At Traffic, we receive many clients who want to launch e-marketing campaigns such as PPC and SEO for their online business. But unfortunately, a considerable number of these businesses have websites that are not built to be e-marketing friendly. When we honestly tell these clients that neither SEO nor PPC campaigns would work effectively with their present websites, it’s really hard for them to come to terms with the bitter truth.

Mostly, the owners of such websites have little or no knowledge about what e-marketing or search engine friendliness means for a website. All they know is that they have a pretty website to build which they paid a hefty amount. This happens because of the common lack of knowledge about e-marketing and how it works. Though web marketing has seen a dramatic boom over the past couple of years, many business owners still have very limited information on how to get an effective e-marketing campaign in place and make their online presence stronger and more profitable.

We at Traffic value our customers’ money more than anything else. To help them utilize every bit of their precious marketing budget, we feel obliged to give website owners a cursory knowledge about what makes a website marketing-ready.

Design
The design of your website cannot be brushed aside as unimportant for e-marketing. A professional look that reflects your business and industry is in fact a key to your website’s success. It’s the design that makes the first impression on the client and no matter how great products or services you offer, if your site’s design is not appealing in an industry-specific way, the customer will take no time to leave.  It’s also necessary to ensure that the site’s design follows the latest industry standards doing which makes the website search engine friendly and helps it gain improved rankings on major search engines.

Content
Another key factor that makes your website ready for marketing is the well-written content providing brief but rich information about your business. The content needs to contain industry-related keywords in proper density so as to improve your site’s search rankings. Make sure that the content is also user-friendly besides just being friendly to search engines, and provides the reader with the information he’s looking for with the fewest possible clicks.

Layout
You site’s layout should be as much user-friendly as possible. It should be selling in a direct and interactive way with proper positioning of your products and services. Make sure the user doesn’t have to ‘look for’ what you offer; in fact, he should immediately find what you have on offer so that he makes a quick and informed decision. If the user has searched for a product and landed on your website via search engine, he wouldn’t want to read a lot and dig down deep the site to find what he’s looking for. So keep what your business offers right there in front in shape of snippets or any other interactive fashion.

Navigation
Keep your website navigation to its simplest and error free – no broken links accepted! Not only user hates the complicated and erroneous navigation, but also search engines loathe it and refuse to follow the links resulting in poor search rankings. Make you site’s navigation simple and effective so that both user and search engines can benefit from it.

Process
Again, ease is the key to success in online business. Whether your website is only information-based involving no online transaction activities, or it is an online store carrying out online sales, make sure to keep the process simple. If it’s product information that you’re giving through the site, make it appear with few clicks and land the reader on inquiry form or contact us page for further information. If you have inquiry or contact forms on your site, add only the fields you require most omitting the unnecessary ones to remove the hassle from user’s end. If you’re selling a product online, keep it simple as well limiting the purchase time to a few seconds.

Page Construction
If your site has full support for standard on-page elements such as Titles, Meta tags, Headings, Image Alt Tags etc, then your site is ready for SEO. But in most of the projects that we undertake, the sites completely lack Headings or Meta Tags. Though it’s true that today these elements are not as important as they were in the past, they still play a major role in helping the site obtain good rankings while the lack of them makes a website deficient of the power to compete. While they have improved significantly, ecommerce sites usually have the most deficiencies in terms of page construction problems.

Web Server Configuration
Just put your website to a little cross-browser compatibility test and find where it stands. Test-run your website on all major browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or Opera – the chances are that your site would not work properly on some of the browsers. The browsers mask a lot of errors that originate from the web server and an SEO-ready website does not require major time or resources to fix the web server.