Top Google Ranking
It takes time, focus and patience but a great Google ranking is possible.
Kerry Smolarek was selling her chocolate making supplies on eBay 12 months ago. While things were going ok, the amount of time it took to list items, handle sales not to mention the increasing fees, highlighted the need to find a better way to do business online. Another important aspect of moving from eBay is the intellectual property. Owning your own online store means you are not handcuffed to Ebay's pricing or sales policies - and you have a tangible piece of online real estate - hey, let's call it efront-age... :)
Ok enough about all that, I could go on about eBay but....
The Chocart online store has been built from scratch with search engines in mind. Any time Kerry adds a product or category, a number of things happen in the background to make life easier for the search engines, giving her the best chance of a better and broader ranking. Kerry has been diligent in adding recipies and news to the general area of her site - demonstrating to search engines that Chocart is an authority in the area of chocolate making.
Chocart now commands a number 1 ranking for "Chocolate making supplies" on Google.com.au - See for yourself!
While we're happy with this result, we've been busy improving our store model and we're just taking the bubble wrap off version 3. This online store not only looks stunning, but in terms of usability from a customer and owner point of view is a major step forward - all things going well, we should be able to give you a look in the next week.
Our online store design philosophy is simple - keep the focus on the products and make shopping easy. This means don't clutter the space, avoiding animated objects that distract attention and confuse - guide the visitor, don't make them have to work. It's amazing to see how many online shops make you register with them before you can even add something to your shopping cart....
Congratulations Kerry!
David
Labels: Chocart, Google, Online-Stores, Search-Engine-Optimisation, SEO, Web-Design-Melbourne
Posted on Monday, April 30, 2007
Why Web Designers Can Start to Say Goodbye to the Office suite
...actually, why EVERYONE can start to say goodbye to MS Word and Excel.
If you work as web designer or web developer you would have come across some issues with MS Word. Although ideally our job is not content filling, the odd occasion will still require this (small, premium site, training etc) and if you're anything like me, you like to cut and paste...a simple, easy and effective way to get the content in, then go on to formatting. Funnily enough, content is often written in soft copy (insert_sarcasm) and more often than not this tends to come from the market leader - Microsoft Word.
Dunno about you, but have you ever cut and paste content from a Word doc, into ANY type of web design software or CMS and seen what happens? You get those great little diamonds with question marks inside for one. You'll then notice some wHAcKy formatting and line breaks, weird code markup, font tags and and and....needless to say the list goes on.
At Efront, we've been using gMail for some time now. The ease of use coupled with the great storage has helped us and our clients with email solutions on the web. Being a company that bases our business on web design and working on the web, it made sense to have a great webmail solution, and at this stage, gMail is it....here's another reason why :
Last week when I received an email from a client with a Word doc attached, normally I'd download the doc into a clients' folder, open it and proceed from there. This time I noticed an "Open as Google document?" option. I clicked, a new tab opens in FF and hey presto....I've got an online word processor. I open a few more mails and click a few more docs and I have an index page of documents. On the web, ready to be used, saved, formatted, revised or even SAVED AS A PDF DOCUMENT.
Holding my breath I cut and paste into the layout mode of Dreamweaver (I know, I know, I'm slack, EVERYONE else is hardcore and codes in text editors).....I publish the file.....perfect. No weird formatting and most importantly, it correctly marked up my code.
Time savers, I love them.
So, not only do I now have a better word processor (especially for web design work) I no longer have to download and consolidate documents between machines (work/home etc) or worry about having the latest update. We've also had a lot of clients who don't use Macs (it's a native print feature) but want to be able to switch their documents to PDF's without installing more software and now they can!
The internet is coming along nicely (its even on computers now) and the move away from locally installed software will be a strange one for many, myself included, yet I can't help but think we're heading the right way.
Peace out, enjoy the public holiday and the gorgeous weather if you're in sunny Melbourne.
Mark
Posted on Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Why RSS my website news?
It's been around for a while and only matured in the last two or three years. Many of the people we speak to still don't have any idea of what RSS is and how they can benefit.
Read the bit in italics if you've got time otherwise skip down...
When we're doing the background on a new website we're developing, we will look at the objectives / purpose of the site.
Some websites are just online brochures where they just provide additional information and images for a business. The traffic for these sites is generally driven via off line means like brochures and real world advertising. Other sites are looking to pull traffic through online means - organic (natural) search engine results and links from other sites.
