The original website was launched in the final decade of the last century.
Their site was in its second functional incarnation. It having been based upon two different eCommerce technologies over the course of time.

As eCommerce evolved and so did their routes to market. Telephones Online had to look for another solution to accurately control all their merchandising avenues. An increasing percentage of their sales were coming from alternative routes as more and more online shopping activity centred on stores like eBay and Amazon.

So, after careful consideration it was decided that eSeller pro could provide the basis for this venture. This system allows a full inventory control for the merchant selling online, you can choose which products are sold through which channels ( i.e., tick the eBay box, tick the Amazon box, select which website etc )

The biggest benefit of using eSellerPro is that product can be sold across multiple channels from a single inventory. Their channel profile feature automatically manages the stock levels across channels according to user specified rules (e.g. percentage of available stock or a fixed quantity). Once channel profiles have been created there is never any need to manage stock levels on different channels.

quote from tamebay

eSeller Pro has delivered a superb backoffice which is allowing the merchants to manage all their routes to market and inventories under one, easily accessible login.

The new site has been optimised sensibly with relation to the major search engines with a series of 301 redirects from cached pages from the previous site and new Pay per Click campaign initiated with Google and other search partners.

Telephones Online site makes for a clear and easy process for the customer to find, and buy cordless phones online.

Site is at : Telephones Online

The brief was to design a site in keeping with their current branding but to have an identity of its own.

The site incorporates a hand coded folder structure for a clean SEO perspective, making the site both accessible and usable. Main elements were brought out using sIFR, a technology which allows Flash replacement of text. (CSS3 will eventually make this unnecessary).

Site may be seen at : Paediatric Training Courses

Currently the site runs its online booking of first aid training courses through paypal, but in the near future we expect to roll out further sophistication site wide, making the site easier to use for everyone concerned – as that is our goal.

Nowadays the art has evolved and much of this is thanks to the ever fluctuating but ever dependable algorithm which Google devised to support its own raison d’être. You see that Google’s very existence is down the fact that it delivers good search results. I shudder when I use Bing as I know that it may well throw up ludicrous and unusable results in its results. Google is king because the first page or two you come to after performing a search will include pretty much all the best sources for solving your query. If any search engine failed to meet this criterion it would soon be dropped by the savvy public.

Hence, and this is clarity and beauty of the highest order, Google makes sure that the searcher (their client to be precise) will be satisfied with their product.

What makes a good website ?

• Clear Identity – “it does what it says on the box”
• Good navigational structure
• Clearly defined sections
• Loads at reasonable speed
• Is accessible
• Can be said to be a useful source of information/ services
• Is recognised by others as a good website

These are some of the things that Google places a high importance upon when considering the validity of your website in its sphere so these are the things you, and your SEO/ SEM agency need to consider when either building a new site or attempting to increase traffic to an existing one.

It is no longer a dark art, SEO you know, it is serving us all, it drives us to create better, more relevant and richer websites, it is the good influence on web site designers and coders, it is the force of natural selection driving the evolution of websites today.

an aside – if Google decided that any website with a huge black circle in the middle of their home page would automatically go to page one in the search results for their <title> tag keywords, do you think that anyone would follow…….

There is another side, however, which has been labelled with the acronym of GMOOT – get me one of those.
This is where a webmaster/ site owner decides that they “just outta have some social media” on their website.
They want the colourful little icons which associate them with youth, Web 2.0 and cool. So, they may get an account on each of these platforms, but then what?

Does your flower store really expect to have fans on Facebook? Should your iphone case emporium expect to have so much to say that people will follow your Tweets? In many cases the answer is a resounding no and it is not long before these pretty icons lead off to pages last updated a year ago with the text “Wow, we are on Twitter at last” or suchlike.

However, there is no doubt that a strong and well organised social media presence can do wonders for your online marketing strategy. If you have a product or service which can be regularly updated in some way, that has a real place in the world of frequent updates, Diggs and suchlike then it really is worth investigating how best to present your company on these ‘new’ stages.

Like so many things online, and indeed in life, it is worth doing only if you are going to do it well.

We will start off by analysing the current situation of the website, looking at visitor origin and behaviour so that we are well positioned to both learn from current traffic and improve upon it.

This initiation will be followed by an extensive period of analysis of the industry in general and the best performing sites of their competitors, it is important to see what other people are doing in your arena and to learn from them.

As a result of the industry analysis we will define a list of keywords, commonly used search terms, and implement these into the website’s content and code.

Some websites are lacking in content in general so content creation can come into play at this stage.

The good thing about following ethical SEO techniques is that they, in fact, are good for all concerned. In the old days SEO’s played silly games with hidden text and excessive keyword densities aimed at fooling the search engine spiders. Now the major search engines are sophisticated enough not to fall for this trickery ( and will commonly penalise/ blacklist sites which try it).
This has resulted in the formation of a SEO strategy that requires webmasters to create easily navigable and accessible websites with useful content – this is how we need the web to evolve after all.

Back to my story – as the website in question has several geographic locations which will need optimisation we will be looking to have the site listed in local directories and blogs. It is quite likely that we will be recommending a period of press releases at some stage so that the site’s presence and new code and content is brought to the attention of the search engines with more frequency and weight.

This entire process is a FOR>NEXT LOOP of course, as the whole process is iterative. On needs to tune a search engine optimisation campaign, analysing the effects of the work you have done and honing the site so that you get nearer and nearer to a site which fulfills all that their customers may be searching for,

Once your website is worthy of a place high up in the search results it will make its way up there.

However there is something else I need. Mozilla Firefox has an interesting array of add-ons, some of which can be quite useful for web development. The most imperative of these is Firebug which allows a developer or coder to make changes to the CSS of the site in real time. Sadly Chrome does not yet offer quite as good functionality via its developer tools option though I hope that it will improve this offering in future updates.

Funnily enough as I was pondering I thought of another anomaly. The Google toolbar is a useful addition to any browser. Chrome of course allows you to add Google search commands to the address bar directly such as :link and :site. The toolbar gives you many enhanced options to your search experience and also shows the Page Rank Indicator (which is a useful but oft misinterpreted tool for measuring the importance of a website).

As I installed the new Google Toolbar for Firefox I knew that I was going to make this my default browser. Luckily the new machine has enough RAM to cope with what I have always considered to be the most resource hungry browser.

Once you have a Google Account you can head over to Google Analytics to apply for an account. This is a simple process which only requires you to know the name of the domain and what country you are in ( twice for some reason ) and you are done.

Google Analytics will now give you some code which you need to have inserted just before the closing <body> tag of your site’s code.

You will then have access to very detailed data about the traffic your site receives. Particularly after a month or so you will start to build up a good idea where your traffic is coming from and what they are doing when they are on your website – in turn allowing you to direct your online marketing campaigns and allow you to identify any areas where your website’s usability is lacking.

The more you return and investigate just what your customers are doing on your site the more you are able to make the best of your web presence.