If you manage a site which has Sitelinks for certain searches then this is a great addition to an already great webmaster resource.

Apparently though Google doesn’t seem to manage Sitelinks for its own search results very well!

The first Sitelink above ‘Installed’ links to the ‘Congratulations – Google Toolbar is now installed’ webpage. Maybe not a link which somebody searching for the Google Toolbar would find useful?

Also listed is ‘Welcome to Gmail’ a link to Google’s Webmail offering. Surely a user searching for ‘Google Toolbar’ would not be looking for Gmail?

Anyway, learn a lesson from Google. Make sure you manage your Sitelinks for maximum effect!

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Well this is not just another article on SEO, I’m not going to be talking about increasing your conversion rate, instead I will be discussing the offline aspect of running a successful Internet retail business.

During my consulting work I come across many Internet retailers selling a wide range of products online, some more successful than others. The majority of these businesses have one major aspect in common, their offline operation sucks!

What do I mean ‘offline’?

When discussing offline aspects of an ecommerce business I am talking about tasks including:

• Dealing with enquiries
• Inventory management
• Order dispatching

These are the crucial steps which go on behind the scenes of all ecommerce sites, and can be the difference between a smooth, peaceful operation or absolute chaos!

Whilst the above factors are not an exhaustive list of offline functions, they represent areas which can definitely be improved upon in many ecommerce businesses.

Dealing With Enquiries

How do you respond to customer enquiries?

These may arrive in the form of a telephone call, email or even the newly popular ‘live chat’ interfaces which are popping up around various websites.

However they arrive, timing is crucial. It is unacceptable to list a telephone number then leave it unanswered during core business hours, it gives a bad impression of your business to potential clients and leaves them frustrated.

As with telephone calls, all email enquiries should be dealt with promptly, I recommend a response time of no longer than 1 hour during trading hours, emails received outside of business hours should be dealt with as soon as is possible, however waiting for the next working hour is usually acceptable.

Live Chat is useful as you can instantly indicate whether you have a representative online to field questions, however on busy sites, dealing with more than 3 – 4 chat sessions at one time per operative can lead to problems, including slow response times, and confusion as to who asked what.

Our advice is to try and work smarter if possible. For example, if you receive more than a couple of calls per week asking the same questions, why not try and include this requested information directly on your website, then potential clients will not need to call you quite so much.

Also if you have many enquiries for which the information is already online, maybe taking a look at your website architecture would be beneficial. Even providing a simple link from a product page to a related F.A.Q. section could cut down your call numbers.

Less time spent dealing with enquiries will give you more time to develop your business, and could even save on costs associated with answering enquiries such as staffing or call charges.

Inventory Management

Whether you store all your stock directly on your premises or simply relay all orders to a 3rd party drop-shippers outfit, you must have a handle on inventory information.

Does your website accurately convey current stock levels to potential customers? I have more than once seen orders made online for items which are actually out of stock, or are on a 3 – 4 weeks delivery schedule, without the customer being aware. This is really poor service and definitely leads to angry customers.

If an item takes an extended period of time to reach a customer after an order is made you MUST make this clear directly on the product information page. Some people would argue that showing this information would put off potential customers, however I have found most people are happy to wait if it’s explained clearly the reason for this. Also in the majority of case’s customers choose to simply cancel their orders once they are made aware of the delays.

Many online retailers don’t hold stock, and have to arrange delivery directly from a 3rd party. This has many advantages, also with a few drawbacks, however this is not a discussion on the merits of drop-shipping.

If you do operate in this fashion, you must be on top of your suppliers. Many times I have witnessed an order arrive then the site owners flicking through reams of papers looking for the supplier from which they based their prices off. All this information should be sorted out and organised so that all members of your team have access to an easy to use list immediately identifying product sources.

When prices change or new suppliers are added you should immediately update your list. An excel spreadsheet is perfect for this task, and it should be someone’s responsibility to keep it up to date.

