1. key word research

2. implementing these key words in the site

3. link building and search engine submission.

The role of the developer or designer mainly comes in the second step, i.e. implementing the keywords in the site. And to implement the perfectly sorted out keyword, there are certain simple and basic steps to be followed and they are…

Keywords

• Each page should have a maximum of two key word phrases
• Each keyword phrase should be 3 or 4 word long
• Create keyword phrases for each page by referring to the site map

Title tag

• <title> Title phrases.. </title>
• This should contain the sites main key word phrase at least once
• It is ideal to have maximum 60 words

Meta Keywords

• <meta name=”keywords” content=”key word phrases, ”  >
• This should contain keywords for the page and not the site as whole.
• Maximum 250 characters long
• Don’t use the same keyword more than twice
• Don’t use all caps unless the word is an acronym
• Don’t repeat the same word (even capitalized differently) right next to itself
• Don’t get too much obsessed with this since this is not of much value now

Meta Description

• <meta name=”description” content=”describe the page”  >
• This should describe more about the page and not about the website.
• This is what people see when your page comes up in search engines
• Maximum 200 characters
• Don’t use the same keyword more than twice
• Don’t repeat the same word (even capitalized differently) right next to itself

Headings

• Use key words in heading, <H1>, <H2>
• Adjust the page content using headings, and using css for heading tag is a good option

Text / Page content

• Text should be minimum 250 words, and better it is better to have 500 words or more, if it is less than 250 words most search engine won’t index it.
• In the HTML code for the page, the text should be as close to the beginning of the page as possible, because there is a limit to how far down into a page a search engine spider will go to try to find text. It is generally agreed that this is 3kb. That’s only about 80-100 lines of code! So make sure your text comes before some really long JavaScript menu in the code for the page, or else the search engine won’t make it far enough into the page to index the text. They’ll never see the text if it is buried way down at the end of the code

Images

• Image name should be descriptive and separated by hyphens. For example an image of a company logo would be ideally companyname-logo.jpg
• Alt tags should be filled in to describe the image for text browsers and visually impaired.
• Title tags can be used to describe the picture, this will be displayed before the image is loaded

Anchor tags

• Title tags in anchor are indexed by the search engines, so it is always a good idea to explain in the title tag about the page to which the link leads. And also key words can be added in here.

Robots tag

• The robots Meta tag is more useful for pages you do not want indexed. If you don’t want a page to be indexed, then put this robots tag in the head of your document:

<meta content=”noindex”>

Robots text file

• Make an empty file. Name it “robots.txt”. Put it in the root directory of your server and If you want every robot to be able to index your site, just leave the robots.txt file completely empty but make sure it is there.

Code in robots.txt

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /tmp/

Disallow: /private/

That example lets the robots coming to your site index everything except what is in your cgi-bin directory, your tmp directory, and your private directory.

Validate your HTML code

• The search engine robots which gather information from your site can really only do two things: 1. Read text. 2. Follow links. That’s all. Modern browsers are much, much smarter than robots. So while you may be able to look at a page using the latest version of your browser, the search engine robots are too dumb to see anything at all if there is a big error in your HTML code. If you have an unclosed HTML tag – for example if you have complicated nested tables, any of which aren’t closed — then that may be the point where the search engine robot gives up trying to read your site. To validate your site, use this link: http://validator.w3.org/

Registering with search engines

• Registering your website with search engines is necessary to get a fair chance of being listed.

Get Links to site

• It is also a good idea to get links to your website from valid sites.

Feel like having this guideline handy with you ? Download it here

And a more basic overview of SEO can be found here…

Most projects are developed directly from the requirement specification. The drawback of this is that requirement specs are mostly words and sometimes they have diagrams and screenshots and sometimes they miss some elements or something is not explained clearly enough. But the most important issue is that these documents lack details, especially minute details which will affect development and will change the hours required to finish it.

Like they say the devil is in the details, it comes as a shock sometime to clients and to developers, when client thinks this particular feature was explained in the requirement and when developer thinks this particular feature was not mentioned clearly enough to be considered. The more clear things are more better will be the result; clarity is the key to outstanding products, clarity in what each others want. And this where a wireframe comes in, like a blue print for a house, a wireframe is equally important to a website.

So what makes the wireframe different from the requirement specification?

