The growing expectations and the cut throat competition in the online business environment has pushed the bar to a much greater level for various eCommerce businesses. In order to match up to these expectations, it is important to make transition towards a more effective eCommerce platform that can fulfill your all business aspirations. As, it is said “Look before you leap”, similarly before ensuring the movement towards any eCommerce platform, it is important to consider all the pros and cons for avoiding the major implications later on. Take a look at the various scenarios that can make a crucial impact in this direction.

1. Customer experience offered by your site–

In order to keep your customers hooked to your site, it is important to provide an unmatched user experience. To achieve the same, you need to improve website navigation, website loading time, search facilities, landing page and other such components for grabbing the instant customer attention and product sales. Analyze if the eCommerce platform which you are thinking for making the transition fulfills all the above mentioned criteria in the best possible manner.

2. Support for mobile devices-

Mobile devices are increasing day by day and so are their role in the eCommerce business. More number of people are now doing online shopping through various mobile devices like smart phones and tablets which explains their importance in the online business environment. There should not be any considerable difference in the user experience of your customers that are surfing the site on desktop or laptops and the one that are surfing the site on various mobile devices. For accomplishing this crucial task, the eCommerce platform selected by you should be capable to support all the mobile based devices effectively in order to boost your product sales, site traffic, conversion rates and customer engagement.

3. Scope for added functionality due to changing market conditions and business scenario-

Your eCommerce platform needs to be flexible enough for including new functionality and plugins for improving the productivity and usability of your online store. There are various important eCommerce plugins from Knowband and other plugin development company for making the various crucial website tasks much faster and in a seamless manner. Further, it may arise that store owners may need to add Magento extensions, PrestaShop modules, OpenCart extensions or any other platform based plugins for improving the overall functionality of their website which will be possible only if the eCommerce platform on which the site is built can accommodate new plugins and functionality without any hiccups.

4. Can contribute towards your eCommerce performance indicators-

Every online store is doing business with the aim of achieving any of these eCommerce key performance indicators like conversion rates, site traffic, increased clicks, more number of online registrations and other such metrics. Your chosen platform should have added functionality and features that can effortlessly contribute towards achieving these key performance indicators.

5. Cost of installing and maintaining that platform-

There are various business entities that are having a weak financial condition and can’t afford to spend a large amount of money in installing and maintaining an eCommerce platform for long term business growth and expansion. Before selecting a new platform, make sure that it is not burning a major hole into your pocket for installation, maintenance and configuration purposes in order to minimize the operating cost of your business.

6. Effective time of installation and functioning of the platform-

Always choose an eCommerce platform that require minimum amount of time for its installation for ensuring a faster and seamless functioning of your online store. If your selected eCommerce platform is taking several months for ramping up its infrastructure, your business is sure to suffer in a big way.

Once, you have have gone through all these checkpoints carefully, there are less chances of making any mistakes while selecting the appropriate eCommerce platform for your online business entity. It will further save your time, money and business opportunities from getting being wasted.

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Having an eCommerce website with a pathetic accessibility to its targeted customers is like having a good looking car which does not have a performing engine. Nobody would like to visit a website that takes too much time to load properly and often frustrates a user. If you want to improve the fortunes of your business entity, you need to work towards enhancing your website accessibility for brilliant conversion rates and product sales. With the support of an effective eCommerce website design, seamless site navigation, faster checkout process, impressive website loading time and performance, you can easily achieve the remarkable success in terms of site traffic, conversion rates, customer engagement and product sales. Here is a detailed account of what all ingredients are required for a mind blowing website accessibility.

1. Improve the reach and quality of textual material-

Any website without an impressive and engaging content or text is simply useless. Moreover, the recent Google algorithms like Panda, Hummingbird and others have time and again proved the superiority of the content for generating the required site traffic and conversion rates. Remember to pay adequate attention towards the content as well as graphics or images for increasing the readership of your written content. Take a look at the various ways by which you can accomplish this crucial task seamlessly.

• Use high quality optimized images for increasing the worth and appeal of your written content. Further, use effective image alt tag along with the caption and description for improving the SEO friendliness of your content.
• Offer high quality short videos with your content (Product Video) for making content more appealing and worth while.
• Make use of an effective alternative audio content that does not affect the overall performance and loading time of your website.
• Utilize the services of a plain text transcript or RSS feed for making site content available to large number of visitors.
• Include a closed caption for optimizing the video experience of your targeted customers.

