The BBC News website quotes a Verdict Research report that online retailing grew by 35% in 2007 and forecast a further growth of 200% over the next 5 years - that’s around 25% a year.
Even with the ‘credit crunch’ and recession looming, online sales look likely to continue to grow.
These figures emphasis the importance for businesses to continue to invest in online marketing during these challenging times.
Internet Explorer, Firefox and other browsers can be very tolerant of programming errors in your website.
And when you make an error it is easy to see when the browser doesn’t like it.
However, Google and the other search engines use proprietary software to analyse web content and do not tell you when they don’t understand your website.
This can lead to pages or sections of pages being ignored by the search engines and you are none the wiser.
In their Webmaster Guidelines, Google advise webmasters to check that their HTML is valid. Failure to do this can lead to poor rankings without any clear pointer to the source of the problem.
We have recently seen a number of sites that were only partially indexed by the search engines and where the code contained numerous HTML errors. Fixing the errors quickly improved the results.
You can check your code at http://validator.w3.org/ - remember to check the whole site not just the home page.
Ensuring that the HTML code on your website is valid is a essential step to achieving good rankings for the search engines.
Many smaller businesses are very dependent on the web but don’t have the technical or financial resources to get the maximum benefit from the opportunities it presents.
Over the years we have seen the same issues arise over and over again both with websites run by our clients in the travel business and with the sites of other small businesses.
This blog is an attempt to highlight some of the most common situations we encounter and help the smaller business compete effectively.
Articles will be written on an ad hoc basis so please come back to catch up on our latest views and, hopefully, comments from our readers.
We welcome your contributions to the discussions, however in order to avoid spam all comments will be moderated.
