaction of knowing that they are being listened to.

- Pay attention to returning customers

The more you know about your customers, the better level of service you can offer them. By paying attention to customer details you will be able to connect with customers on a more personal level. Give your customers the option of receiving email notices or send them personalised emails every now and then. By sending updates and special occasion offers, as well as notices regarding new products that may interest customers, you will make your customers feel important. Customers who are satisfied before, during and after the sale are customers that will return to your website.

You may be wondering why keyword research is so important and why it has such an impact on your website’s success. Well, keyword research is an essential process that needs to be applied for you to promote your business properly online and to make sure the right customers find you.

There are a number of different Keyword Research Tools out there that you can use to find out your most competitive search terms and search terms that you are more likely to rank for. I recommend that you use the keyword tool called Google Adwords. It is simple to use and gives you a clear list of relevant keywords that are related to the search terms that you are looking for; it also shows you the advertiser competition for that keyword term and the search volume for the previous month and the average searches per month.  Google Adwords also allows you to download the keywords onto an Excel Spreadsheet which give you the option of managing the keywords and choosing the best keywords for you to use on your website. Therefore this is an extremely useful tool and can prove to be highly beneficial to your website.

The main objective of your website is to rank high in the major search engines; and the reason for this is to provide your business with much more online traffic which will, in turn, achieve a boost for your business. And to rank high on search engines, having the correct keywords that are most relevant to your business is of upmost importance.

There are many websites out there that have great products and content but eventually fail because of the incorrect or unpopular keywords that are used throughout the site; this means that their potential customers will struggle to find them because they would be ranking for the wrong keywords. This means that you need to do the correct research and make sure that your keywords are related to your website/business and make sure that your content is original and easy to read which will help you be found by your potential visitors on search engines.

So, in conclusion, and to answer the original question, keyword research is so important because it helps your business to succeed on the World Wide Web and helps your potential customers to find your website through the world renowned search engines.

Keyword Research is the key to success, follow these tips and you will have the online traffic your company needs for success!

After its first release on 9th November 2004, quickly became a firm favourite with web developers.

Firefox has been downloaded more than one billion times and is the world’s second most popular browser after Internet Explorer.

For web developers like myself, Firefox’s greatest appeal is the add-ons system, with favourites of mine including Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar.

Checkout the video for Five Years of Firefox: www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/en-US/

I have previously written an article about the top SEO hints and tips you should implement into your search engine strategy to rank high in search engines amongst your competitors. Now I am about to tell you the major “don’ts” of SEO so you can avoid those crucial mistakes so your website can carry on succeeding in the world of search engine optimization.

• Firstly, do not leave SEO from your website for too long. You should always be considering your SEO strategy from the beginning of your website development. SEO plays one of the most important parts in your website and needs to be thought about from the start.
• Do not waste your time submitting your website to countless search engines. Crawler-based search engines will find your website more quickly as soon as you get a link from another website that is already being crawled. Search engine submission is a thing of the past.
• Never make your website un-crawlable. You should always make sure that your website can be crawled by search engine spiders, because if it cannot be crawled then the search engines will not find you. An un-crawlable website can be due to having a convoluted navigation menu that spiders can’t follow, developing an all flash site, or even simply too many variables in your domain name.
• Make sure you don’t target keywords that are too ‘general’. If you want the best chance to rank high, then don’t target keywords that are crowded with competition. You need to do keyword research on your website and find out the best keywords, with a fair amount of competition, this will give you a chance of ranking for number one!
• Don’t ignore usability. You should always make your website user friendly and efficient for users and search engine spiders. This can be achieved with proper site structure, local navigation and sitemaps. So avoid over complicating your website and making it harder to use and navigate.
• You should never give up on creating good content for your website. As I have said before, content is key. The less content you have, then the less chance you have to fill your website with keywords which gives you less chance of being linked to by search engines. That is why the more content you have, the more search engines will link to you because your website would be more relevant because of more keywords. Simple.
• Never spam to help your website get found. This will NOT work. Search engines disapprove of websites that use spam to rank higher, so this will not work to improve your rank on search engines. So you should avoid posting your link on blog comments, guestbook’s ECT, stuffing META tags with keywords and also putting keywords into your footer with lightly coloured or hidden text.
• Patience is a virtue; don’t give up on SEO once started. SEO is a long, time-consuming process and demands time, attention and commitment. You need to be patient when doing SEO work on your website, because it may take months to see the results.

