Chapter 3 choose your platform
This has been one of the most astonishing and concerning areas of website building, don’t take anything for granted when talking to web design firms and don’t be afraid to ask what may seem like really basic questions.
For a website to be truly effective all aspects must be optimised towards search engine performance or you will be facing an uphill struggle to get noticed. Trust me when I say that achieving and maintaining good search engine positions will take a good proportion of your time, don’t pull the rug out from under yourself by building a site that will be a battle to optimise.
SEO orientated questions to ask your web designer if you use an e-commerce platform or other type of content management system.
Can alt tags be individually edited (Alt tags describe each image and are important for search engines to identify the image and for people with impaired sight to access your website) we fell foul of expensive systems without this basic function.
Can you access the full suite of page meta data to edit it for SEO purposes, this means page title, description and keywords. Although keywords are less relevant these days as some search engines ignore them. But it still indicates the level of customisation or control that you will have over your site. Some C.M.S. platforms will generate page title and description for you which can be hit and miss depending on where it draws the information from.
Can you add and edit H1, H2, H3 and H4 content. With most platforms this is easy, in the HTML editor area that allows you to add text there will be the ability to turn normal text into H1, 2, 3, 4 headers. This can be descriptive and give the search engines more idea of what your webpage it about. Remember you want your homepage to rank for your area of specialisation your internal pages get you even more high quality traffic by ranking for your specific products or services. If some one is looking for a ‘chrome plated round drawer handle” it will be useful if your page or department filled with chrome plated round drawer handles pops up first on a search engine.
Is there the ability to add “rich snippets” to the page, rich snippets are another way of giving search engines nice descriptive information about the specific webpage. This again adds to your SEO efforts and needs to be edited by you, rather than generated by the platform (this can lead to poorly constructed information)
Open source blogging platform wordpress has this feature, so why wouldn’t your platform?
Does your platform create a fully responsive website that will display on mobile, tablet and desktop. This question is vital, more and more search traffic comes through mobile devices and I can’t see that trend changing any time soon. Who knows as hardware gets better the very notion of a desktop PC may well go extinct. The search engines look for sites that have either mobile versions or are fully responsive and will adjust to the screen size they are being viewed on automatically. Your new site needs to do this!
Will you host the site on a secure server, if you are going into e-commerce, launch the site on a secure server from the start this means your url will start “https” not “http” the engines will read that and prefer your website to non secure competitors as it indicates you take your customer’s security seriously
Do you see that good SEO and website building is a cake of many ingredients!
How neat is the code? Straight forward bad code is a common problem, ask your web site designer or platform supplier for examples of live websites that already use their content management or e-commerce systems. Check the page load speeds by searching on “page load speed checker” and feeding the homepage into the checker. This is a great way of showing who’s sites are well coded and throwing up the fewest errors.
Again the search engines take this data into account, can you image investing hundreds of hours writing content and buffing images for a CMS that runs slowly and will never please the search engines criteria?
There are so many ways to hamper your online efforts and doing a U turn on a website that is fundamentally flawed is painful and expensive. I think it probably happens every day though.
Will my website have social media links, two things here, obviously the site’s very template MUST have links out to your businesses Facebook page, instagram, pintrest, youtube, vimeo, twitter and any other social media outlet you plan on using. But will the individual product pages have “like” “tweet” and “share” buttons? Increasingly social media use is part of search engine results if you content is being shared it must be relevant and of interest to people. That is as simple as that. A share is like a vote, “come and have a look at what I found” is what the sharer is saying. Make sharing your content easy to do, this is SEO that will happen while you sleep.
Does the offering use frames? Old one this, just don’t, frames can lock valuable content away from search engines and leave them staring at a blank space. Make SURE this doesn’t happen to you.
Can I embed video content in a slick and seamless way. Some platforms I have used really didn’t offer this. Videos show and speak to people in a way that text and pictures just cannot. So use video and make sure your platform can serve up video content in a what that does not look like a clumsy after thought.
Does your platform general a site map file that can be uploaded to the various search engines to update them on the site. This isn’t optional, you need to tell the engines about your site and that is what a site map does.
Does your e-commerce section generate a merchant feed that will allow your products to show up on shopping channels offered by search engines?
Can your e-commerce platform run eBay, amazon, Tesco, Debenhams and other channels allowing you to simply integrate selling through third party sites as easily and neatly as selling through your own site
Which accounting software packages will your e-commerce platform link to to save on administration time
Is there an easy way of keeping content fresh, a website is never done and never finished. Content must be kept fresh and new content added continuously, this tells engines that the site is alive and kicking and that someone is taking an interest in it. A blog is the easiest way to add fresh content while internal pages should be checked and updated frequently. Most web designers should be able to install an open source blogging platform like wordpress seamlessly onto your server so adding fresh content is a cinch.
Also your blogging is a great way of capturing more free traffic with well named and SEO optimised blog posts. People are searching for information on refurbishing old furniture, if they read your post they will feel connected with your business and may come back to buy their new drawer handles from you. Think of blog posts as little advertising billboards floating round the internet bringing high quality traffic to your site.
Is the platform open source? How do updates happen? Who is going to host the site and where?
Some agencies insist on hosting the site themselves which can lead to a rather turbulent relationship if prices creep up or performance falls down. I had this exact experience of a shiny new website falling further and further behind as the company hosting it would not update their platform and keep up with the times.
If a web agency is successful you can be drawn to them, then that very success becomes the problem as they get comfortable and don’t press ahead with every possible tweak and update to keep their platform current. Or suddenly every update that would be free on open source software comes with a hefty price tag. In my experience that agency only really took notice when customers started leaving them in droves. But by then it is too late. From that experience I would choose an independent agency on an open source e-commerce platform every time.
People change, businesses change, try not to tie yourself to one supplier it is not a safe long term strategy.
Can you imagine your homepage slipping further and further down the SERPs simply because of out of date code or some other SEO limitation? The internet changes fast and to stay on top you need the flexibility that independence brings.
Will the template included links to my major brands and department pages, this is a simple way of making sure that your internal link strategy remains healthy. Steer the design towards a template with plenty of room for text. Two reasons here, search engines like text and text means links so each page that the template is on will link to prominent internal pages keep them searchable and easy to find.