This is my oscommerce based UK website that sells tools. Britool Facom Sykes-Pickavant Draper and Beta Tools Online My target keywords are: Britool Sykes Pickavant Beta Tools Facom DeVilbiss (These pages are important) Im a complete SEO newbie but this is whats been done to the site so far: 1). Sorted the URLs to be keyword rich 2). Title, description and metas to be keyword rich 3). H1 tags on important keywords and at top of page 4). Put middle table/main content first in page 5). Google sitemap 6). Normal sitemap 7). All products pages 8). Keywords at beginning and end of pages 9). Lots of content 10). No follows on anything going to SSL or that I don’t want robots to bother with. Such as nofollow on “add to basket†11). Robots.txt to keep bots away from pages with no worth 12). Redirects from /index.php to / and domain.com to www.domain.com 13). Done an RSS new products feed and submitted it everywhere That’s all I can remember at the moment. Have I over done the keywords in the metas and at the bottom of the page. Am I keyword stuffing? The manufacturer names are very important so I have tried to have a link or two to them on every page. There names in H1 tags at top, link to there section in the middle and then link again in the footer. Google doesn’t show any links back to me yet but I have about 400 which should be about 500 by this weekend. I have a couple of page rank 6 back links, that’s the rank of the page that has the link to me. Also done a few press releases on relevant sites with link back to me. The domain was registered in November 2005, which could be my biggest problem. MSN loves it and puts it between 2 and 5 for most keywords. Google has it 12th for sykes pickavant but no where for anything else. Now what’s really annoying is that anchor text links pointing to my site on irrelevant websites are ranking higher than my site. Is this proof that Im in a sort of age related sandbox?
Sorted, think the hosting company where restarting the server for some reason. Anyway what do you think when its not 404? lol
layout looks good, could do with being on a faster server though as it takes time to load the images. slow ping time of 330ms where are the servers based - US?
No UK, its pretty slow today the server. It is ussually better. Thanks for taking a look. I'll keep an eye on its speed maybe do some regualer tests on it. Id it doesnt improve then I'll move hosts.
Hosting seems fine to me. Its UK based which is the main thing. A new site will take a while to show up in google for your search terms. Ecommerce sites are always hard to get good rankigns for so you really need to concentrate on good content. Build deep links straight to your product pages. I assume you have added a mod so that the session id is not indexed by google? If not then this is important.
Page loaded quick for me. The site looks good. I am not a fan of the baby blue background by the images. I would have done white there to match the images, but that is minor. Other than that nice job.
Thanks mad4 you reminded me, yes I have got the session ids switched off for bots. Although I do a have a slight problem with the yahoo bot getting session ids. Ive looked about on some forums and it seams to be yahoo fault and not my own. On the content side of things, every manufacturer or product has an information page which is available from any product page. Not sure how much worth this has but extra info like this has to help a bit. If you look at the reviews link at the top. There is a sample of the sort of product content we are building. Also none of its up yet but Im working on some how toos/articles on rebuilding a gearbox and the complete restoration of a VW camper van using tools found on shacktool_com. I hoping they will both attract natural links for SEO purpose and customers directly. Did I ask if anyone want to buy some tools yet? lol
aah, that blue. Yeah I know I messed about with that for ages as without it the boxes on the right and left looked funny. Also that blue strip along the bottom of the header looks a little funny. But its one of those things without any of the baby blue it all looks odd.
The look of the site isn’t high design flash/css mastery or anything. Its not really the style that would appeal to my customers I don’t think. It just has to look reasonably good and be usable for people who aren’t big computer users. It’s the SEO that’s my main issue. I need to get more traffic before I can spend anymore money on the business. Have I missed any other SEO ticks? Have I over done the keywords mentioned above? Any SEO suggestions much appreciated.
The layout and content look good - functional but not too flashy. The very bold red and black might be a little too high contrast for some eyes. I did find many pages very slow loading, so I don't know if your hosting problems have been solved. From a SEO standpoint, the list of Popular Searches at the bottom might not be a positive. A large number of small-font keywords/links packed in at the bottom of a page could be construed as 'keyword stuffing.'
uum, thats what I was thinking about the footer links DonkeyTeeth. But as an example if I search mobile phones in google uk. (mobile phone very competitive search term) It returns this page as number 1 http://www.mobileshop.com/ and they have done the same thing? Its something that I seam to see on sites high up the rankings although it is blatant keyword stuffing. Im reluctant to remove it as it has some static links to search results for highly used keyword combinations. The red and black was decided upon after studying similarities in company brands for major successful companies in the tools industry. e.g. snap-on, mac tools a britool to name a few who use red and black. I also read some arty study on red for increased sales somewhere. Cant find the link though. At least Im not using a black background and red text though! lol
Once you are at the top of google you can keyword stuff and cloak as much as you like and google just ignores it..........at the moment.
Thats the first time Ive heard that. I didnt think being at the top already gave you special treatment? I should run a pole. Who thinks I should remove the keywords from the bottom of the page? So far for remove: DonkeyTeeth You think I should remove them then mad4?
Don't take it as a firm no...do what's best for your business. If you think your visitors will use those kinds of links and it adds value to their experience, keep them or even move them somewhere more visible. Maybe put a top 10 searches into one of your sideblocks or something like that. If SEO and building organic traffic is your priority right now, it might be safer to remove them.
My advise is don't even think about the search engines. If your visitors will use these links then leave them. Otherwise remove them.
IMO, you need to shorten your title tag for the category views. The product pages are surgically precise and will yield greater search relevance. However, the category (and manufacturer) pages are way too long. BTW, I notice that you have my contribution installed (Ultimate SEO URLs). I worked hard on that code and love it when I see osC stores that have it installed. Bobby
Hi Bobby, thanks for your views. I’ve had a play around with the title tags. Are they better now? Looking at it now that makes a lot of sense, each page should look more unique. Hopefully it’ll encourage some deeper crawling. Thanks. Yep, Ultimate SEO URLs - brilliant contribution! I have a couple of other contributions you did installed. Thank you very much for putting the time in on them. Also, bit of an update on the footer links. I decided to keep them for a bit and they are working, the pages are showing up high in SERPS for the targeted searches. That’s in MSN and Google. Ive also added a link directory to try and get more on topic links. I wasn’t sure about reciprocals as some are questioning there value. So I had only got one ways up until now. But have since decided a good mix of links would be better and the directory is strictly only for related topics that would appeal to my users. So links exchanged should be possible of providing traffic too.