The number of people buying products online is on a rise. And an e-commerce web site is an ideal platform to showcase and sell multitude of products to your target audience. But to ensure that your products reach to the maximum number of target audience, you need to make it seo-friendly so that it ranks high in the searches on Google and other search engines.

Here are some tips to make your e-commerce site seo friendly:

Use proper keywords

If you want to rank higher in the top search engines, you need to incorporate the best performing keywords in the site. Search popular keywords from the various keyword tools such as Google Adwords Keywords Tool External, Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. The right keywords will help the site in reaching the top in major search engines.

List products in order of importance

You have only 30 seconds to grab the attention of your visitor to make him stay longer on the site for more. Therefore it makes sense that you sort out the products on the basis of importance and list the best and most tempting offers, on the first page itself.

Classification of products

Classifying products into categories and sub categories makes it easier for user to locate the products he/she is searching for. For example you have an e-commerce site which sells furniture online. You can classify the items into main categories such as beds, tables, sofas, chairs etc. and further break down categories into sub-categories. For example beds can have sub-categories such as junk beds, king size beds, queen size beds. You can also make categories by price, size, brand or any other product attribute.

Compelling product descriptions

It is a Web 2.0 world and undoubtedly content is king. A well-written and powerful product description not only persuades visitors to buy products but also boost rankings. Hence pay attention to the content part and create persuasive descriptions of products which urge visitors to take the final action.

Unique and keyword rich title tags

It is important to incorporate primary keywords in the title tag. Having well written and keyword rich title tags guarantee top rankings in the Google. And it is sensible to use different title tags for different pages. Don’t try to save time by writing just one title tag for all pages. This would cost you a lot in the long run. Google and other search engines display results which contain the keyword typed in by the user. And if you use only one title tag for all pages, you won’t be able to target other several keywords for different pages and ultimately you would be losing potential customers. Therefore each page must have clear, concise and unique title tag which should reflect the information pertaining to that particular page. For example if you are on the category page, then the title tag must contain the category name and if you are on a sub category page, the title tag must include the sub category name.

Use alt text for images

The images of product should be clear and attractive enough to tempt users to buy. And make sure that all your product images contain the alt text with the product name and link to the product detail page. After all search engines can’t crawl images but they can read the alt text.

Breadcrumb trail

Breadcrumb trail is the text that appears either on top of the page or at the bottom and shows you the path you took to reach the current page. Suppose you reached the dining table page on the e-commerce site selling furniture, then breadcrumb trail would show ‘home> furniture> dining table’. Having the breadcrumb trail not only enhances the usability of a particular page, but also makes it easier for search engines to index it.

Smooth navigation

The way products are organized in the site with categories and sub-categories makes a lot of difference. When a user comes to your site he/she must find it easy to locate the products. Having left side navigation bar throughout your site boosts the usability factor. It helps the visitors to know where they are in the site and how to navigate through it easily. A consistent navigation is also easier for search engines to crawl.

Avoid Flash

Never ever even think of having Flash intros for your e-commerce site. Flash takes time to load and is not very SEO-friendly. Though Google spider can crawl Flash now, it is still better to steer clear of using Flash. Customers don’t have time to wait for long to see and buy your products.

Simple checkout process

Complicated navigation can result in a loss of a potential customer. Make the checkout process as simple and easy as you can for the customer to complete a sale and pay you money. Display pricing and shipping information clearly and also include details about return policies in case of dissatisfaction, terms of use, privacy, access to customer service and the phone number. Nothing convinces the customer about your credibility more than knowing that you are just a phone call away.

Product & Category URLs

It is beneficial if the URLs contain keywords and not just the domain name. It is because Google and other search engines highlight the URL in bold if it contains the keyword, the user has searched for. This is the added advantage of attracting the visitors.

To create an e-commerce site which is SEO friendly is not easy. It requires skilled and talented designers, content developers and web marketers to develop an e-commerce site which attracts visitors and search engines alike.