Order Dispatching

Dispatching any order should be a painless task which anybody in your business can do.

Your ecommerce solution should be able to handle tasks including:

• Email order confirmations sent to customers
• Update online stock records
• Updating accounting systems
• Print off customer delivery address
• Print off packing slips

The product(‘s) ordered should be located and prepared for delivery. As simple as this sounds I have seen sites attempting to get by without a proper product id system setup, when orders arrive they could spend up to 10 minutes or more just identifying what product was actually requested. This may sound extreme, but it does happen.

A well designed order management system should take all the pain out of dispatching, if your current ecommerce solution can’t do this, a custom built addition to your store could be purchased. Despite an initial outlay the savings a system like this can make are vast.

One particular client I visited had a massively convoluted order process:

Upon receiving an order they manually emailed back a confirmation to the customer, then hand wrote the order details into an order book which they used to track the order process through to completion.

Next they contacted their suppliers to place the order via telephone, and once again recorded call details in the order book.

After the order was placed with their suppliers they printed off all email correspondence and order details and placed them in an ‘order tray’. Upon dispatch of the item, they again manually emailed the customer to inform them, then printed off the emails and stored them with the original order.

All paperwork was moved to a filing cabinet when the order was delivered, and they kept records pretty much indefinitely.

Their website was quite popular and often they received a few orders in the space of 30 minutes, watching them go through this process was difficult, knowing that an order management system would eliminate around 80% of their required effort.

The moral of this little story is that we currently live in the year 2007, the technology is available to automate many of the mundane tasks involved with many business operations both online and off, if you find yourself repeating many tasks over and over, take a step back and think about investing in some smarter technologies.

Final Thought

Running any business is a massive undertaking, and making a profit is even harder! There are many different articles and opinions on the front end of an ecommerce operation, and investment in that ‘shop front’ can make an unbelievable difference to the success of an online trader.

Paying attention to the back end operations, and perhaps investing in an offline ecommerce business solution will only enhance your business, freeing up your time and energy to focus on other areas.

A nice website will attract the first time buyer, but amazing customer service provided off the site will keep the customer coming back again.

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What is a conversion rate?

The term ‘conversion rate’ relates to a simple calculation that takes the number of sales (conversions) and divides it by the number of visitors to the store / business.

If 100 people visit your website and this makes 2 sales then: 2/100 = 0.02 this is the conversion rate of the ecommerce store. To turn this into a percentage, which is easier for most to work with, we simply multiply the result by 100, so 0.02 * 100 = 2%.

Conversion rates are not purely an Internet / ecommerce concept, they have been used in traditional marketing campaigns for a long time to indicate the effectiveness of promotions, ad campaigns and many other related concepts.

What is your conversion rate?

To work out your conversion rate you need to be able to monitor your website visitors using some form of statistics or analytics package. You then use your actual sales data to perform the calculation.

For example if your website logs show that your store had 7000 visitors last month, and your sales records showed 120 sales through your site then the calculation would be:

120/7000 = 0.0171 or 1.71%

Some things should be considered at this stage.

Depending on your stats / analytics package, the figure you use for your visitors could vary. Don’t use ‘hits’ as this generally registers a ‘hit’ every time a user views a page or an image. See individual instructions to decide the correct number to use.

Make sure your sales data is correct, use only sales that are generated through your website. Any sales made which have bypassed your website should not be included as these will artificially inflate your conversion rate. These types of sales could include a sale generated over the phone directly from an advert, or an ‘in-person’ purchase from a bricks and mortar store.

How do you know if your rate is good or bad?

A conversion rate without anything to compare it with is pretty useless. In an ideal world you would know what your competitors and industry leader’s rates are. This would then indicate whether any increases could be made on your site. Unfortunately this data is hardly ever available.

An extremely wide generalisation is that a ‘decent’ ecommerce site has around a 2% conversion rate.

Rates vary depending on the actual sector you’re in, highly niche sites could have rates as high as 12-14% and beyond, however sites this niche may not be able to attract massive amounts of visitors.

