According to the site’s “About Us” page, Back 40 Books is run by back-to-nature people and the books they sell on their site are predominantly focused on issues related to that lifestyle. It also sounds as if the website was put together by these same outdoor people with little help from web professionals. This is to be commended, but everyone needs a little help sometimes.

In this SEO Report Card featured on Practical eCommerce, Netconcepts’ Search Analyst Jeff Muendel takes an in-depth review of this online bookseller. From recommending “permanent, textual content on their home page” to reflecting on keyword themes and the use of JavaScript and how it affects crawlability of the site, this review highlights areas that many online retailers could keep in mind, in order to improve their site.

In conclusion, Jeff remarks that,

“There are many intriguing and educational books on Back40books.com, and that rich content needs to be better reflected from the home page down. While product pages do feature decent content that is both focused and reflective of potential keywords, even their content could be improved, at the very least by the use of header tags. Get all that Javascript bloat off the pages and into .JS files on the server! Keywords reflected in title tags and URLs will further optimize the site to take full advantage of what search engines have to offer.”

Candlesandsuch.com is a website run quite frugally by its two main proprietors. For a site that hasn’t had a lot of professional help with regard to search engine optimization, it possesses some positive SEO attributes. That’s not to say there aren’t issues, but some of the main facets of good SEO are observed and incorporated.

In this SEO report card originally featured on Practical eCommerce, Netconcepts’ Search Analyst Jeff Muendel takes an in-depth look at how inbound links and sculpting PageRank can help improve the overall site.

Jeff writes how the ScanAlert Hacker Safe logo “bleeds PageRank away from every page, so add NoFollow tags to these links.” Here, the placement of the logo is also an issue since it’s “among the first pieces of code a search engine spider sees on each page. Moving the logo further down the page would be better.” Another valuable find that Jeff discovered was the fact that this site’s error pages were not delivering the proper 404 code, so outdated pages are not dropped from the search engines’ indexes.

In conclusion, Jeff recommends that:

A good link building campaign is what this site needs most! Read Stephan’s article called “Weaving A Web Of Links” for great suggestions on getting started. With that and a few technical changes, Candles And Such will have a website that is optimized at an above-average level. Once inbound links begin to build, they should reap the benefits of their SEO.

Amy Africa

I love Red Envelope. The catalog breaks many traditional direct marketing rules, which is one of my pet peeves, yet I still think it’s fantastic.

I like the products. Red Envelope has a great selection of unique gifts for weddings, new arrivals, anniversaries, birthdays, thank yous, and especially holidays. Its merchants pick quality items that are often accompanied by excellent visual representation, good stories, and topnotch packaging.

The company has great online and offline customer service. Its phone reps are consistently friendly and helpful, and its LivePerson-hosted chat is probably one of the best and most efficient around.

And I think Red Envelope’s Website sucks.

Granted, it does a lot of things right. But for a company its size and with a reputation as one of the best places to find a present, RedEnvelope should be doing a lot of things better. A lot better, in fact.

Let’s start by reviewing the site’s search and navigation.

In recent months, Red Envelope has made major improvements in the site’s navigation. It is now using at-a-glance, left-hand navigation (albeit inconsistently) on the entry page to help you find gifts faster.

You can find gifts by occasion, recipient, and shops (what’s new, favorites, home and garden, and so on.) It also has links to business gifts, gift certificates, last-minute gifts, and the sale shop. Hopefully, you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for, because the text search function leaves so much to be desired it’s almost humorous.

A quick search for “food” yields Murano heart bracelets, baby milestone photo frames, and a grilling set — among other things. Is that the best example I can come up with? Probably not. A search for “cigar” gets you a crocodile-embossed wallet. “Bar” yields a golfer’s shoe carrier. “Sale” finds 35 items, 10% of which don’t even have special pricing. “Kids” gets you therapeutic spa slippers — and if you buy them, Acorn (the company that makes them) will donate to Earth-care concerns or a children’s charity. “Business associate” yields exactly zero results, which is interesting because it’s one of their navigational drop-downs.

This list goes on and on, and I haven’t even begun to mention the particularly amusing things — like when you search for “wedding,” you get 26 items, one of which is a personal compass.

The search refinement function — which is a must-have for any site — has good choices. You can sort by favorites, new items, catalog items (kind of odd), and price high to low and price low to high. Copious testing shows that it’s not always consistent, but at least it’s a good start.