The "Pull" traffic sites are generally more long term while brochures sites will have a limited lifespan or evolve into "Pull" traffic sites as they mature or objectives change.
Web sites that "Pull" visitors need to have content, it needs to be fresh and updated. This takes a serious commitment.
If you are going to work so hard at attracting people to your site, wouldn't it be good to keep them coming back? This is where RSS comes in.
RSS allows people to know when you've added something new to your blog or news page. Here is a great little clip that explains RSS in a really simple way.
Having a news page has many benefits....
- Adds content to your site
- Shows visitors your business is progressive
- Shows you have expert knowledge about your subject
- Increases the amount of links Google has of your site in it's results
- Shows Google your site is alive (not stagnant)
- Increases the rate that Google revisits your site
- Broadens your ability to focus on different keywords
- you get the picture
Be wary of anyone that says they can get you in the top rankings of Google without any effort or content. Short term it is possible, but keep in mind that your competitors will only be too happy to highlight to Google the dodgy tactics your search engine optimiser has used on your site and it will be removed from Google completely. Hey, it even happened to BMW last year (see article).
In a nutshell, it takes a well designed website, great content, time, effort, and patience. RSS is an easy/free way to more mileage out of your new content.
Good luck,
David
Posted on Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Online Store Freight
One of the challenges that every online store owner has to face is how to calculate freight charges accurately without inconveniencing the customer. If you can't give your customer a final freight charge during checkout, it's obvious that you're going to really impact your checkout rate.
Over the past few years we've developed a number of different methods which, each tailored for the type of store. Some stores only sell products which are light and small, so shipping charges are pretty consistent. While others sell heavier items so freight becomes much more variable and requires a database to manage the combinations.
While working with Rhonda from Crimson Gifts and Homewares on our newest version of our online store offering, we've managed to incorporate a method of determining freight charges real time with Australia Post. This means that a shopper can enter their postcode (or country), select their desired method of postage and we can give them the freight charges within their shopping cart directly from data at Australia Post.
It's all seamless to the customer and very flexible. If the shop owner wants to add a buffer on the shipping charge to cover packing materials or time, this can be done as a straight percentage or set amount - and included in the freight quote.
In addition, the store owner can still nominate free shipping on set items within their store or just plain offer a discount.
Another way to make managing an online store simple.
David
Posted on Friday, April 20, 2007
A Beautiful Online Store
We're just putting the finishing touches to our new online store and are really excited with the result.
The store management area has been completely rebuilt using AJAX technology to make it even simpler to add, remove and edit products. The customer front end is simple, elegant and dynamic. It's the little things that really make this store shine.
Search engine optimisation has been a priority with the store and we've taken this to a new level. All urls are keyword rich and contain product and category names. Page titles and meta data are dynamically created with product information to maximise Google rankings. We've managed to get rid of those pesky trailing variables in urls, so now rather than having a product url like....
www.yourstore.com.au/items/index.html?productid=123&categoryid=432
we now have something more meaningful for Google like
www.yourstore.com.au/items/furniture/large-dining-table/123121/
There are 3 levels of image views, ranging from automatically created thumbnails, to medium sized product images, to full size in-page views.
Crimson Home and Giftware will be our first client to use the store. Rhonda and her team are busy stocking the virtual shelves in time for Mother's Day.
Stay tuned for the launch!
David
Posted on Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Get A Better Google Ranking Part 2
Web site content is KING!
If you're serious about getting a better Google ranking for your web site, you need to nurture it with content.
We've been publishing content on our web blog for about 10 months now on subjects ranging from AJAX, RSS, new clients, recent web site design work or just things that are happening in Melbourne. 1 - 2 articles per week has given us around 75 pages of content. Each page can carry a different focus within web site design - but at the end of the day it's content.
We learnt from our mistakes
One of our misconceptions was that Google puts your site in a specific category. That's not always the case. If we use our web site as an example, while our focus is on 'web design' and 'online stores', we have great rankings on '1300 numbers'.
I'd love to say this happened as the result of careful planning, but it was a complete accident. We wrote a blog article about our 1300 number and its benefits, which was picked up by Google. In the process we learned something important - we didn't have to just focus on certain keywords across our entire site, we could do it at page level and broaden our scope. Each month we get almost 200 referrals from Google that are looking for 1300 numbers.
That's 200 clicks for free - if you paid for those clicks on adwords each month, you'd be looking at around $200.
