Does Your Website Have Good SEO And User Experience? Tags, Meta Tags, Keywords, What Next?	Visited: 1015 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Kathy Austin June 26, 2007

You have included your tags, meta tags, keywords and did your link building like every good website owner has done. What next? Will the search engines beat a path to your door and get you enormous amounts of traffic that will crash your server? The answer is no.

The above is just one tiny step towards achieving your business goal. First of all, sit down and write your goals. What is it you are looking for? Is it leads where you just want visitors to leave their names and contact information? Or is it more lofty, like earning some dollars while they are on your site? How do you get them to loosen their purse strings?

As a consultant, I always tell my customers, know your goals. Knowing what you want to get out of your visitors will help you create a targeted ad and a relevant landing page for the customers. If you are a mortgage broker, have a form on your site where interested customers can leave their contact information. In this way, you can make follow up calls and sell your products to them.

SEO for ecommerce sites

If you are a business selling multiple products, it is a good idea to have relevant keywords on the landing pages of those products. In addition to that, you can upsell or give information on related products with a search function located in your site or in that page itself. When a customer lands on a page selling, say, a softwares, you can have relevant add ons or similar products with the words "if you like this product, you may like these too" or something along those lines to get their attention. This allows you to showcase your other products and the customer feels that they are given a choice of several items to choose from. You not only give the customer a good user experience, they may come back later too.

Do not forget to add a "Tell a friend" or "Bookmark this page", so they remember where you are located. Viral marketing is an effective way of selling products and services. Customers who like your product or services must be encouraged to give testimonials and tell their friends about your business. Ask your customers to leave a comment on your site. Testimonials helps to build trust as they cannot see you and this is a good way to gaining trust.

FAQs and live support help can help with answering any questions that customer have when they are on your site. FAQs or frequently asked questions can be questions which you think your customers will ask. Over time, you can accumulate the questions that your customers asked you and compose a comprehensive answer to those questions. This can be posted on your site for your customers to view. There are many live support add-ons that you get online. This can be purchased for a yearly or monthly fee. It can be tried on a trial basis before you buy the one you like.

Giving an assurance that you will not spam the customer's mail box and keeping to that promise goes a little way in reassuring a customer when asking for their mail addresses. Remember, they can be a repeat customer and it will not help annoying them with daily emails. Once a month telling them about new products or discounts or any other offers should be the minimum unless they specify otherwise.

Another useful add on is a translation tool for your international customers. Google has a useful tool which can be downloaded. There are several other companies which offer variations or even translation of your blogs which can be useful in reaching out to the non-English speaking customers. Non-English speaking customers account for a large number of users of Google search. So if it is a product or service which can be provided to them, then your market has just expanded to double or treble of what it currently is.

Just as in real life, where you don’t forget the friendly waitress who served you in one of your favorite cafes and you want to come back for more, a user experience has to be made pleasant.

There are no sales people to sell or give your customers information and it has to all be done by a silent website. So being intuitive, knowing your customer, having wish lists which you can refer to, remembering their birthdays, having live support on the site or a good help manual, all these go in creating a good impression and goes to increasing the bottom line. As important as it is to have keywords, relevant landing pages and relevant url's, once the user lands on the page, it is important to make sure all links work, pages load quickly and makes the customer want to come back for more.