Another thing that’s missing from a navigational perspective is a recently viewed items listing. The site does employ breadcrumbs, just not a listing of items you’ve looked at. So if you find something that you want, you’d better put it in your “shopping bag” because if you don’t, you have to find it again, which isn’t always easy.

When it comes to asking for the order, I hear it all the time: “When you’re a hoity-toity, chi-chi-la-la site, you don’t feel like you should be too aggressive.” But it’s been empirically proven — over and over — that the more you ask for the order, the more customers think you want it. The little, red “add to bag” with the mini, mouse-sized font on the second view doesn’t really show much interest on Red Envelope’s part.

Web designers will design things as one page, but users see things differently. They see every view as a different page. If they have to scroll down, it’s “another page.” So if you don’t have a request-for-the-order on the page they are looking at, you’re not going to get as much conversion as you would if you have it on say, every view, like Collectibles Today (www.collectiblestoday.com) does.

Of course, the big difference between a gift site like Collectibles Today (a division of Bradford Exchange) is that it asks for the order on every view and reminds you how much it wants the sale by showing you a perpetual cart, actually three of them, throughout the site. (A PC, perpetual cart, is a cart that stays with you at all times. Collectibles Today uses one at the top, the right-hand, and the bottom of their navigation.)

Asking for the order on every view, adding perpetual carts, allowing people to buy an item when they see it (for example, on category and gate pages), are all little things that go a long way to making viewers feel that you are interested in their purchase.

The Red Envelope shopping bag/cart/U-Haul truck needs work. It’s functional if you order one gift, but if you order two or more to be shipped to different addresses, you’d better have a Ph.D. and a heck of a lot of patience. Here’s why:

Say I want to buy two gifts, one for my friend Barbara and another one for my friend/client Linda. I go through the site and pick out a gift for each of them.

That part is simple it has a nice and easy to use “select name from this list or add your own” feature so, on the product page, I can assign the individual’s name to the gift. Barbara has a sweet tooth so she gets Dancing Deer Chewy Brownies, and Linda has done a huge favor for me so she gets the brownies and a random “office-munchies”-type food collection in a spiffy green box.

At the product level, you can decide whether or not you want to pay $4.95 for their signature red gift box and you can read the story that’s going to go along with your present. “Every gift has a story.”

When you get to the checkout, it’s a train wreck. The bill-to section is fine, but the shipping address section? It’s just a flipping number! The first part says “shipping address” with a list of required fields and optional gift message. The second part? Well, that says shipping address too! You have four choices: 1) you remember how you added things to your cart; 2) you guess how you added things to your cart; 3) you go back to the view cart page and see what you order ed and then type them in accordingly; or for the best (and most likely!) choice of all; YOU ABANDON. I mean really.

If you’ve ordered from Red Envelope before (as I have, under many different names and various addresses) and have someone in your address book, it will say “Barbara Shipping and Gift Message.” Not that it matters though: The name pops up but the address doesn’t. I’m not exactly sure what good it is to have an address book that doesn’t keep addresses.

The order summary allows you to change anything you’d like to change about the address. With that said, removing an item is impossible unless you go back to the beginning and start all over from the view page.

On top of the pressing payment information, it asks “how did you hear about us?” There’s a handy drop-down with choices (in no apparent order) and the field is not required, but this is not exactly the place for it. Emphasis on not exactly.

One of the benefits of the Red Envelope shopping bag is that after you submit your order, you can set up a gift reminder where “each year, they’ll remind you 14 and 4 days before the occasion.”

Because subtlety is Red Envelope’s middle name, it doesn’t upsell at all at the view shopping bag level or in the checkout. Harry & David, another seller of gifts, has a nice feature: If you order something for someone else, you are given an incentive to order something for yourself.

Red Envelope misses out on several other opportunities. It waits until the 11th hour to address security — still an important issue for many folks. It also doesn’t have a traditional temperature bar (a proven technique to guide the user through the process) or ways to easily print your cart, view your cart, save your cart, or e-mail your cart to yourself.

The latter is a big issue because the site appears to delete abandoned carts at a moment’s notice so if you’re shopping during the day when you’re not supposed to be (read: at work), you may or may not have your cart when you come back.

Red Envelope also does not allow you to choose when your item is going to be shipped — it allows you to choose standard, next day, and second day delivery options, but if I want to order my Christmas presents right after Thanksgiving, I can’t instruct the site to wait until almost Christmas to send them. (1-800-Flowers.com does an excellent job at this.)

As I mentioned earlier, Red Envelope has excellent merchandising It has great photography — the pictures are nicely done, and in several of the products it uses multiple visuals. The copy is okay, not perfect but definitely not the world’s worst either.

