CP3401/5636

Online Presence

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Readings / Preparations

Pre-lecture Preparation:

• Research on the internet to learn about how google search work ?

• Why do some websites rank high in google search results page?

Extended Readings:
• Laudon Ch 3 pp170-217
• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769

References:
• Google Search Engine Optimisation Start Guide
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//
webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
• Google Support of Structured Data https
://developers.google.com/structured-data /
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Learning outcomes
By the end of this topic, you should be able to

• Understand the questions you must ask and answer, and the
steps you should take, in developing an e-commerce presence.
• Explain the process that should be followed in building an e-
commerce presence.
• Identify and understand the major considerations involved in
choosing Web server and e-commerce merchant server
software.
• Understand the issues involved in choosing the most
appropriate hardware for an e-commerce site.
• Identify additional tools that can improve Web site
performance.

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E-commerce Presence Map

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E-commerce Presence Timeline

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Building an E-commerce Site:

• Developing a clear understanding of business objectives

• Understanding the target audience

• Knowing how to choose the right technology to achieve

those objectives
• Create valuable contents and services

• Main areas where you will need to make decisions:

• Human resources and organizational capabilities
• Creating team with skill set needed to build and manage a successful site
• Hardware/software
• Telecommunications
• Site design
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Choose a domain name

• Descriptive:
• Think about the name of your company and the content you’ll
put on your site.
• The domain name should provide a good idea what your site’s
about at a glance.

• Easy to remember:
• Keep the domain name short and simple

• Adaptable:
• A domain name is likely be tied to your site for a long time so
choose one that will work if your site’s content changes over
time.
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Web Site Systems Development
Life Cycle

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Ltd. Slide 4-8

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System Analysis/Planning

• Business objectives:
• List of capabilities you want your site to have
• System functionalities:
• List of information system capabilities needed to achieve
business objectives
• Information requirements:
• Information elements that system must produce in order to
achieve business objectives

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Ltd. Slide 1-9

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• Table 3.2, page 183

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Ltd. Slide 4-10

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Logical Design for a Simple Web
Site

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Ltd. Slide 4-11

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Physical Design for a Simple
Web Site

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Ltd. Slide 4-12

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Build/Host Your Own vs.
Outsourcing
• Outsourcing: Hiring vendors to provide services
involved in building site
• Build own vs. outsourcing:
• Build your own requires team with diverse skill set; choice of
software tools; both risks and possible benefits

• Host own vs. outsourcing

• Hosting: Hosting company responsible for ensuring site is accessible
24/7, for monthly fee
• Co-location: Firm purchases or leases Web server (with control over
its operation), but server is located at vendor’s facility

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Ltd. Slide 1-13

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Choices in Building and Hosting

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Ltd. Slide 4-14

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Choices in Building and Hosting

Copyright © 2016 Pearson Education, Ltd. Slide 4-15

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E-commerce Merchant Server
Software
• Provides basic functionality for sales
• Online catalog
• List of products available on Web site
• Shopping cart
• Allows shoppers to set aside, review, edit selections, and then
make purchase
• Credit card processing
• Typically works in conjunction with shopping cart
• Verifies card and puts through credit to company’s account at
checkout

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Merchant Server Software
Packages
• Integrated environment that includes most of
functionality needed
• Key factors in selecting a package
• Functionality
• Support for different business models, including (m-commerce)
• Business process modeling tools
• Visual site management and reporting
• Performance and scalability
• Connectivity to existing business systems
• Compliance with standards
• Global and multicultural capability
• Local sales tax and shipping rules

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Web Services and Open-Source
Options
• Options for small firms
• Hosted e-commerce sites
• Offer site building tools and
templates
• Example: shopify

• Open-source merchant server

software
• Enables you to build truly custom
sites
• Requires programmer with
expertise, time

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Factors in Web Site Optimization

• Figure 4.10, Page 207

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Other E-commerce Site Tools

• Web site design: Basic business considerations

• Enabling customers to find and buy what they need
• Tools for Web site optimization/ Search engine
optimisation (SEO)
• Factors affecting search engine placement
• Metatags, titles, content
• Identify market niches, localize site
• Offer expertise
• Links
• Buy ads
• Local e-commerce

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Discussion 1
Google Search

• Research on the internet to learn about how

google search work ?
• Why some websites rank before other
websites in google search results page?
• What are the factors affecting a website’s
ranking in the Google search results?

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Google Search Quality
Guidelines
• Ways to help Google find your site:
1. Submit it to Google at
http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/.