2. Employ ways to read content for your targeted customers-

There are numerous people who may not be able to read your site content properly due to visual impairment, small font size or illegible font type of your written text. For ensuring a seamless site accessibility to these type of customers, it is mandatory to have an audio version of your page and site content. This recorded audio file can conveniently convey the written message of your website and its internal pages to your targeted customers. Apart from this, there are various screen reader softwares like Microsoft Narrator, JAWS from Freedom Scientific, VoiceOver for Mac systems, Orca (open source) for Unix based Systems, NVDA (open source), Dolphin Supernova by Dolphin and various such others.

3. Take required steps to improve your site navigation (especially forms)-

What good is of a website if it does not allow visitors to navigate through it in a seamless manner? It would be a sheer wastage of your time, money and efforts if navigating around your website is a challenging task. There can be numerous factors on your site that can act as a major stumbling block in the seamless navigation of your website. You need to give special attention to these particular site elements like registration forms, checkout page, images, videos, links and other such areas for ensuring the effortless navigation of your website.

Among them, forms are said to have a drastic effect on the website performance and navigation. You need to eliminate unnecessary fields, illogical labels and other such factors so that visitors can fill out your site forms without any hiccup. Moreover, you need to avoid time bound restrictions and use correct headings for your content on your website for facilitating a faster navigation. For increasing the accessibility of your site forms, you need to perform the following steps.

• Use a well positioned and descriptive label with each field in your form.
• For establishing an effective relationship between the label text and form field, you can either use a <label> tag or an <ARIA> property.
• Ensure that the tab order of your form is at proper synchronization with the order of the form fields.
• For similar or related fields in a form, you can group them together using the fieldsets. Take for example, fields like “Street Name/Locality”, “Village/City” and “State/Province” can be combined together under a single field of “Correspondence address”.
• Inform users about mandatory fields in your form through the help of asterisks symbol (*). Apart from this, you can make desired fields mandatory by using the ARIA property. Use ARIA required=”true” for mandatory form fields and ARIA required=”false” if the field is optional in nature.
• Provide customer information regarding successful submission of their form or any submission related errors. Show errors on the relevant place and position on your form for increasing the chances of faster error resolution that can help in the quick form submission.
• Avoid the use of CAPTCHA codes for form validation due to their inaccessibility and performance issues. There are other alternatives like Sweet Captcha, PlayThru, NuCaptcha, client side JavaScript checkboxes and such others that can be used for validating form data. For understanding more about making your forms spam free, you can check out this link.

4. Select the color that is in resonance with your site content, images, backgrounds and other such elements-

For ensuring the effective readability of your website, it is important to choose the appropriate color for your background and foreground elements. Remember, to use a contrasting color for your text and its background for better accessibility of your website. Beware of using similar colors for both the text and background of your website like using the black text color along with violet, brown or any other dark color will affect the usability of your website to a great extent. The normal contrast ratio while using the color for your background and foreground elements should be around 7:1 but even a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 will also do justice to the visibility of your content and will ensure effective accessibility of your concerned website. You can check the color combination with the help of a/b testing and heatmap tools.  By these tools you will be able to know more effective areas and less effective areas and make the required changes on the website.

5. Ensure the proper font size of your content-

It would be practically immature and naive to expect your readers to have an exceptional eye sight of 6/6 so that they can effortlessly read the small font size content on your website. Don’t make your customers to struggle too much while reading your website content. For facilitating a seamless accessibility to your website content, you need to use relative font sizes that are expressed in terms of percentages or ems rather than using absolute font sizes which are expressed in terms of points or pixels. Due to this above practice, it is practically much easier for the users to make desired changes in the font sizes as per their requirements and eye sight. So, it is the need of the hour to focus on the font size also and not just on improving the visual appeal of your website.

6. Role of Assistive technology in the website accessibility-

Assistive technology also known as Adaptive technology (AT) is actually a blessing for the people with various types of disabilities linked to visual, speech, cognitive, motor or other such physical and mental disorders for accessing the various areas of a website effortlessly that use precise mouse movement, positioning or clicks. The technology stands for a group of assistive, adaptive and rehabilitative devices that are aimed for people with different disabilities along with the process that is involved in locating, selecting and utilizing these devices. This technology has provided a great sense of freedom to all disabled people through the help of various enhancements that have changed the way by which these people used to interact with various digital devices.

Various devices like screen readers, braille system, screen magnification software, speech recognition software, switch access and other such have done a tremendous job in providing a seamless website accessibility to people with various types of disabilities. For more information about different types of assistive technologies that are acting as guiding light for disabled people, all you need to do is just follow this simple link.