So, how can the site “suck”?

The thing is that navigation is 40% to 60% of a site’s success, at a minimum, and its navigation, although much improved, is still weak at best. That, and its somewhat dismal shopping bag, leave a site that’s far from perfect and definitely not as good as it should be.

It doesn’t matter who you are: You can’t ignore the stuff that’s important.

Stephan Spencer

Red Envelope’s Website is powered by BroadVision, a sophisticated e-commerce platform when it comes to functionality — but not when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). The home page redirects to a very search engine-unfriendly URL with seven parameters in the query string. That is way too many for the tastes of any of the three major search engines.

What’s worse, one of those parameters is a session ID. Session IDs are anathema to search engines, as they create an infinite number of URLs that point to the same content. Also, the URL is three directories deep. Category and subcollection page URLs are similarly unfriendly to spiders, with three directories deep and up to nine parameters (in other words: eight ampersands).

Google reveals in its cached copy of the home page (i.e., search Google for “cache:www.redenvelope.com”) links containing session IDs. Furthermore, a Google search for “inurl:BV_SessionID site:redenvelope.com” confirms that session ID-containing URLs are making it into Google’s index, which is bad news because a URL with a session ID will obtain only a minimal number of links.

The category and subcollection pages are not making it into the search engines at all — not because of their spider unfriendly URLs, but because they are being specifically blocked through “disallow” directives in the site’s robots.txt file. Robots.txt is the place where you can give commands to Googlebot and the other spiders, such as “stay away from this directory” or “stay away from this file type.”

Looking at the site’s robots.txt file, I see that category pages, sub-collection pages and product information pages are all being disallowed. You might wonder why this is the case. Wouldn’t Red Envelope want these pages indexed and ranked, despite any inherent search engine unfriendliness? Well, in this case, the answer is no.

That’s because Red Envelope has alternate pages for the spiders to index, using a technology called SearchDex. SearchDex autogenerates thousands (more precisely, 2,250, according to Google search results) of sitemap pages. These doorway pages (such as the one at http://www.redenvelope.com/giftcatalog/Ccat10095.jsp) are built specifically to lead spiders to product-level content pages.

These SearchDex “Ccat” pages may appear to be full of meaty, keyword-rich content, but upon closer examination of the content, it is quite apparent that the content was not written by a human. For example, consider this fine prose in the second sentence of the first paragraph on the aforementioned Ccat10095.jsp: “Our men’s accessories range from men’s fashion accessories to men’s leather accessories, which are reasonably priced and unique to RedEnvelope.com.” Yuck!

Or consider the lead sentences on http://www.redenvelope.com/giftcatalog/Ccat10629.jsp: “Great Christmas presents make holidays magic. Unique Christmas presents from our collection of our newest gifts this Christmas season will bring good cheer.”

It’s throwaway copy from the reader’s perspective, but certainly dense with keywords: 10 occurrences of “accessories” and “men’s” in the first paragraph of the former example, seven occurrences of either “Christmas presents” or “Christmas present” in the second example.

There are names for this black hat SEO tactic, none of which are complimentary: “keyword stuffing,” “spamglish,” and “doorway page” are just three that come to mind. This is a search engine ban waiting to happen.

Also in the aforementioned paragraph on Ccat10629.jsp, the words “my Christmas presents” are actually wrapped within heading tags, yet that fact is hidden from the user. The headings are given the exact same font, style, and treatment as the rest of the paragraph copy, so they are indistinguishable from the surrounding text and buried within the paragraph.

Links within the paragraph copy are hidden in the same way. Clearly, this was done only for search engines and not for humans. This is definitely the sort of thing that Google’s automated algorithms seek to detect and penalize.

The title tags are similarly keyword-stuffed. A good rule of thumb with title tags is not to repeat a word three times and not to repeat more than two words. In the title tag of the aforementioned page (Ccat10629.jsp), “Christmas presents” is repeated twice, “gifts” is repeated three times, and then “gift.” Furthermore, the title spans 17 words — too long. I would go for a dozen words or less.

Looking again at the cached version of the home page (the one that Googlebot was given), I see that the majority of links on that page are wasted, because they link to category and subcollection pages that are being disallowed. Where are the links to the SearchDex pages?

There’s only one SearchDex link — to the top page of the SearchDex sitemap. And that’s quietly tucked away in the copyright line at the bottom of the page, since the linked page is not really meant for human consumption, only for spiders. There are no graphics on this sitemap page; it is a page chock-full of text links to various SearchDex Ccat pages.