A wireframe is almost similar to the website itself, where requirement document is a description with words and pictures. Wireframe is in HTML and is viewed in a browser. For example a wireframe for a registration form will contain an html page which has all the elements for the form. And the submit button will be clickable and on click it will specify the required actions and also take the user to the next page, just like the real site. Only difference will be that there is no database and no design, and no script of course.

So if it is a huge website and has a lot of forms, then it will be a good investment to spend time in creating a wireframe out of the requirement document. And when you create these wireframe you will notice most of the missing elements in the requirement since you start to think in the practical point of view in creating a site and with its details. Once these wireframes are created it can be handled to any designer or developer, even if a new developer has to start working on the project, he can see all the details in the wireframe and he does not have to go and see the communication made between the client and the previous developer. And it is easier for the designer because he can see all the elements while creating the inner pages. And it is easier for the developer because all the action is mentioned in the wireframe.

So how do you make this wireframe?

There are different tools to create these wireframes, some are free and some are paid. After trying couple of these tools I found Axure Pro to be the best among the lot. It has all the above mentioned abilities, it can create a mini website and you can call it a wireframe.

Search Engine Optimization

The basic idea of Search Engine Optimization or in short SEO is to improve the volume and quality of the traffic to a website. And to achieve this there are few basic methods followed by SEO specialists and also by web developers. They are,

1. Keyword research
2. Content developing
3. Link building / Social Media
4. Analysis reports

Keyword research

This is basically the process of finding out the search terms people enter into search engine to find out particular information in the internet. For example if you are doing keyword research for a company which sells web development outsourcing services in India for German clients. Then you need to find out what your prospective clients type into Google or in any other search engine when they want to search for an outsourcing partner in India. And once you find these keywords then you can use them in your website content in the ideal way so that when people search for those words your website comes in the top ranking and which increases your chance of getting the attention of that prospect

Sounds interesting, but how do you find these words??? It’s not as tough as it sounds like; first you list out a few key words which you think is matching your service and then search for these keywords effectiveness in keywords tools. There are some paid keywords tools and also you can use Google ad words keywords tool. And also by using Google Insights for search will give you an idea of the effectiveness of the entered keyword which is the number of people searching for that word and their location and the results and also suggestions for other keywords. With this you can get an idea of the keywords you require and once you have the keywords then you can go to next step which is content developing. There are also so many sites and tool available in the web to do this, some are Quintura (http://www.quintura.com/) and wordtracker (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/).

Content developing

Content developing is basically developing the content for the website in such a way that the users who land in your site with the researched keywords get the information they were looking for. The idea is not to include the keywords repeatedly in your content. The idea is to provide information which the users expect to have and that will drive in good traffic and increase the site ranking.  And also the content should have a minimum number of 250 words and the keyword density should be average that is the total number of words and the occurrence of the keyword in the content.

Developer’s tips

URL, Title, Meta Tags and Meta Description

Second method is the technical side of content developing which is more relevant to developers. This can apply to different parts of the website starting from the website name. For example if you want to create a website to sell used mustang cars in Detroit then the ideal website name can be like www.used-mustang-detroit.com which has the most relevant keywords and also separated by a “-“. This will make sure that used mustang Detroit is read as three separate keywords and when someone searches for these keywords together this site has the highest chance of summing on top based on URL. And once the URL is set then the most important are the page title, Meta keywords and Meta description. All these three should be in relevance to the site content.

Heading and content

And the second thing after meta tags are the headings in the page content once you use the keywords in the headings tag like “<h1></h1>” it increases the site relevance. So it is ideal to have the keywords in the content and in the heading.

Images

When you are using images in the website, for example if there is a company logo then it is ideal to have the image name changed to the relevancy of the picture. For example if you have an image of a mustang car and then if you upload the image with name like “image123.jpg” and if you upload it with “ford-mustang.jpg” then the latter has higher chance of showing up in image search. And also it increases the site relevance if the image name and the content keywords match.

ALT tags

It is also ideal to add an ALT tag to an image so the crawler can read the alt tag and identify what the image is about. And if the image name and alt tag and the site content altogether speaks about the same topic then its boosts the page’s relevance to the top and increase the chance of showing up on top of the search engines.

