Can i get an SEO specific review of www.sharpsbooks.co.uk please any hints and tips would be great. thanks Im on a windoze server so some things i cant do. cheers Mike
Hey, I like your site. Are you using OS commerce? There are tons of SEO friendly contribs that you can use.... Looks like you are using the rewrite for your category and product pages. It Works well, one of my competitors found out about it and shot to the first page for a main keyword in a month. You have 41k+ links according to Yahoo, so your in the coop too. Looks like you have your bases covered, but you many want to find static one way links to help strengthen your link campaign. something not seo related, but have you considered adding Amanzon affiliate links on your site? or checking out the Noppid's freeBS program? Just something that crossed my mind. also, are you targeting the KW "used books" along with "second hand books"? In the US "used books" is more common, but in the UK im sure it is differnet. Good luck with your store!!!!
Very nice site. I love the design and layout. I would suggest maybe as another member has said trying to get some 1 way links. That would really help your link campaigne. You only have 65 links in google which isn't too bad, but need to work on getting some more relevant links in my opioin. Again nice site.
thanks for the replies people. im woking on the backlinks and will hopefully see an increase at the next BL update! other opinions are welcomed Mike
The first thing I do when checking SEO on a site with lots of products is to take a snippet of one of the products descriptions. In your case, I randomly picked a product and did a Google search "in quotes" for: "Fully illustrated in colour by John Batchelor; a very nice copy, internally tight and clean, no previous owner marks" The results were that 3 other sites had the same exact text in their description. Over the long haul, this could hurt you greatly, even get you almost non-existent on Google. I am guessing that you have pages and pages of content that is duplicated all over the web. I would find a way to make the descriptions unique. I know its a big task, but who will Google give the authority to on each duplicate content and who will they ignore thinking its the same site? The next thing that caught my eye was your Title tag on your home page is: <title>Home - Sharp's Book Co</title> The title tag is one of the most important places on your website that should contain your MAIN keywords you want to be found if someone were to do a Google search. People will have no problem searching and finding your company name, you should automatically rank #1 for that. Don't waste SUPER VALUABLE space with your company name on the title tag, make it keyword heavy (but not spammy). Same thing with your H1 tag:<h1>Welcome to Sharp's Book Co!</h1> This tag is also too important not to have keywords in it. make sure you do your keyword research. If "secondhand" is searched more than "Used" then the H1 should say something like: "Welcome to the UK's best selection of Secondhand books" (your keyword research will dictate what the Title and Header tags should include) Sorry, there's more. I hope this is not too much, but reviewing sites for SEO is what I do for a living and a hobby. You have 2 images on the home page that are generically named: intro-image.png and logo.png. Both of these are above the fold on your site and should be optimized. Other SEO's may not think this is too important, but everything toward the top of the site on the home page is heavily weighted by Google and gets weaker as the page gets longer. So you need to optimize everything you can. Rename the logos with keywords, like change intro-image.png to "secondhand-books-image.png". Maybe rename logo.png as "Sharps-secondhand-book-specialists.png" (again, do your keyword research to maximize this) Also, the logo that has the words "Secondhand Books" is not helping you by having the text as part of the image. Help Google out by making the text part of the image readable by the bots by really making it text readable. If you can add more keyword rich text on the home page and the aboutus page that will help too. I see that others talk a lot about backlinking (which is important), but good SEO should always start on-site. When Google see's backlinks and goes to your site, it verifies that the site is relevant to the backlink origination site. The more text you have, the better Google can make a good determination that you are worthy of higher rankings. If your on-site optimization is poor, your competition can beat you with a lot less effort. Also, stick to white hat backlinking, Google is getting way to smart to be tricked by any of us. You may not be caught today, but when you finally do get caught, all your work will be for nothing and you'll really have to pay for traffic or work extra hard day and night on social media campaigns. By the way, there is a lot more on-site things you can do. The above comments is just what I saw that caught my eye. I haven't looked very far past 1 or 2 pages. If you have a local SEO expert, you may want to sit down with them to have them look it over with you in detail. Print my notes and verify what I said with them. SEO's all have different opinions he/she may disagree with me and have better advice after digging harder.