Neha Arora is an experienced web content writer working for Wisitech Info Solutions, a leading name in end-to-end web solutions outsourcing web development companies based in New Delhi, India. Neha has written incisive and thought-provoking articles on web design and website development and how such work is being outsourced to Indian outsourcing firms web designs companies.

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If you’re selling products on the web, you need to incorporate pictures. Whether you’re selling something as artistic as handmade religious jewelry or something as technical as phone headsets, a bunch of details about the product and a price are not going to catch a visitor’s interest. So it follows that when you’re building an e-commerce website, you will be including a place for pictures.

Here’s the thing; it’s a lot of hassle for everyone if you have to hand-code in every new item. If the phone headset site finds a new distributor and gets a hundred new types of headsets in, or the religious jewelry site comes up with a new rosary necklace every week or so, they’ll need to be able to add the new products. That’s why you’ve created a fancy database-driven CMS, so they can add in the information and it automatically populates to the website.

But what happens when the new phone headset distributor sends a bunch of 1,500 pixel images when your system is designed to display 100 pixel thumbnails and 500 pixel normal images? What happens when the religious jewelry pictures are all high-resolution images that will take far too long to load? When the site layout is based on the idea of the images being a certain size, and then new images are introduced that aren’t that size, problems occur.

Now, you might be saying, “Oh come on, this is easy, just include a width=whatever height=whatever in your image tag and call it a day.” If so, hit yourself. I’ll wait.

See, the reason you see those attributes added to the images so often is, the great majority of the time, because it helps with getting the images indexed in the search engines. It’s not to actually set the image size. If you try to set the image size with them, the quality is dramatically reduced. And, if you’re sizing down, you wind up dealing with full-size loading time for a part-sized image.

Your next option is to get the client to make sure any images it uploads are properly sized. Not too likely. Aside from the very real possibility that they’ll forget what sizes to use, make a mistake, just not bother, or try to do it with Paint or something equally ludicrous, that’s just giving them more work, and one of your jobs is to minimize the amount of work and complexity they have to deal with for running their website.

So how do you get these phone headsets to fit in the proper format, and these religious jewelry pieces to load in an acceptable amount of time? Well, it just so happens that there’s some php code that can resize images automatically on the server. It’s not perfect for enlarging, but it does a pretty clean reduction, and it’s not too hard to code up a loop that will run through existing images to size them, and then add the resizer to the backend of the admin – right by where the image uploads works. Personally, I prefer setting some variables to determine the size and folder of the image, and then having it size the image in the chosen ways (a thumbnail, standard view size, and full size, for example), and save each to their own folders, keeping a single image column in the database.

So, when working on admin systems for e-commerce sites, from phone headsets to religious jewelry, expect there to be pictures. Prepare for them for the first batch of uploads and for future updates by including dynamic image resizing. It will make things easier on you and the client, and result in a cleaner, nicer-looking, and more easily updated website.

Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique works on websites of all varieties; their clients may offer products and services ranging from religious jewelry to phone headsets.

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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to give a stylistic look and formatting of the page elements like layout color, fonts, alignments, images etc. to a document that written in the markup language. You can easily control the properties of the elements by the CSS. CSS can be easily called from all the pages. Here are some benefits using the CSS.

CSS makes the Pages good looking

The design using HTML only doesn’t look well, but if the CSS is blended with the HTML at the time of website design, it gives the web pages decent look and makes the pages technically stronger.

The time to design the site is reduced

At the time of designing, the properties of the elements of the pages are controlled through the class written in the CSS. So the designer doesn’t have to define the properties again and again. It reduces the time of the designing.

The designing becomes easier

As the CSS can be controlled centrally from an external file, it becomes very easier for the designers to work. Just define the properties of the page elements in classes once and call the class in the pages several times.

Web page load time would be reduced

Cascading Style Sheet reduces the page load time. The CSS is downloaded once and stored locally, when the next pages are opening the CSS is not downloaded further thus the pages load faster.

