Having a wide variety of payment options is important to your business for obvious reasons. When presented with two websites, one which offers instant purchases via credit card verification and the other which requires the customer to print a form and mail a check, 99% of consumers are going to pick the former option.

That being said, routine charges of up to $150 a month in credit card processing fees are tough to justify for a business that has a relatively small sales volume. Often times, in addition to the monthly fees, merchant account services will charge application fees (upwards of $400) and other various leasing fees which can really add up.

There are however, a number of options that can work better for smaller-scale businesses, namely, pay-per-transaction merchant services. ccNow.com is an example of such a service that charges 10% of each sale made. No additional charges are accrued and ccNow.com transfers the funds from the customer’s card to your account after each sale is confirmed and shipped. The small delay in payment should be well worth the money you can save in fees.

The volume of your monthly sales will determine the smartest merchant service to go with. For very small businesses selling less than $1,000/mo, ccNow.com is likely the best option. If your business sells intangible services, subscriptions or electronic files rather than tangible products however, you will want to go with ClickBank instead as ccNow.com doesn’t support intangible product sales. While there are no monthly fees with ClickBank, there is an application fee and they charge 7.5% + $1 on every sale, so if your products are very low in price, this may not be a worthwhile option for you. Now, if you do sell more than $1,000/mo, you are likely going to benefit more from the standard payment gateway options, such as Authorize.net, as their fees are typically flat rather than a percentage.

PayPal is also a great option with very low fees, but has the disadvantage that users are forced to create accounts with the site before they can use the service. This can potentially turn away would-be customers. Having this option in addition to an instant payment option can provide users with the best of both worlds.

Whichever option you choose, please ensure that the merchant service you go with is legitimate and your customers enter their payment information in a secure environment. The last thing you want to do is get into a mess where your customers’ credit card information is at stake.

To learn more about website design/development and eCommerce solutions, fill out the form on our contact page or give us a call at 530-848-6158.

Article by Benjamin Ballinger, Owner, Digital Sostratus Design.

While these tips cannot guarantee success of your website (nothing can), they are sure to at least lead to better performance.

Website Content

Content is king! The old days of encouraging search engines to rank your website well through meta tags is over. Search engines these days primarily take one thing into consideration, and that’s the actual material that you have on your site. The more content on your site, the more there is for the search bots to scan through, which translates into more opportunities for you to have relevant keywords for them to grab onto, causing your site to improve its ranking ability. Besides, your website visitors also like content.

There is no such thing as “too much content” with regards to your website. Making sure you have as much as possible, and that it is as relevant as possible to your products or services is the primary key to success on the web. Set aside an hour or so each day for creating new content for your website.

Content Freshness

Lots of content only goes so far—it also needs to be kept current, or your website will look dead! Content freshness is taken into consideration by search engines. They monitor the frequency at which your site changes when they visit it for indexing. Your rank is partially determined by how you score in the freshness category.

As you can imagine, blogs are the ideal platform to assist in keeping your website fresh, because the act of adding news articles, blog posts, etc. to your website guarantees large amounts of new content for the search engines to scan over.

Website Structure

Both search engines and your website visitors will prefer a well-structured website to browse. The search engines must break down all web sites into elements based on the structure of the pages. People are simply easily-distracted, lazy readers and thus need to be clearly led to the important content in an efficient, fool-proof fashion. A poorly-structured site will fail to address the needs of both of these visitor groups.

The proper use of headings, correctly-coded tags, lists and the organization of relevant content sections into groups are some of the most effective ways to ensure that one’s site is intelligently-structured.

Quality Code

If you didn’t create your website yourself, then you likely don’t have much control over the code used to create your website. However, it is still important to know the impact that coding can have on a website’s success. Standard compliant code that has been checked for errors is easier for the search engines to assimilate— a similar concept to what was covered in the previous tip. It also helps ensure accessibility (see below) which increases your site’s potential customer/reader base.

Ensure that you hire a website developer who practices standard-compliant coding and that they validate your website for errors before handing it off to you. You can check your own website’s compliance by visiting the W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium) free online tool.

Follow the Rules

Many design firms promise success through the use of tricks, backdoors, and special “black hat” tactics that are designed to sneak a website into a top position illegitimately. The companies that designed the search engines are constantly monitoring for these cheating tactics however, and once a site is caught, not only do they lose the benefit of the implemented tricks, but the engines will often further penalize the site’s ranking as punishment. In the end, these tactics are far more harmful than they are helpful.

Instead, one should follow the recommendations of the search engines. The proper methods to increase one’s rank are not a secret—they are widely available for website owners’ benefit. Following the rules will leverage the engines as a resource rather than causing them to be an obstacle in your efforts to increase your site’s visibility.

Website Accessibility

Websites should be accessible to as many people (and systems) as possible. This includes those with a visual disability (whether it is full/partial/color blindness, or otherwise). If these folks cannot access the information on your website, you are forfeiting them as potential customers. This group of individuals has the potential to be a significant portion of your customer-base.

There are many simple ways that you can make certain that your web site is accessible to people with special needs. The specifics are beyond the scope of this document—but be sure to double-check with your website developer to ensure that your website’s design and code is following accessibility guidelines.

Smart URLs

Professional website developers should already know how to optimize these, but it is still important for website owners to understand the significance of the URLs used for their sites’ sub-pages.

Search engines extract keywords from URL in addition to the content on the page itself. For example, a webpage with content related to dog grooming would likely want to have both keywords in the URL (e.g. http://www.website.com/dog-grooming/). This naming scheme will always work better than using meaningless URLs such as “http://www.website.com/page=2.” The more specific you can get in the URLs, the better.

That being said, it’s a good idea not to include filler words such as “and,” “the,” “or,” etc. (note how this page’s URL omits the word “for” from the article name).

Website Design Style

When all’s said and done, the “looks” of a website are not really that important—honestly! If your content is interesting enough to keep visitors on your website for more than a few minutes, the first impressions from your site’s look and feel will have faded into insignificance.

That being said, you should ensure that the style of your website makes it easy to read the content. Avoid things like black backgrounds with white text (hard on the eyes) and ALL CAPS (not only does this give the impression of YELLING, but it also greatly increases the difficulty of speed-reading an article). In other words, your site design is important insomuch as that it does not actively hinder the readability of your content. For more on this subject, please read this article by Turbo Social Media.

Incoming and Outgoing Links

Incoming and outgoing links can be useful for ranking purposes, but only if the links are relevant. Years ago, a “black hat” SEO technique known as “link farming,” which involved creating a network of websites all linking to one another, was widely-practiced by the more unscrupulous marketing firms. Search engines quickly caught on to this practice however and now such tactics are utterly useless.

Relevant links on the other hand, are legitimate and effective at increasing your search engine rank. Blog platforms are ideal in this regard, as there are many built-in features that automatically create relevant links for the site’s content. If you’re not using a blogging platform, it is important to manually include subject-related links to other sites. Regardless of your site’s technology, one of the most important things to do is to spread your name to other sites related to your industry and get them to link back to yours in an intelligent fashion.

Images

If you are selling a tangible product, then high-quality photos/videos are a must. If you care about what you have to sell, then it’s worth investing in some professional photographs or film to show people what you have. Remember, online visitors aren’t able to see your product or service in person and thus the visual impression that you give them will be all that they have to go off of. Consequently, these visualizations should be the best they can possibly be.

To learn more about website design, website development and website management as a small business owner, fill out the form on our contact page or give us a call at 530-848-6158.

Article by Benjamin Ballinger, Owner, Digital Sostratus Design.