Well there you have it. I have just told you what NOT to do if you wish to succeed in the search engine world. If you read my previous blog then you will also know what you SHOULD do if you want to succeed. Thank you for reading; I hope I helped you understand the fundamentals of SEO success!

If you would like more information about SEO success, please read my other blog.

Top SEO Hints and Tips

Twenty of our favourite high street stores have gone under the microscope of Webcredible in order to find out how good their usability is. The sample was taken for the first time last year and it found that webcredibly many of the sites really weren’t taking advantage of the potential revenue in the run up to Christmas.

This year they looked at the same 20 high street stores, judged them on 20 different criteria and gave them an overall mark out of 100.

With the results just out, in first place, drum roll please …

With 83/100 points … WHSmith and M&S

This is the second year at the top spot for WHSmith, no points gained but no points lost. On the other hand, M&S snatched an extra 15 points this year to zoom them up into joint first.

M&S re-launched their brand new site just before the report was made and it seems they paid attention to improving their user experience. Well at least someone did! Unfortunately the average score across the sample only increased by 5.5%, the top score isn’t any higher and the lowest score was still 56.

The sites are judged on search results, browsing, product pages, basket and checkout; all things you would expect of an ecommerce site. For simple things like ensuring there is a link to the basket and checkout on every page – all sites should be scoring 5/5, but they weren’t.

Debenhams was the only website out of 20 that changed the colour of the link once you have visited it. Nothing is more annoying than trying to remember what you have already seen. Tut tut to the other nineteen stores who don’t know what their customers want.

How about the guidelines- you know when you click on, for example, women’s department, clothes, tops, evening tops and then when you don’t like the one you clicked on, you go all the way back to the start of the process. How about just taking us back to the evening tops? This is a long term guideline and it is not particularly hard to implement. If not implemented, then it won’t be long before customers start visiting their competitor’s site.

You would also think ‘Proceed to Checkout’ would be a major priority for all the sites but guess what; it was the only guideline with a lower score than last year. Site designers should carefully consider where to place and how to design this button to ensure that customers don’t get lost and drop off at the most crucial stage.

Any website scoring in the 50’s and 60’s, such as Topshop would you believe, really need to up their game. A good ecommerce site is now just as important as the shop itself. If you’re not taking advantage of the online market then your not taking advantage of big money and ultimately you’ll be losing customers to competing stores who know where to put their ‘Buy it Now’ button.

Great, another strike is just what we all need. Finally, just as it looks as we’ve got a bit of an upturn in the economy; businesses now have this to contend with. Give us a break!

The sham, that currently is our postal service, has a backlog of 25 million letters already and the strike hasn’t even begun. I can pretty much cope without a Christmas card but companies such as moonpig.com rely on this time of year. What should be their busiest time is now in serious jeopardy.

And why is this protest happening? Erm, because of pay cuts and job losses! Sorry hold on a second, aren’t we all dealing with that right now? Well, I’m sorry but you’re damn well lucky to have a job at the moment! Welcome to the real world, businesses all over the country have had to let people go or cut hours; it’s a matter of survival. You don’t see any of us stomping our foot and walking out on our jobs. If you did, it’d pretty much be the case of keep walking and don’t come back.

We really need this Christmas to be a good one, we all need the business and we all need the customers. In fact many retailers are relying on this time to turnaround their sales figures. Whatever the industry we all need this Christmas to be brilliant and ultimately that means we need our postal service. So Mr Postman, help us out, instead of letting the team down can’t you just work with us? We need to stick together for this economy to stand any chance of recovery.