7. Improve the performance and nature of your links-

For directing more number of people on the desired location of your links, make sure that your links are having a proper label and color for indicating your targeted customers about them. Use a more contextual based text than those simple phrases like “click here”, “read more”, “know more” and other such statements that can prompt your targeted customers to click on a particular link. Further, choose the right color for your link for getting higher customer attention and link accessibility.

8. Use HTML for improving the accessibility of your tabular data-

Make it a point to use only HTML for data tables instead of using the images. This approach will be extremely useful for the visitors that are using the assistive technologies for accessing the table content. Moreover, try to include proper column headers for improving the accessibility of your table content. It is also advised not to use tabular format for the page layout or structure as it causes problem in the effective accessing of the content.

For making your data tables more accessible to your users, you need to mark up your table header cells effectively. Apart from this, you need to use the scope attribute value for the associated column header or row header of your table. If you want to improve the accessibility of your “date” field in your table, you need to change <td>Date</td> to <th scope=”col”>Date</th> in your coding part. Further, in order to inform users about your data table, you need to include a relevant description or table caption through the use of <caption> tag. For example,

<table>

<caption>Class Schedule</caption>

<tr>….

9. Check the accessibility of your page through the use of WAVE-

Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) is a remarkable tool that can help web developers in improving the accessibility of their website. This website evaluation tool provides crucial insight and feedback about the accessibility of your page by entering the URL of your web page on the Wave tool home page. If you have any doubts, queries and concerns about this website evaluation tool, do check out this helpful link, https://wave.webaim.org/help. Moreover, first time users that are not familiar with this pioneering website accessibility and evaluation tool can take the help of this link for getting required knowledge about checking the accessibility of their website. Other tools besides WAVE that can be the guiding light for improving your site accessibility are CynthiaSays, Tenon and much more.

10. Work towards making your downloadable content accessible to your targeted customers-

It would be in the interest of your website if you can take the required steps in making your downloadable content on your site like terms and conditions documentation, product use manual, product category specification or any other such document accessible to your interested users. Don’t make them to roam here and there in search of required softwares for accessing a particular document but do ensure to make your downloadable content accessible through common available software. Always use a comma separated or tab delimited files, PDF files and other such formats that do not need any licensed proprietary softwares from the concerned vendor. For making your content accessible through the PDF format, you need to follow the various guidelines that are mentioned in this crucial link, https://webstandards.sonoma-county.org/content.aspx?sid=1014&id=1123.

11. Utilize the services of ARIA landmarks-

Thanks to the introduction of the new Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), a specification of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which is a global web governing body, web applications can now be easily interacted and shared through keyboard. You can easily make your site more keyboard navigation friendly through the use of ARIA landmark roles. All, you need to do is just add an HTML attribute for any of the landmark roles, say for example role=”navigation”, role=”main” or role=”search” for directing user to the particular section of the page through a single keystroke. Let us check this HTML code that can add the appropriate landmark role attribute on the “main” and “search” section of a website.

<div id=”maincontent” role=”main”>

<form action=”search.php” role=”search”>

12. Learn to use the services of Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Content Management Systems for enhancing accessibility of your website-

For improving the accessibility of your eCommerce website, you need to avail the services of an effective eCommerce platforms that consist of numerous features. Apart from this, you can take the services of various Content Management Systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and others for providing easy access to numerous themes, templates, eCommerce plugins and other such options. Plugins are seen to provide an advanced level of accessibility, performance and usability to a website for improving the overall performance of a website.

However, make sure that you are availing the expertise of an exceptional plugin design and development services like Knowband that has years of experience in this area. Some of the superb plugins provided by it are as follows:

Magento– Some of the amazing Magento extensions that are provided by Knowband are Magento Abandoned Cart, Magento Auto Subscribe, Magento One Page Supercheckout, Magento Google Analytic Enhanced Ecommerce and much more.

OpenCart– Here are some of the OpenCart Extensions that can help in enhancing the productivity of your OpenCart store to a great extent. They are OpenCart Ajax Cart+, OpenCart One Page Supercheckout Pro, OpenCart Social Loginizer, OpenCart Price Alert and such others.

PrestaShop– If you are having a PrestaShop store, these are some of the PrestaShop Addons that can be the game changer for your online store and can improve the accessibility and performance of your website. Take a look at these plugins which are PrestaShop Abandoned Cart, PrestaShop Return Manager, PrestaShop One Page Supercheckout and many others.

13. Improve the reach of your website on various mobile based devices-

Due to the constant increase in the number of mobile customers, it is the sole responsibility of every online business entity to make its website accessible to various available mobile devices. Use various tools like Mobile Usability, mobile friendly test, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom website speed test and other mobile SEO tools for improving the performance of your mobile website. If you want to know more about how to improve your mobile SEO results, do visit this informative link. Further, use of the content delivery network (CDN) services along with the webp image format for Google Chrome browser can make a significant effect on the accessibility of your website on various mobile based devices.