Actual figures for sectors are published in various places, including the Conversion Chronicles website. Below are some figures directly from there:

• Fashion/apparel - 2.2%
• Travel - 2.1%
• Home and Furnishing - 2.0%
• Sport / Outdoors - 1.4%
• Electronics - 1.1%

Remember, these are averages which will include good and bad examples of websites. If you currently measure up well against these figures it doesn’t mean that you should stop there.

Is it worth spending your time on?

YES.

Let’s take a look back at our pretend ecommerce site. It currently has a conversion rate of 1.71% and last month made 120 sales.

Let’s also suppose we could increase the conversion rate to 2%. Now, by attracting the same amount of visitors, 7000, we would generate sales of: 7000 x 2% = 140! That’s an extra 20% in sales without attracting (or paying) for any further traffic.

If each sale is worth £100 after costs, that means an extra £2000 profit every month!

Okay, so how do I raise my conversion rate?

Here is the tricky part. There and lots of factors which all go towards determining your conversion rate, some obvious, others not, here is a brief overview of five common factors:

Price

• Arguably the one of the most important factors is the price of your products. Are you competitive against your rivals? If another site is selling the same products at a cheaper price then they could well be taking your business.

Copy

• Sales copy, the actual text on your site encouraging visitors to purchase has to be strong. Overloading a site user with too much information is as much of a turn off as giving them no information. Great website copy can have a massively positive impact upon conversion rates.

Checkout Process

• The time directly after a visitor adds an item to their shopping basket is where many sales are lost. Is the shopping cart easy to use? Are you forcing a user to create an account to make a purchase? Is making a payment straightforward or convoluted?

Trust

• Trust is another major factor in the sales conversion process. Without it a visitor will rarely make a purchase, even if your price is good. Many smaller factors help create (or break) trust including, first impressions, visible security measures, terms & conditions, physical trading address listed, etc…

Returns Policy

• Having a clearly stated returns policy could be classed as a part of the trust issue, however it is so often a factor in determining a sale that it deserves a high amount of attention. Would you personally buy something from somebody you have never met, without any guarantee that you could send it back if it’s faulty / not suitable?

Note, this is certainly not an exhaustive list and many other factors will influence a potential customer on deciding to make a purchase.

Taking it further

For many small – medium ecommerce sites simply covering the basics with regards to site usability will see an improvement in conversion rates.

Once you’re confident your site has implemented best practices the next step to take conversions further is usually A/B testing or Multivariate testing.

A/B Testing

Website visitors are split into 2 randomly selected groups and are shown a different version of the same page. On the second version perhaps a different product photo is used, or the sales copy changed.

Conversions from each type of page are recorded to determine which layout gives the best conversion rate. Once you are happy to make a change, you begin the process again, perhaps changing the location of the ‘buy now button’.

The end goal is to create a page that converts as many visitors as is possible.

Multivariate Testing

This is a more advanced version of A/B testing. The principle is that for a certain page you select a number of factors that you wish to modify to try and increase sales, the variables.

For example, on a sales page you could decide to test changes in:

• Product images
• Sales copy
• Buy now button
• A promotional offer such as free delivery
• Location of key product information

The multivariate software then works out all the different combinations of the changeable factors and produces them ‘on-the-fly’ for randomly selected visitors. Again, conversion rates are recorded and, with a little tweaking here and there, you can create the ultimate sales conversion pages.

It goes without saying that more advanced conversion rate techniques can be expensive to implement, however for a heavily visited website even a fractional increase in conversion rates can be worth tens of thousands in extra revenue.

Medium – Large ecommerce site example

Following is one further example of how an increase in conversion rate could affect a medium - large ecommerce website:

Search engine optimisation and pay per click campaigns are both highly effective ways of attracting interested customers to your website, however, with increasing competition and therefore ever increasing costs, it really is important that your website is doing the most crucial part of its job effectively, generating sales.