CSS saves the server space and bandwidth

CSS is created in a separate page and it is called in the pages through link. Hence you can easily cut down the overall amount of codes in your web pages. The size of the webpage become smaller and your web server space could be saved. As it is downloaded once for the full session, it saves the bandwidth also.

CSS allows you to place the page elements anywhere

It becomes easier for the Web developers to position the page elements where ever they wish to give the page a good look. And CSS also helps to change the properties of the page elements. E.g. if a particular section of the pages need bigger text in any other color compared to existing, It can be done easily with the CSS. No need to change all the pages of the portal individually. Thus CSS reduces the risks colligated with the maintenance of the website.

CSS has the all browsers compatibility

CSS is compatible with all the browsers. All browsers support the CSS and its functionalities. Thus, the web designers and web developers don’t have to think about the page elements’ functionalities. The websites which are using the CSS appear similar in all the browsers. CSS functions same in all the browsers.

Users can easily customize the webpage

Currently many websites give the liberty to the users to change the web pages as per their choice without changing the contents. If users wish to change the fonts, color of the page, even layout also that can be done through the CSS. This makes better user interactivity in the websites.

CSS style sheets make your website more search engines friendly

Most of the images can be easily controlled through the CSS. Thus CSS makes the webpage light. It can control the page elements’ properties from outside. This makes the page well structured. Google rewards the websites that are well structured.

If you use the CSS wisely you will be benefited from all the aspects. You can save time, can save effort and also can save money. CSS makes the website lighter and also the user friendly. It gives the websites a greater and better look and feel to attract the visitors.

Abir Roychowdhury is a professional Internet marketer. For Website Design Web Design Company or for to hire Best Web Designer Web Developer visit Brandmantra.net.

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So you’re ready to set up your client’s e-commerce site selling, eh, headsets.  They have phone headsets, bluetooths, wireless and corded headsets, tiny little headsets that fit right in your ear, and a big pair of earmuffs that their neighbor gave them three birthdays back.  Of course, getting all that up on the web means they need pages to display the items.  They need categories to hold them in.  They need individual pages for full descriptions, thumbnails for groups, and big full-size high-resolution images so people can see just how sleak and streamlined the headsets are.  They also need a way to keep all of these things in order, and to add new ones or edit the existing ones as time goes on.  But you’re a web designer; you’re not <i>actually</i> going to hand-code a specific page for every item, manually resize every image in Photoshop and type in {a href=”images/really-big-image-of-another-phone-headset.jpg”}{img src=”images/not-so-big-image-of-that-same-phone-headset.jpg” alt=”this is the 200th phone headset image I’ve coded in why does my suffering continue?” /}{/a}, and wake up in the middle of the night with phonecalls asking you to change the price of headset #102 from $25.00 to $24.95.  You have databases for all that, and forms, and clients who swear roundly that they want to be able to update their website themselves.

Thus, the admin system.  Now, many web designers may go straight for the pre-built templates that they just have to initialize and guide the client through using.  That’s fair enough, but the purpose of this article is the <i>custom</i> web design admin system.  By building the system custom, you have the advantage of complete control over its functionality.  Client doesn’t need to track inventory?  Don’t even confuse them with the link.  Client wants some of its phone headsets fading in and out on the home page?  You can add a field to the image manager so they can select which ones themselves, and link them right up to the actual item’s page.  Have a beautiful custom web design for the site’s layout, maybe even a cutting-edge Flash site?  Integrate the database right into it.

So what might a site selling phone headsets need for their admin system.  Well, first off, they of course need to be able to manage their products; add, edit, and delete their headsets as they get new ones, upgrade existing ones, or get rid of now-outdated models.  Chances are they’ll want to divide these into categories; you can set the categories to choose from in a drop-down list or by checkboxes of course, but it doesn’t take much to set things up so they can create new categories as things go (tip: make sure the category navigation on the site itself is vertical).  They may also want a system to keep track of their orders, and possibly to edit the text on their pages.