Anchor tags

When you are using an anchor tag or a link in a web page it is ideal to have the keywords in there too. For example for an anchor tag which links to accessories for the car it would be best to do it like this <a href=”car-accessories.htm” title=”Car accessories”> rather than <a href=”page3.htm”>

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is like the instruction guideline fort the robots or the crawlers or spiders or whatever you may call it. The basic idea is that each search engine has an algorithm which crawls each websites and web pages and creates an index for each website and when users search in the search engines this index is referred before the web pages are listed. The robot.txt file will communicate with the crawler and it can say to the crawler to omit some files or folders so that those pages will not be indexed and hence not be listed in the searches. But even if you don’t want to block users to any folder or file it is still better to create a blank robot.txt file and save it in the root folder of your web server and also in the folder which contains the index file, in case if both are not same.

So after you have done your keyword research and created a good website with relevant contents it’s your turn to give this site some publicity and one of the methods is link building.

Link Building

Link building is the process of having a link to your website in another website.  There are two kinds of link buildings, artificial and organic link building.

Artificial link building

This is the method of creating links to your website from other directories or sites by submitting your links to those directories. And if it is a website you can have a link exchange by asking the owner of that site to put your link in his site in return of the same from you. And to submit to directories there are online directories where you can submit your links for free and it is not so useful because most people will not search for online directories when they want to search for a website and instead they search a search engine like Google or yahoo. So in effect it is better to spend less time in artificial link building and spend more time in Organic link building

Organic link building

This is the method of creating good content and other people add a link to your site because they think the information in your web site or page is useful for the readers of their site. This is the ideal way of link building and this is done by creating good content. And also you can promote the information you have in your site by answering forums that relates to your specialization. So for example if you have a web development outsourcing company in India and want to get more clients from Europe then you can start a blog about it which will help to create awareness of your service and also helps to increase your credibility. Another step is to visit forums and answer to questions which relate to your services and leaving a link back to your site in the signature. Also having your website URL in your email signature will also help you to be promoted within your network.

Social media

Having your presence in social media sites will also boost your presence in the web tremendously. Different steps you can take are

Facebook / Twitter

With the large number of users in facebook you can boost your web presence by creating a facebook profile for your company and also create a fan page for your company. And most important thing is to keep the fan page and profile updated with content and activities. An interesting way is to organize events and polls in facebook about your industry of work which will keep users active in your group. And having a twitter account and posting about your blogs and activities can help you to be active among the web users.

Analysis

And after creating good content website and have spread the word around then the task is to analyze the performance. Google analytics is a free service offered by Google which will help users to study the performance of your website and content. Basically you can see how each content, page, image etc are performing with page view and by returning customers to your site. With Google analytics tools you can decide where the users come to your site from and which links users click to get to your website or page. And with the information provided you can change the content of your website or the links.

1. Global usability
2. Design flexibility
3. Shopping..!!!
4. Analytics and reporting

Global usability

Multiple websites and stores

With Magento you can manage multiple websites using one CMS…!!! That is one of the amazing features of Magento so for example if you have three websites like, shoes.com, t-shirt.com and hats.com you can manage all these three websites with one CMS using Magento. You can also manage multiple stores in the same site with the same CMS

Multi-Lingual

Magento is Multilingual and that means you can have your website in French, German, English or in any other language. And also since you can have multiple websites and stores using the same CMS, you can also have one website in English and another in some other language. So for example if you have a website which sells cigars, you can have it in English like cigars.com, and have it in German like cigars.de specifically for the German market and all these with one CMS. That is one good feature which you won’t find in most other opensource e-commerce software’s.

Localization

Localization is a feature which will be useful if you have a global customer database. The currency localization can change the currency in the site according to the location of the customer. So for example if you have a site which sells shirts and it shows the price in USD (United states dollars), and if you have set up currency localization for India, if a person access the site from India then the site checks the IP address of the person accessing the site and it sees that the customer is from India and then the price of the product is changed to INR (Indian national rupee). This can be done with EU and other countries as well.

Multiple currencies

Multiple currencies can be used in the site. For example if you want the price of the products to be in euros or in dollars, you can decide that from the CMS, which can be a handy feature when you are having a global customer base or website for different regions

Allowed countries

This feature helps admin to change features of the site according to countries, for example in user registration, certain countries can be disallowed and also it comes handy when certain shipping methods are available in certain countries. So admin can specify shipping methods depending on the country and also the payment method can be specified according to the countries.