Further resources

Google Analytics – Free website analytics package offered by Google, formally known as Urchin.
http://www.google.com/analytics

Google Website Optimizer – Another Google freebie, full A/B and Multivariate testing package.
http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

Conversion Chronicles – Dedicated conversion rate articles and resource website.
http://www.conversionchronicles.com

Conversion Report – Our very own conversion report service. <- Blatant Plug...
http://www.darrenatkinson.co.uk/ecommerce-report.asp

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Read on to discover how I managed to work out this figure, and how it could have been nearly 4000%.

One of my clients, let’s call him John, runs an eCommerce website which is around 18 months old. Site promotion is conducted through SEO and PPC (Google AdWords), with the occasional foray into traditional marketing methods from time to time.

John manages his own PPC spending directly, and apart from the odd data check, I have no input into this side of his marketing.

I am charged with the SEO for his site, and as part of this I track many aspects of the site using a web analytics package.

I’d like to share with you a 6 month overview of his eCommerce store’s traffic, traffic sources, and sales conversions.

The tables below represent actual data pulled from the web analytics package and Google AdWords. So there is no confusion, definitions for the terms listed are found below:

Source:

• AdWords – Visitors arriving to the site from Google AdWords only.
• SEO – Visitors arriving to the site from any search engine. No AdWords / paid visitors, no direct entries such as bookmarks, or simply typing in the URL.

Visitors:

• Individual visitors to the site. 1 visitor may browse 300 pages but will only be classed as 1 visitor.

Sales:

• The number of sales made by the eCommerce store from each visitor source. These figures do not include any telephone sales as they are impossible to track in this fashion.

Cost:

• The amount John has paid directly for this traffic.
• AdWords cost data taken directly from AdWords console.
• SEO cost data taken from my nominal monthly charges.

Cost Per Sale:

• Simple calculation based on cost of visitors / number of sales. A basic yet effective metric.

November 2006

SEO work starting to bear fruits after a previous 3 – 4 months initial groundwork.

December 2006

Steady growth for the SEO traffic, AdWords seems to be getting more expensive based on the lower amount of traffic.

January 2007

A dramatic increase in SEO and AdWords traffic can be seen, also a double in the number of sales from SEO. AdWords getting quite expensive now. Obviously some seasonal trends may be at play here.

February 2007

Still further growth from SEO traffic despite the short month!

March 2007

Another leap forward in traffic from SEO work, AdWords expense still climbing.

April 2007

The final month from the review. SEO is almost doubling the PPC traffic and sales are more than double. Hint, this is the month that SEO was nearly 4000% more effective than PPC.

6 Month Totals

Let’s take a minute to look at the 6 month overall figures above, and list down a few points:

• Despite a slow start, SEO work generated almost the same amount of traffic as the PPC spending.
• SEO actually generated more online sales than PPC.
• The SEO fees were only 7% of the PPC spend.
• The cost per sales figures show that SEO was actually 1433% more cost effective than the PPC.

You may think that this is a one off but I have seen other small businesses with massive PPC bills coming in each month which are hardly making a profit.

Other notes on these figures:

• If John stopped his PPC today he would save his business nearly £2000 per month costing him 33% of his online sales. (Based on Aprils online sales figures.)
• Based on the last 2 months figures the SEO would increase enough in around 3 months to more than make up for this 33% loss.
• If John stopped using our SEO services today he would not lose any of the monthly traffic or sales, they just may not increase as much.

AdWords and PPC definitely has its place in the online marketing arena and, when utilized correctly, can be a valuable addition to most businesses.

SEO work generally takes longer to get going, and can seem like you’re paying for little in terms of results for the first period, however the figures show that long term investment in SEO can transform a business and save literally thousands of pounds a year in marketing costs.

I haven’t even touched on conversion figures for the sample site, I think I’ll save that for my next article…

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From time to time I visit an Internet forum for business owners and start-ups. One of the areas available for posting is a ‘review my website’ area, you’ve probably seen them before, somebody with eCommerce issues or business problems asks for a critical review of their website.