2. Submit a Sitemap using Google Search Console. Google

uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site
and to increase our coverage of your webpages. (we will
do this in prac)

3. Make sure that any sites that should know about your
pages are aware your site is online.

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Meta tags that Google understands

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Meta tags that Google understands

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Meta tags that Google understands

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Meta tags that Google understands

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SEO Best Practices for Title Tags

• Title Tags are Important for SEO, it appears in browser

title, search engine results, and external website
sharing

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SEO Best Practices for Title Tag

• Optimal Format
• Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

• Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag 512 pixels wide.
• If the title is too long, engines will show an ellipsis, "..." to indicate that a title
tag has been cut off.

• Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title Tag

• Leverage Branding
• Consider Readability and Emotional Impact
• Give Each Page a Unique Title
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SEO Best Practices for Meta
Description Tag
• The meta description tag serves the function of
advertising copy.

• Meta descriptions can be any length, but search

engines generally truncate snippets longer than 150
characters.

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SEO Best Practices for
Description Tag
• Avoid Duplicate Meta Description Tags

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Google Webmaster Guidelines

• Help Google understand your pages:

1. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that

clearly and accurately describe your content.
2. Think about the words users would type to find your pages
( or products), and make sure that your site actually
includes those words within it.
3. Ensure that your <title> elements and alt attributes are
descriptive, specific, and accurate.
4. Design your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy.
5. Follow our recommended best practices for images, video,
and structured data.

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Google Webmaster Guidelines –
Structured Data
• Structured data markup is a standard way to annotate
your content so machines can understand it.

• When your web pages include structured data markup,

Google (and other search engines) can use that data to
index your content better, present it more prominently
in search results, and surface it in new experiences like
voice answers, maps, and Google Now.

• Structured data is typically invisible to users, but visible

in the page's source code.
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Google Webmaster Guidelines –
Structured Data
• Structured data markup makes your content eligible for two kinds
of Google features:

• Enhanced Presentation in Search Results:

• By including basic structured data appropriate to your content, your site
can enhance its search results with Rich Snippets, Breadcrumbs, or a
Sitelinks Search Box.

• Answers from the Knowledge Graph:

• If you're the authority for certain content, Google can treat the
structured data on your site as factual and import it into the
Knowledge Graph, where it can power prominent answers in Search and
across Google properties. Features are available for authoritative data
about organizations, events, movie reviews, and
music/video play actions.
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Google Webmaster Guidelines –
Structured Data
• Google supports Rich Snippets for the following data types:

• Product -- Information about a product, including price, availability, and

review ratings.
• Recipe -- Recipes that can be displayed in web searches and Recipe
View.
• Review -- A review of an item such as a restaurant, movie, or store.
• Event -- An organized event, such as musical concerts or art festivals,
that people may attend at a particular time and place.
• SoftwareApplication -- Information about a software app, including its
URL, review ratings, and price.
• Video -- An online video, including a description and thumbnail.
• News article -- A news article, including headline, images, and publisher
info.

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Google Webmaster Guidelines –
Structured Data
• Rich Snippets ( for Product, Recipes, Reviews, Events,
Software apps, Videos, Articles.)

• Breadcrumbs

https://developers.google.com/structured-dat
a/rich-snippets
/
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 Google Webmaster Guidelines –
Structured Data Example
• A review is someone's evaluation of something. In
addition to the text of the review, the markup can include
a reviewRating, which expresses a summary of the review
as a numeric value.

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Google Webmaster Guidelines –
Structured Data Example

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Google Webmaster Guidelines

6. When using a content management system (for

example, Wix or WordPress), make sure that it creates
pages and links that search engines can crawl.

7. Allow all site assets that would significantly affect page

rendering to be crawled: for example, CSS and JavaScript
files that affect the understanding of the pages. The
Google indexing system renders a web page as the user
would see it, including images, CSS, and JavaScript files.
• To see which page assets that Googlebot cannot crawl, or to
debug directives in your robots.txt file, use the
blocked resources report in Search Console and the
Fetch as Google and robots.txt Tester tools.
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Google Webmaster Guidelines

8. Allow search bots to crawl your site without session

IDs or URL parameters that track their path through
the site. These techniques are useful for tracking
individual user behavior, but the access pattern of
bots is entirely different.
• Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of
your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that
look different but actually point to the same page.

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Google Webmaster Guidelines

9. Make your site's important content visible by default.

Google is able to crawl HTML content hidden inside
navigational elements such as tabs or expanding
sections
• Google consider this content less accessible to users, and
believe that you should make your most important
information visible in the default page view.

10. Make a reasonable effort to ensure that

advertisement links on your pages do not affect
search engine rankings. For example, use robots.txt
or rel="nofollow" to prevent advertisement links from
being followed by a crawler.
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Google Webmaster Guidelines

• Help visitors use your pages

1. Try to use text instead of images to display important
names, content, or links. If you must use images for
textual content, use the alt attribute to include a few
words of descriptive text.
2. Ensure that all links go to live web pages. Use valid HTML.
3. Optimize your page loading times. Fast sites make users
happy and improve the overall quality of the web
(especially for those users with slow Internet
connections). Google recommends that you use tools like
PageSpeed Insights and Webpagetest.org to test the
performance of your page.