Design flexibility

Customizable templates

Magento templates are 100% customizable, that means there is no restriction while creating the design for a Magento site and these templates can be uploaded thru Magento CMS and can be used in the site. And also theme management can be an useful feature, say for example different themes can be designed for the store like winter, summer, autumn etc and they can be uploaded to the site from the CMS. And admin can change the theme of the user side from the CMs, so when its summer Admin can change to the bright sunny theme and so on, these small knick knacks can create an impression in the customers minds…

iPhone optimized themes

Magento themes are iPhone optimized and they can be views in iPhone and which makes mobile browsing easier.

Shopping

Gift coupons

Gift coupons management in Magento has not much of a limit and can be used in a wide variety of ways. Coupons can be created for a customer group, for a time period, for a total amount of purchase, certain products, certain categories of products, certain stores etc… And the discounts also can be managed ion different ways like buy X and get Y free, buy X and get 50% off in Y etc…

Pricing and discount options

There are different pricing and discount options available, like Multi-Tier pricing, where users get a discount on the products if they buy a certain number of the same product. For example if you buy 3 shirts you get a 10% discount on the total amount. This can be set in the CMS suing the multi-tier feature. Another option will be Bundled products, this feature lets the admin to bundle different products and offer a discount for the bundle. For example a user purchases a shirt, a pullover and a t-shirt then user gets a 15% discount on total price. Another feature will be Customer group pricing, where the admin can create customer groups and offer different prices for the same product to different customer groups.

Share products

Recently viewed products option let users view the recently browsed products, and recently compared products let users view recently compared products after they view a product. Users can create a Wish list and can send it to a friend by email or by RSS. There is also a RSS feed available for new products or for products with special tags, so users don’t have to browse the site to know whether the is a new product in the site or a new product of say for example with tag ‘sneaker’ is available on the site, it can be viewed in their RSS feed. Send to a friend feature for a product is also available, which can also be restricted to registered customers or also to all customers.

Checkout

Check out options in Magento is vast and flexible. Magento has a one-page checkout which is hassle free and simple and less frustrating for users where they don’t have to go to multiple pages and fill different forms for check out. In this case simple = good!! SSL Security support is available for both front end and back end. Other features are shipping to multiple addresses for the same order, guest check out; where user can check out without registering to the site. And another useful feature is a saved shopping cart with configurable expiration date. This comes handy when users can do the payment at a later point of time and still the products are in the cart. Certain shipping options available are flat rate shipping per order, per item and free shipping.

Payment

Payment in Magento can be configured from the CMS in two ways, first one is to authorize and charge so that the amount is charged soon after authorization and second option is to charge on creation of invoices in which the amount is charge after invoice creation. Different payment methods are available in Magento. Multiple PayPal gateways like website payment standard and website payment pro, Website payments pro UK and PayPal Payflow Pro. Payment can be also integrated with Authorize.net, Google checkout, saved credit card method for offline payments, Checks / Money orders, Accept purchase orders. And there are a lot of other payment extensions available in Magento, there are around 30 or more payment extensions available and some of them are like, iDeal, ePay, Fontis Australia, Secure Trading XPay mode, ChronoPay, PayPoint.net, VCS, WorldPay etc…

Order management in CMS

The CMS has a feature to create a customer and also to do a purchase. Admin can view the customer profile and can view the shopping history of the customer and also different features like view shopping history, view cart, view compared products list, view wish list, view last ordered item etc… There is also an option for Call center (phone) order creation with this feature customer can call a 1800 number and can place orders and a user assigned by the admin can create a order for the customer by the given details…!!! There is also an Order and Account Email updates option which will email customer for all updates on their order and for the account.