14. Make use of proper alt text for images-

Although, it is said that “An image can say a thousand words itself” but these images need the support of Alt text for helping user understand the proper intent or message behind these images. Moreover, these alt text becomes much more useful while using an informative images like infographics. It is to be noted that the message which is to be conveyed with a particular image needs to be used in the alt text of that image. Similarly, if the concerned image consists of some text, that particular text should also be included in the alt text. Make sure the images that are used as links are provided with appropriate alt text so that screen reader can read the associated message of your image rather than reading the file name of your image. Here is the sample code about how an alt attribute can be used in an image for improving its appeal and understanding among the targeted customers.

<img src=”webaimlogo.jpg” alt=”WebAIM – Web Accessibility In Mind”>

However, you can leave the alt text empty for your images if the image is purely used    for fancy decoration purposes as it will take the focus of your customers away from the concerned image.

15. Initiate steps to make your website more accessible through keyboard-

There are numerous users that like to navigate a particular website through the use of keyboard shortcut keys or Access keys. These Access keys are HTML elements that are not effectively used during website development process for ensuring a seamless access to certain sections of the website through keyboard. In order to use the services of Access keys, you need to follow these steps.

– Press Function key (Alt in case of Windows and Ctrl if the system is a Mac) along with the specific letter or number key that is associated with a particular section of the website.

Further, programmers can effortlessly add the functionality of Access keys on their website by adding a simple HTML code into the navigation anchor tag of their concerned site. The sample code is as shown below.

<a href=”index.html” accesskey=”1″>Home</a>

However, what limits the usage of Access keys on a global level is that there is no universal set of assigned keys that can be used for implementing the functionality of Access keys on a website. Apart from this, there is no such mechanism by which users can be informed about the keyboard keys that are used as Access keys for navigating around a site. But, there are certain countries like UK where concerned authority has recommended a set of Access keys that can be assigned for a seamless website navigation through keyboard. Here is a list of those Access keys.

S – Skip navigation

1 – Home Page

2 – News/Updates

3 – Site Map

4 – Search

5 – Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q)

6 – Help

7 – Complaints Procedure

8 – Terms and Conditions

9 – Feedback Form

10 – Access Key Information

16. Include headings correctly for organizing your content structure-

For a seamless access to your site content, make use of the heading structure. Use HTML heading tags like <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and others at appropriate place in your content for the effective organization of your content and for better readability. Follow the correct order of your headings and keep presentation away from the heading structure through the use of CSS. Some of the guidelines that needs to be followed while creating a new CSS class for your content are as follows.

• Always use <h1> tag for the main title of the page. Keep <h1> heading tag reserved for the title of the website and other individual pages.
• Include headings for the proper indication and organization of your content structure.
• Follow a proper order while using the headlines and never jump from <h1> to <h3> heading tag directly as it gives a sense of feeling to readers that some particular content is missing in the middle.

17. Make use of tab indexes for the seamless navigation around your website-

For determing the proper order of navigation around form fields through the use of tab key, it is important to utilize the tab indexes. This feature plays a key role while navigating around the forms on a site. However, if your page design is equipped with proper logical order and a strong hierarchy due to the presence of headings and sub headings, there is not much to worry about this tab index.

As, forms consist of numerous small elements like checkboxes and radio buttons which needs precise mouse positioning and click by humans, performing the same would be difficult for a person with motor disability. In situations like this, life of these people can be in much relief if a proper tab indexing is performed on the form which can enable user to interact with each and every form element through simple keyboard strokes.

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“Ignorance is a sin” and it will not be a hyperbole when it comes to the “not provided” keywords while analyzing the data of Google Analytics tool. This is a matter of serious concern for all the Web marketers and analysts as without a clear insight about your online traffic particularly about “not provided” keywords, you can’t expect to improve your conversion rates and product sales.

“Not provided” keywords are those organic keywords that are used by an online user on a search engine to arrive at your website. These keywords that drive customers towards your website are collectively grouped under the “not provided” keywords and are not passed onto your targeted website. This was done by the Google on the pretext of protecting the user privacy but in reality it was a smart strategy to push more people towards paid keyword targeting, PPC ads and other such paid advertising mediums. Around 85% of the keywords used on Google for accessing a particular website comes into the category of “not provided” keywords when seen through the report of Google Analytics tool.