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Google Webmaster Guidelines -
PageSpeed Insight Example

https://
developers.google.com/
speed/pagespeed/insights

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Google Webmaster Guidelines

4. Design your site for all device types and sizes, including
desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Use the
mobile friendly testing tool to test how well your pages
work on mobile devices, and get feedback on what needs
to be fixed.
5. Ensure that your site
appears correctly in different browsers.
6. If possible, secure your site's connections with HTTPS.
Encrypting interactions between the user and your
website is a good practice for communication on the web.
7. Ensure that your pages are useful for readers with visual
impairments, for example, by testing usability with a
screen-reader.
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Elements of an Optimized Page

Large Version
https://moz.com/rand/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/
elements-optimized-lrg.gif

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Google Quality Guidelines

• Avoid the following techniques:

1. Automatically generated content
2. Participating in link schemes
3. Creating pages with little or no original content
4. Cloaking
5. Sneaky redirects These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of
deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond
6. Hidden text or links negatively to other misleading practices not listed here. It's not
safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique
7. Doorway pages isn't included on this page, Google approves of it.

8. Scraped content
9. Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
10. Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
11. Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing
viruses, trojans, or other badware
12. Abusing rich snippets markup
13. Sending automated queries to Google
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Discussion 2

• What e-commerce site features will annoy

you ?

• What e-commerce site features will attract

you to use the website?

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User Friendliness

• There is no point
to make your
website search
engine friendly
without having
user friendly
content and
design.

Reference:
https://
support.google.com/adwor
ds/answer/6227215
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Personalization Tools

• Personalization
• Ability to treat people based on personal qualities and prior
history with site
• Customization
• Ability to change the product to better fit the needs of the
customer
• Cookies
• Primary method to achieve personalization

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The Information Policy Set

• Privacy policy
• Set of public statements declaring how site will treat
customers’ personal information that is gathered by site

• Accessibility rules
• Set of design objectives that ensure disabled users can
effectively access site

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Web Analytics

• Technique to analyzes data at each stage of the

customer conversion process
• Awareness
• Engagement
• Interaction
• Purchase
• Loyalty and post-purchase
• Helps managers
• Optimize ROI on Web site and marketing efforts
• Build detailed customer profiles
• Measure impact of marketing campaigns
• Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, IBM Digital
Analytics, Webtrends

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Google Analytics

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Google Analytics

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Intelligence Events Reports
Intelligence monitors your website's traffic to detect significant statistical variations
and generates alerts

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Audience Reports
The Audience reports provide insight into characteristics of your audience.

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Traffic Channel Report

Possible Channels:
Direct
Organic Search
Social
Email
Affiliates
Referral
Paid Search
Other Advertising
Display

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Report with User-ID view
e.g. for your customer logged in and interact with your website

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Core analysis techniques

• Segmentation allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your

data.

• You can segment your data by date and time, to compare how users
who visit your site on certain days of the week or certain hours of the
day behave differently.
• You can segment your data by device to compare user performance on
desktops, tablets and mobile phones.
• You can segment by marketing channel to compare the difference in
performance for various marketing activities.
• You can segment by geography to determine which countries, regions or
cities perform the best.
• And you can segment by customer characteristics, like repeat customers
vs. first-time customers, to help you understand what drives users to
become loyal customers.

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Lynda.com Google Analytics Essential Training
Free for JCU users

https://www.lynda.com/Google-Analytics-
tutorials/Welcome/197523/415170-4.html

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Summary:
We have discussed,

• The key technology concepts behind the Internet.

• The limitations of today’s Internet and the potential capabilities
of the Internet of the future.
• How Internet and Web features and services support e-
commerce.
• The questions you must ask and answer, and the steps you
should take, in developing e-commerce.
• Tools to analyze and improve performance of e-commerce
websites

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Quiz Question 1

• True / False

• When developing an e-commerce presence, it is important to

understand that the technology must drive business decisions,
not the reverse.

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Quiz Question 2

Which of the following typically includes a data flow diagram to

describe the flow of information for an e-commerce site?

A) physical design
B) logical design
C) testing plan
D) co-location plan

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Quiz Question 3

A(n) ________ is a set of public statements to customers

declaring how you will treat any personal information that you
gather from them on your Web site.

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Quiz Question 4

Explain the meaning of the following meta tag.

<meta name="google" content="nositelinkssearchbox" />

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Quiz Question 5

List the 4 main components of the Google Analytics system?

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