Products

There are a lot of options available to view the product and product related features some are,

• Listed / grid view of products
• Product reviews
• Filter by product tags
• Popular search terms cloud
• Configurable search with auto-suggested terms
• Cross-sell, up-sell and related items
• Multiple product images and image zoom

There are features where customers can submit product tags which can be approved by admin and displayed in the site and same for product reviews. Other product related features in admin are batch updates of products where admin can choose a range of products and attributes can be updated for the whole chosen batch of products. There is also an option to create customer personalized products, like upload text for embroidery, monogramming etc…

Analytics and reporting

All content pages have tags and Google analytics option and products are integrated with Google analytics. There are reports available in the system, some of the are,

1. Best customers report by total and number of orders
2. Best purchased product report
3. Best viewed product report
4. Sales report
5. Coupon usage report
6. Tags report
7. Total sales invoiced / refunded reports
8. Search terms report
9. Product reviews report
10. Low stock report
11. Abandoned shopping cart report
12. Tax reports etc…

So with this wide range of options Magento is one of the most sorted out open source e-commerce software’s in the web. Even after you develop a web application in Magento then you need to spend some time in studying the CMS so that the admin can manage it with full features. And also it is also good option to assign different admin users for managing the site depending on the size of the shop. In short we can define Magento as Strong, flexible and Robust. Have fun trying out this amazing product!!

• Your product to sell
• Targeted audience
• Number of sales intended per day
• Amount of transaction included
• Your budget
• And most important of all the time you intent to spend on this

If you are a low budget beginner, but still need a very professional e-commerce site you can consider online tools like Shopify (http://www.shopify.com/). Sites like Shopify works like your Gmail account where you get a domain name for your e-shop and get a tool to manage design. And once site is up all the content and admin features can be managed from the site admin panel. And these features roughly cost around 100 USD per month..!

The disadvantages of these online tools come when you need a feature and you find out it’s not offered. Then you prefer to go to a web company where they can either create a custom e-shop or customize Opensource packages. And the three things which you should consider when choosing an Opensource e-commerce package are

1. Foundation or the software
2. Design or visual simplicity
3. Flexibility and robustness in managing

Foundation or the software

This is the core of your e-commerce application. This can be developed from scratch using different frameworks, which will take more time and effort and also require re-creating already existing simple features like registration, CMS etc. This can be overcome with Opensource e-commerce packages.

Beauty of Open source and PHP

This is where PHP and Opensource come in. With the Opensource and free software gnu license a lot of companies create Opensource packages and distribute for free and with the ease of PHP language it is easy and less expensive to customize a Opensource package.

The basic factors to consider when choosing Opensource e-commerce software

• Availability of features: This defines the basic and advances features available in the package so that they don’t have to be custom programmed. Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/) which has around 50000 shops running on it has a good CMS with strong features.
• Flexibility: So what if you need an additional feature than the basic available feature, then you have the plugins or extensions which are developed by other programmers and available for free download. And if you still can’t find the feature you need then you can custom program it with the help of a programmer and that’s where a web development company comes in to your rescue.

Design or visual simplicity

Creating a user friendly design is a big factor in creating your e-commerce site especially if you are competing with other e-commerce site and if you are new. Then people tend to go existing competitors which they are familiar with. Using a User experience designer can help you to develop a good user friendly design. This basically means it takes the customer from product listing to payment smoothly..!!!

Freedom to custom create templates

With Open source e-commerce packages you can custom create a template / design and integrate it to the e-commerce system. That is one of the flexibility of the Opensource packages, and one important thing to keep in mind is to design the elements in the structure of the e-commerce pattern. Even an entirely different structure is possible to integrate, but then you need an experience developer and designer for that particular package to do the integration.

Use of free templates

Another beauty of this Opensource package is the availability of free or paid templates. You can download free or purchase templates for most of the popular Opensource packages.Sites like Template monster can be of help (http://www.templatemonster.com/)

Flexibility and robustness in managing

And once your e-commerce application is launched, your work starts depending on how simple it is to manage your new e-shop. So choosing a flexible, simple and yet robust software makes a big difference in how much time you need to spend to manage your site.

Two important factors are products and payment. Ease of use in managing products, like adding new products and changing the availability of products should be easy to do. And also adding the images and video of the product are also easy in carts like Prestashop (http://www.prestashop.com/) and Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/). And the payment, managing of the payments and option to use different payment methods are a good advantage for your shop since it will help more payments done without hassles.

Some of the most used open source e-commerce applications are

• Prestashop http://www.prestashop.com/
• Opencart http://www.opencart.com/
• Magento http://www.magentocommerce.com/
• Cube cart http://www.cubecart.com/