Having some time to kill (waste), I decided I would have a look through some posts and see if I could offer some advice to a fellow business startup.

The website I picked to ‘help’ was attempting to sell software packages such as Windows Vista, and Adobe Creative Suite to the general public.

My first thought before even visiting the site is: ‘Do people even pay for Vista?’ Perhaps my way of thinking is warped, but would I personally hand over in the region of £170 for the privilege of installing Vista on my PC? Not a chance! I am more than happy to wait for my next PC upgrade where it will probably be bundled at a (seemingly) lower cost to me.

I do understand that being a little technically minded I may not represent the average consumer so I plough on anyway.

Upon visiting the eStore first impressions where not exactly brilliant. The logo and site header were poorly designed, obviously without the input of a skilled designer, and the overall colour scheme chosen for the site was basic at best.

It only took a second to see that the site was based on a popular free eCommerce template called OsCommerce. While this in itself is not a bad thing, it had undergone very little customization from the basic installation. The net result of this is that the site looked basic in its layout, and mirrored hundreds of other websites on the Internet, and not the particularly good ones either.

Next, I began to browse through the products on offer.

The first product displayed on the homepage is Microsoft Vista Premium Upgrade edition. Now, I have already established the fact that I probably wouldn’t be rushing to the tills, credit card in hand, trying to purchase Microsoft’s latest offering , so I better do some research on pricing.

I think to myself ‘Where would I go if I wanted to make a software purchase online?’ Two seconds later I’m on the Amazon homepage looking for the software department, right there on the software homepage is a nice green image of a Vista box, one further click and I can see a list of all the Vista editions including pricing.

Unfortunately you can probably guess what’s coming next…

Within roughly 15 seconds from leaving the test site, I have found the exact same product cheaper.

Not just a by a little bit, but a massive 28% cheaper!

This is from a retailer which:

• I have used successfully in the past
• I already have an account with
• Has a certain level of trust already established with me

Checking a few more items between the two sites confirms the initial discoveries, pretty much everything that the test store supplies is available at the same, or better prices from Amazon.

For me the critique has finished, in my mind I have already found enough reasons why this business is failing without going further than the homepage.

I haven’t even needed to check basic things like returns policies, checkout processes, product images and copy, etc…

To me, running a successful ecommerce venture is simple (in principle).

1. Find a product that people will want, with enough of a margin to make it worthwhile (probably the hardest task)
2. Create an ecommerce store which is well designed, builds customer trust, and offers the consumer savings over your competitors
3. Attract as many potential customers to your site as you possibly can

For the site at the subject of the review they failed at tasks 1 and 2 miserably.

The problem is that this isn’t a one off, there must be hundreds if not thousands of similar businesses out there, throwing money into something that is never going to be a success.

Even though the website is poor, and had obviously been constructed without the help of a professional web designer, this guy must have spent a certain amount of money on it. You can guarantee he has spent lots of time and energy too.

At some point surely a friend, relative or contact must have raised concerns with the business idea, maybe he should have listened.

So, thinking about starting up? Take advice, do your research, and use your common sense.

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Well, I have an idea. Why not spend some time and money on your website!

Okay, of course being a Hull based web designer it’s pretty obvious that I’m going to suggest that one to you, but read on to find out why you should be investing in this aspect of your business today.

Imagine that your looking for information about under floor heating for your house, where would you choose to find this information? Forgetting about recommendations for a minute, you would pretty much either:

Look in the yellow pages (or Hull colour pages!) at the adverts

Fire up Google and search for a Hull flooring company

If you were to take the yellow pages route, how would you decide on a company to use?

• The biggest advert?
• The best looking advert?
• The advert which conveyed the best sense of quality / trustworthiness?

Whichever one you choose, you would then need to initiate some form of contact with them to find out further information about their services, arrange to go and see them if they have local premises, or book somebody to come and give you a quote.