Blog your way into the rankings
Good web content, page titles, and urls can really help you get more pages in Google and spread your Google net further. But how do you add new content to your site with minimal effort and knowledge?
A blog has many benefits, and with free online services like Blogger (that we use here), it can be integrated into your existing site structure. This allows you to add new articles, images and links through your web browser - it's really easy. Most blogs handle all the archiving for you (so you hang on to your old content) and setup keyword rich page titles and URLs without you having to do anything extra.
It you want some more info on adding a functional web blog / news area to your existing website without making it look like a 1970's extension on a classic art deco villa - drop us a line or give us a call on 1300 EFRONT.
(If you missed part one you can read it here...)
Posted on Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Evestor
Just a quick post to let you know we've just finished work on the evestor.com.au micro site.
It features ajax suburb selection to make submission simple (and fun). It's a straight forward setup, that keeps things simple and easy to follow.
Have a great week,
David
Posted on Monday, April 16, 2007
Ten Darling St
We recently had the pleasure of working wth Cornwell Design on the new website for architect firm Neometro - www.tendarling.com.au.
The site is comprised of seven cleanpages that serve to educate and inform potential buyers on this new property development. We utilised Flash, Ajax, CSS and some server side scripting to get the site running to specifications. You can check out the different plans for the units, look through previous Neometro developments and submit your information to be contacted regarding Ten Darling.
It was a great job with a tight deadline and David and I are both really happy with the result. Congrats to the guys at Cornwell and Neometro respectively.
www.tendarling.com.au
Cheers
Mark
Posted on Monday, April 16, 2007
Web Design Awards / The Miggy Tree
Julie Buxton was kind enough to send us an invite to the launch of The Miggy Tree and a copy of the new book. The launch was held at Readings book store in Hawthorn on Wednesday with a great turnout of people to share the moment.
Congratulations to Julie and we're pleased to announce that The Miggy Tree website has been awarded a Gold Medal by the Web Designers Network of Australia. If you haven't done so, we recommend taking a look at the site and this beautiful story.
We're also pleased to hear that the 1957 Elwood High School reunion was a success. We supported the event with a website, which won a Silver Medal for its design and usability.
All the best,
David
Posted on Friday, April 13, 2007
Improve your search engine rankings - Pt1
We've been looking closely at search engine optimisation and Google's mysterious ways particularly over the last 12 months.
We've been amazed at the price of things like Google Adwords (e.g. those links you see on the side of Google search results). Did you know that if you want to run some ads that focus on keywords like "home loan" or "refinance" you can pay around AU$10 per click through? You can imagine the advertising bill getting pretty high pretty fast.
Costs like this to promote your business online just increase the importance of getting better "organic" results through Google. "Organic" just means naturally occurring results when someone does a search.
Everyone wants to be on the first page for a given search. That can be a tough call, especially when you are often competing with millions of search results. Let's use our industry as an example - Web Design.
We've changed tact over the last 6 weeks to get the best possible ranking for Efront and in the next few posts we're going to share with you what we've done, what's worked, what hasn't, and how we did it.
We've gone from having no listing within the first 10 pages in Google for the phrase 'Web Design Melbourne' (click to see for yourself) to 4th page about a week ago, and now we are on the middle of the second page. Our goal is to get into the first 5 results on the first page, and we will keep refining our process until we achieve this.
Here's a few keywords that we've managed to score a first page google.com.au.
- online store development
- successful online store
- online surveys australia
- online productivity tools
- 1300 Numbers
- 1300 Phone Numbers
- google maps developer
- fix images online
- conceal email
For sites within Australia
- placeholder website
- web based surveys
- check google ranking
- email marketing newsletters
You can subscribe to the blog RSS feed here or by just bookmarking this link http://www.efront.com.au/web-design-melbourne/index.html/.
Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Helvetica unleashed
At 1pm Saturday 31 March in a sleepy town called Wallen, the signal was given and the war began.
The design industry got together to 'unleash helvetica' in a paintball war. Mark and I got in amongst the flying #FF0000 (red) and #FFFF00 (yellow) paintballs, to try and teach a few graphic designers a lesson or to on how to use ink as a missile. Turns out they had a fair idea.... let's just say there's a fair bit of pent up anger in those mouse pads.
We've posted a few photos and a little video to give you a feel of the action.
Posted on Sunday, April 01, 2007