Classification of the online traffic 

To drive traffic towards your site, two types of keyword referral campaigns are utilized by online businesses. They can be classified as organic keywords and paid keywords. Let us brief you about the two.

Organic keywords- These are the keywords that are used by your targeted customers to land at your particular website by clicking on one of the organic search results of various search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others.

Paid keywords- These consists of various PPC ads, social media ads and other such paid mediums that has brought customers on your particular website. Although, businesses have to pay a particular fixed amount for this type of customer acquisition strategy but this is a very reliable method in terms of getting high traffic for your site.

Representation of organic keywords on google analytics tools

Google Analytics is a smarter way to get valuable insight about incoming traffic on your site. It provides complete detailed information about the nature of the incoming traffic, source of the incoming traffic whether organic or paid, device used by customers while surfing and other such crucial data. As per a recent change by Google on 8th January, 2015, there have been a slight change in the representation of the “organic keywords” on Google Analytics tool. For getting access to the organic keywords option in your Google Analytics tool, perform the following steps.

– Click on the ‘Acquisitions’ tab on the screen of your Google Analytics tool.

– Now, click on the ‘Campaigns’ tab located at the bottom of ‘Acquisitions’ tab.

– Under the ‘Campaigns’ tab, you will find the option ‘Organic Keywords’ there.

Hiding of “not provided” keywords by Google  

On 18th October, 2011, a major announcement was made by the Google that from onwards, the search terms used for landing at a particular site would not be passed on to that destination website. Instead, all these visits would now be clubbed together in the form of “not provided” keywords which is represented as “np”. All this was done to protect the privacy of the online searcher as they would not like their search terms to be passed onto the destination site. Due to this change, all the “keywords” used by the online customers to land  at a particular website is now grouped together under the “not provided” category. This change  has caused much ambiguity among numerous SEO professionals as they are not getting any clear idea about the keywords that are being increasingly used by their targeted customers to arrive at their particular website. Further, it has made the task of content marketing a little harder and has affected the website rankings and online popularity of a business.

Effect of the hummingbird update on SEO

Hummingbird algorithm of Google was launched in August, 2013 and it changed the entire face of the SEO industry. It is a complete new algorithm that consists of more than 200 factors that can make a tremendous impact on the website rankings and search engine results. This algorithm was created with a focus towards the mobile devices and for making the SEO results more mobile friendly. Due to the addition of “conversational search”, the focus of SEO has changed from the use of individual keywords to more towards the  meaning or semantic context of a particular search phrase. The algorithm works on the principle of “understanding meaning behind the search phrases rather than just the words in the phrases”. Hummingbird is a blessing for the SEO professionals who use the white hat SEO approaches by following all the Google guidelines and regulations and can invite severe penalties for the black hat SEO that use illegitimate stuffing of the keywords to cheat search engine crawlers.

As long as you are blessed with the services of good content publishers and writers, you don’t need a reason to panic as the SEO focus has changed from the keyword stuffing to semantic meaning of your written content. Moreover, it is working towards making the search results more effective for voice based searching. Some of the various features introduced by this Hummingbird algorithm are:

• Use of the long tailed keywords for the search results.
• Focus towards the semantic based content instead of plain keyword stuffed content.
• Introduction of the knowledge graph feature for providing brief information about a topic without even clicking the search results.
• Giving more emphasis on the attractive images, videos and visual elements in your content for increasing its semantic appeal.
• Making use of natural language processing and artificial intelligence feature.

Changes occurred in the Google Analytics tool 

In order to get the effective insight about the arriving site traffic on your website, you need to keep track on the analytical activity of your website by clicking on the landing page option of your Google Analytics tool. Let us understand this with the image given below.

According to the above image, SEO professionals were earlier clueless about the impact of “not provided” keywords on the different landing pages of their website. There was no mention of “not provided” keywords anywhere on the different pages of the website. The SEO team was earlier unable to decipher the complete analytical data regarding the incoming site traffic on their website. Due to this, it was difficult for them to target particular high ranking Google keywords as there was no information about “not provided” keywords on the landing page tab of the Google Analytics tool.

In the image shown above, it has been observed that since 20th November, 2015, Google has started providing information about “not provided” keywords in the form of “np”. Due to this relaxation, it is now easier for the content marketing and SEO team to target high converting keywords for their website in order to generate more traffic and conversion rates.  One can easily see the traffic statistics that has generated out of the “not provided” keywords (np) on various pages of their website and it has opened new doors of keyword targeting and content marketing.

So, stay tuned with us and get constant updates regarding “not provided” keywords for improving the performance and website rankings of your online business.

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