Perhaps the yellow pages ad might have a website address on it which you would check out prior to calling. How would you feel if you went on the companies website and it looked as though it had been put together by a child? Would it inspire you to call for more information? Maybe, maybe not.

Your company could have many skilled flooring engineers, with years of experience and know how, but you might be losing valuable clients because some new guy, fresh out of flooring collage has put together a nice looking, informative website along with a reasonable yellow pages ad and is attracting your customers.

Right, lets now pretend you chose to use the Internet to find your flooring guru. Fire up Google and type ‘hull flooring’ in. I will save you the bother, there is really only one listing on the entire first page which has details and information about a Hull company specialising in flooring and to be frank their website is worse than poor.

Try changing the search to something else, maybe ‘underfloor heating in hull’, again similar results are found.

If I were looking for a underfloor heating company in Hull I would have given up on the Internet route already.

This doesn’t have to be the case at all though!

For less than the price of a decent yellow pages ad, you could have your very own, high quality website designed. The site could have examples of your work, areas covered, enhanced contact information, pretty much anything you wanted on there.

And guess what? It will still be online long after your yellow pages ad has finished.

With the annual costs associated with running a website dropping all the time, it really is feasible that after an initial design, you could keep your site online, and providing clients for as little as £80 per year.

Initial web design costs could vary depending on your actual requirements, and getting your site to the top of Google will add to this price. It depends on how much competition there is, but for many Hull related search terms I can tell you the search engine optimisation work will be pretty easy, and long lasting.

If this hasn’t persuaded you to get that new website created, or to overhaul that poorly performing one then I’m not sure what will.

—————— EDIT ——————-

I have received an anonymous email comment regarding this post basically saying that they think that I’m unfairly targeting the business which happens to show up on a Google search for ‘Hull Flooring’. This was never the intention, I randomly picked flooring as an example of a trade as it was the first thing that came to mind, to be honest it could have been any number of trades.

A manager from the actual flooring company which comes up in the search contacted me after seeing this article and agreed with every point I made. They informed me that they were in the process of updating their website, and mentioned that they may contact me in the future for further advice on SEO.

After receiving the anonymous email I have revisited the website in question and it is definitely a vast improvement on what they had before.

I have contemplated removing or heavily editing this article, but upon reflection I still think it is a fair appraisal of the local search market, and could be valuable to businesses in the area.

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You may have spent hundreds or thousands of pounds on the design, photos, hosting, and you might end up with the best looking website of the Internet, but if you have not taken into account search engine optimisation then it will most probably spell disaster for you and your business.

Search engine optimisation is, in our opinion, one of (if not the most) important consideration when creating a new web site. In our experience it usually the part that most people neglect too!

The logic behind this statement is quite simple. What is the point of having an amazing website, selling / advertising your amazing products if nobody knows about it and they can’t find it?

How many times have you searched for something on the Internet and found websites in the top listings on search engines that look like they were designed by an amateur? It happens all the time, however you can be certain that these are the websites that are making money on the Internet.

The principle of making money through a website on the Internet is simple really:

• Have a good product at a competitive price
• Have a website that is easy for customers to make a purchase through
• Attract as many potential customers to the site as you can

If we assume the first 2 points have been taken care of, the next step is attracting potential customers / clients. Anybody who has run a business before will tell you that traditional marketing methods are extremely expensive. Magazine adverts can cost hundreds of pounds with no guarantee of anything back, and let’s not even talk about TV advertising costs.

The potential number of clients you can attract to your website from good search engine positioning can be massive if you target the right ’search terms’, add into the equation that these website visitors are actively searching for something that is related to your site, and you can easily see how this form of marketing is vital for any new, or already established business.

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The technique I am going to discuss in this article also has many other benefits to a website, and is one we strongly recommend to suitable clients.

The principle is quite simple really, it is optimising the code which makes up the pages on your website.