Making your webpage easy and enjoyable for your visitors is the key to usability success. There are plenty of tricks and tips to try out…

1. Making Faces

Whether you’re walking around town or visiting a bar, you can’t help but take a look at the faces around you. Subconsciously you are absorbing much more than you realise. You can take advantage of this fact by featuring people’s faces on your webpage, sounds simple you think? Well hold on, there’s a bit more to it than that. Studies have found that we actually look in the direction of the face we see on screen, so if you want to share some specific information make sure your friendly face is looking straight at that information.

2. Quality Counts

As shameful as it is to admit, we humans really do have a tendency to judge a book by its cover. Therefore the quality of your webpage is key. Visitors are going to believe that your product or service will be as good as your webpage looks, so make sure you invest in making it perfect.

Once the user has checked out how you look, they will then be judging you on personality. It’s one tough crowd out there! So they will be looking at the actual quality of your website, the amount of errors, how often information is updated and its ease of use. If you tick all the boxes, then you’ll be more than likely to guarantee a second date.

3. Keep Scrolling, Scrolling, Scrolling

Once upon a time only around three-quarters of all visitors to your website would not have bothered to scroll. Those who panicked at hearing this information made the dire mistake of attempting to cram all their information into the top half of the site. Unfortunately no one lived happily ever after.

Flash forward a few years and it appears we are now the generation who love to scroll. People are much happier to have content well spaced out with plenty of white spaces as it makes it clearer and easier to read. People are now so keen to scroll that they will even make it right down to the bottom of the page, so make the most of every inch.

4. Blue is the Colour

As important as it is that your site stands out from the crowd, it seems people still love their home comforts. When people visit new websites they look for something familiar, this is called usage patterns. People expect certain things to be the same, such as the location of the website’s logo and the behavior of tabbed navigation. People know what they know and in this case, they know that links are blue. Google sticks to this time-honoured tradition and so should you.

5. How wide is your Search Box?

Time for some specifics - the ideal search box is 27 characters wide. A fact that is clearly not known by many, as the average search box is just 18 characters wide. So take note and remember that by giving the user more space allows them to review, verify and submit their enquiry quickly. Sounds simple enough but yet so many people still choose to ignore this, make sure you’re not one of them.

Internet Explorer 6 has taken some nasty blows recently as it grips on for dear life in the browser war. To the merry cheers of web developers everywhere, Google’s YouTube announced they were soon stopping support for the 8-year-old web browser. This follows on from such other large sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg all prompting IE6 users to upgrade.

The issue here is that for many years, IE6 has been running on empty due to technological advances in web development but many web users are reluctant, ignorant or restricted in upgrading to a newer version, despite the major security issues it raises. This causes a major headache for web developers, as providing support and maintenance for websites in IE6 requires a big commitment. They’ve tried everything to persuade IE6 users to upgrade, from browser detection scripts to out right blocking of IE6 visitors.

The opinion of what to do with IE6 has caused splits in the development community. We all want to phase out IE6, it’s just a question of how it should be done. Is it moral for us to force users to upgrade their browser?

The aforementioned websites are some of the most visited sites on the web, so to have the backing from them seems to be exactly what we developers have been waiting for.

The web is at a really exciting stage right now, there’s loads of interest in HTML5 and CSS3, which will change the way we build and style websites. The problem just now is that IE6 is restricting the development and implementation of these new technologies (on a large scale, at least) because it doesn’t support HTML5 or CSS3 very well.

Once IE6 is dead and buried, the web will change forever.

I had a look at our own IE6 visitor stats and they’re showing a nice decline over the last 12 months. This month last year, www.ph-creative.com received around 8% of traffic from IE6 users, this month we received around 5%.

So is 5% of traffic worth the extra development work that the other 95% don’t need? Should we follow the large websites and stop IE6 support? Let me know what you think!