Regardless of whether it’s phone headsets, high-end computer systems, or children’s toys, the best way to maintain an e-commerce site is through a database-driven admin system.  By custom-building the system with your client’s business in mind, you maximize your ability to integrate and control how the products work within your code, while still giving your client the freedom to update and maintain its own website.

Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique offers custom web design services, and their clients offer diverse products and services such as phone headsets.

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Website Motivation – Whatever your skills, whatever your interests, everyone has the ability to be creative in their work.  However, we can often lose our motivation and drive to create, making it difficult to stay focused on a particular work plan or project, especially in web design.  So what is the best method for staying motivated?

The key to maintaining your own motivation to be creative is actually a long term effort.  Starting out can be tough, and in most cases the most difficult part.  But with the right methods and consistency you will be able to reach a point where staying motivated is easy.  It is a simple case of knowing when to make the right choices at the right times.

Obviously everyone is unique and each of you will have your own methods and actions into being creative.  But here is the chance to read something that offers some possible methods and solutions when getting motivated and staying motivated.

The main things to take into consideration are:

Set goals
You will find it is a lot easier to stay motivated when you feel like you’ve reached a target.  Give yourself something to achieve and break the work load down.  If it is a large website project you are working on, set yourself mini goals so you are reaching targets every few hours or days rather than spending weeks trying to get the lot done.

Small bite-sized objectives
As mentioned briefly above, set yourself up for more success than failure by being realistic in goal setting and come up with small, bite-sized tasks to start with.  As you complete more tasks, start making your goals more ambitious.

Build a creative workstation
Whether you design websites at your desk, in a dark room or a home office, you need to assign a place to yourself where you can be creative.  Once you’ve decided on that place, use it!  Each creative task and success you achieve in your ‘creative workstation’, will slowly train your mind to be creative within it.  When I first set up my creative workstation it took me about 3 months for it to click in my mind that it was actually my workstation but as soon as I enter now, I can focus my mind that I’m ready to work.

Walk away, but don’t quit!
Whatever you do, you must always remember to never give up on a website or problem.  Put them to one side for a while but always come back it later on, even if it means coming up with a theory for solving the problem.  These problems build confidence and develop a nice portfolio.

Find your creative time zone
Just like your body’s sleeping and eating times, there is also a best time when your body can be most creative.  For me, the best time to be creative used to be late at night, now-a-days it’s usually between midday and late evening.  Although I do have a creative burst where I get most work done after 9pm.  Your main objective is find out when you are at your most creative side and start using that time to your advantage.

Using the right tools
When being creative designing websites you need to ensure that you are using the right tools for the job.  The ‘right tools’ doesn’t necessarily mean the best tools but being creative can be difficult enough, therefore, the idea is to make the job / project as easy as possible.  For example, my best choice design software has got to be ‘Photoshop’, you may make this more difficult by trying to use ‘mspaint’ to come up with some amazing graphics.  It’s something you just don’t do!

Following progress
One of the key points in being creative is to follow your own progress.  As mentioned in step 1; the main objective is to break the task down into smaller parts.  Therefore, after a few weeks working on a project look back and see how far you’ve come.  If you don’t stop every so often to see where you were a couple of months ago, and where you are now – do it!  You might just surprise yourself on how much progress you’ve made and how your creativity has grown.

Get out of the house
This may seem a bit like the step where you walk away from your work and come back to it later, but there is a fine line between setting aside some work and actually taking a break from your workstation.  Whilst a creative workstation can often be the best practice, it sometimes helps to go somewhere different to work.  It can provide a different level of ideas and influence your creativity and work.

Work through it
You may think that it’s pointless trying to force yourself to be creative when you’re ‘not in the mood’ but often it can work in your favour.  It may feel difficult to start with but as you gain momentum you’ll find your motivation returns almost every time!  After all, you have nothing to lose; you get the job done and you’re still producing quality work / websites.  It may not seem like they are of good quality but you may still be working the same as you usually do, you’re just in the wrong state of mind to realise.

Read more about web design and Ecommerce web design glassbottomdesign.co.uk.

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