This code is called HTML and consists of instructions that a web browser, such as Internet Explorer or FireFox, reads and uses to display a particular web page. Often this HTML code can be hundreds or thousands of lines long to make up more complex pages, this is not in itself a big problem. The problem comes once you realise that the actual amount of information which is text for a site user to read is only a small percentage of this.

To illustrate this point, a large UK News Broadcasters website has a homepage file size of 105Kb while only 5Kb is actually text which a human or a search engine will ever read. This ratio is often called a ‘Code to Text’ ratio and is displayed as a percentage. Going back to the newspaper example it has a code to text ratio of just under 5%.

Why Does This Matter?
You may be thinking that this surely doesn’t matter with regards to SEO, a search engine doesn’t care about the other code does it?

Well it seems that they do, I have found many times over that rebuilding a website with optimised HTML code can give an underperforming website a boost.

Although nobody knows for sure how search engines index and rank websites here are my theories on why this is an important aspect for websites:

• Although a search engine spider reads the text aimed at site users, it has to be able to read the code part of a page to understand where the actual content is. If any part of your HTML code is incorrect or faulty, a search engine spider could misinterpret part of your site, or miss large sections of content altogether.
• A well constructed page with optimised code may give a better sense of trust or authority than a site with large sections of poorly constructed HTML.
• It is well known that Google in particular put a high emphasis on content, a page with a low text to code ratio offers a smaller amount of content to the user for a larger bandwidth hit.
• It could be that if two different sites offered similar content, but one had a better code build behind it, then a search engine might choose to give the better produced site an advantage.
• Google also have a search engine which ranks accessible sites higher: http://labs.google.com/accessible/ , a side effect of having poorly constructed HTML pages is that they often fail to pass even the basic accessibility tests. If Google have gone to this trouble, it could be an indicator of a factor they look for in the main results.

The above points are simply theories, some of which have been discussed before in SEO circles. They may be incorrect, or inaccurate, and I may be missing the mark completely, however I have seen first hand evidence of the effect of a code optimisation numerous times.

Supporting Evidence
A site I looked after for a client was around 9 - 10 months old, it had come out of the ‘SandBox’ effect and was achieving fairly decent rankings, around the bottom of page 1 / top of page 2 for many targeted terms.

The site had initially been constructed with HTML tables to control layout, these table layouts use lots of code to achieve desired layout effects and tend to create large pages in terms of file size. I rebuilt the site using a technique called CSS for layouts. Although CSS is not a new technique, it is still not used by many web designers and can take longer to construct initially.

After the rebuild the actual pages looked identical to how they originally did, a user would not notice any changes in the layout. The text to code ratio went from around 7% to over 42% for most pages.

After just a few weeks SEO results began to improve and the average position gain across 15 selected keywords was 4 - 5 positions. This bumped page 2 results to page 1 and page 1 bottom results to mid / top positions.

Other websites we look after have managed similar improvements, the actual position gains tend to be greater with sites that are currently achieving poor results initially, i.e. page 5 jumps of 20+ positions.

Other Benefits
Redesigning pages with CSS has numerous other benefits as well as the SEO ones above:

• Pages are easier to maintain and update, full site redesigns are achievable without changing content pages at all.
• Web pages tend to be smaller in size, leading to faster download times for users and less bandwidth usage for hosting charges.
• As mentioned above CSS designs generally tend to have code which passes accessibility tests without too much modification being required. Seeing as this is an increasing topic of conversation in UK legal circles, this can be quite a major benefit.

Final Thought
For businesses and users looking to invest in their website, or if you feel your site needs that final push up the rankings you should definitely consider this option. Depending on the scope of your site many web designers charge a lot more for the design work than the technical HTML coding, if your happy with your sites look, a CSS rebuild could be more affordable than you might think.

If you’re considering having a new site built, you should definitely enquire into which methods your designers will use to construct your web pages. In my opinion every new site should use CSS for layouts as a matter of course.

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