Links contained on the home page along with their anchor text count heavily toward SEO. For instance, the “jewelry” text link would, in normal circumstances, help the linked page rank well for jewelry-related searches. That’s because the search engines associate the anchor text with the page being linked to. Not so here; these navigation links are of no value because of the disallow.

If the “jewelry” category page weren’t disallowed, it would be unlikely to rank well due to the lack of text content on the page. Contained on this page, however, are text links to search results pages. Search results pages can make for good search engine fodder, but fewer than 100 of these search results pages are making it into Google’s index. And nearly all of those are in the supplemental index — an indicator that they are unlikely to rank well in all but obscure queries.

The logo in the top left on all the pages across the site (with the exception of the SearchDex pages) links to the home page — but using the spider unfriendly URL complete with session ID, rather than http://www.redenvelope.com/. Thus these links pass PageRank to a different version of the home page rather than reinforcing the PageRank of the true home page.

Although you wouldn’t be able to tell this from the Google toolbar (due to the unique session ID-containing URL you will have been redirected to upon visiting), RedEnvelope.com has a respectable home page PageRank. By using the “PageRank Lookup” tool from SEOChat.com, I was able to determine that the home page scores a 6 out of 10.

But since PageRank is on a logarithmic scale, 6 is not as good as you may think — a 7 or an 8 would be much better. SEOChat’s “PageRank Search” tool reveals something rather alarming: The majority of the SearchDex auto-generated pages score 0 out of 10, particularly at the product level. A number of Ccat pages have a PageRank 2 or 3, and only a few have a PageRank 4.

Yahoo Site Explorer (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) reveals quite a healthy set of inlinks — from blogs, shopping sites, news articles, directories, and so on. Yahoo counts nearly 20,000 inlinks (excluding internal links). With some re-architecting of the site, this “link juice” could really be much more effectively leveraged across Red Envelope’s site. That — along with rewriting the URLs to eliminate session IDs and “stop characters” (ampersands, equal signs, question marks) from the URLs; discontinuing the questionable SEO tactics of doorway pages and hidden links; and adding meaty content — should have a profound impact on Red Envelope’s rankings and search traffic.

Considering its home page PageRank is only a three out of 10 (on a logarithmic scale) and many of its product and category pages fare worse in terms of the PageRank importance, it’s not surprising the site’s rankings are so poor.
Because this is such a pivotal issue, let’s dig a bit deeper before we cover any other SEO issues. A look at the links (with the help of Yahoo! Site Explorer at Siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) reveals 711 web pages linking to pages in the Millcraftfurniture.com site, excluding internal links of course. The number of links seems passable at first glance, but in reviewing the links, I find a number were obviously obtained through commercial means, such as Seowebdirectory.info/index.php?a=search&q=chair and Laddermart.com/links.html.

nullClearly, its site needs an injection of new high-quality links. The company doesn’t need links from a bunch of directories and link exchanges though; it looks like they’ve already gone down that route. Considering how much ground they need to make up, I think this calls for some serious link baiting.
Time to think creatively:

Idea No. 1: Create an article or blog post featuring wild and wacky furniture. Great examples of this include: Scrabble Furniture (Freshome.com/2007/04/08/furniture-inspired-by-scrabble-game/), furniture made from FedEx boxes (Fedexfurniture.com) and DIY cardboard furniture – complete with patterns and instructions (Foldschool.com). Consider commissioning the guy behind the FedEx furniture to create a gazebo out of FedEx boxes and leverage that into a PR campaign.

Idea No. 2: Launch an outdoor patio decor blog in a similar vein to the popular blog Apartment Therapy (Apartmenttherapy.com), perhaps even calling it “Patio Therapy.” Maybe even develop it as a satire of Apartment Therapy, poking fun in a playful, but not litigation-inducing, way.

Idea No. 3: Shoot a video showing the process of recycling milk jugs into Adirondack chairs: The grinding up, cleaning, drying, melting, mixing and extruding. Make the video fun — e.g., add a funky soundtrack and make it into a music video, hire a comedian to do the narration. Try to get it featured on Rocketboom.

Drop some mentions of this link bait in the blogosphere and in social networks like Digg (with the help of a social media consultant, so it’s done right). Make sure the link bait article is devoid of commercialism or there will be a backlash from Digg users. After the link bait has peaked in its popularity and the Digg traffic has died down, you can then change out some of the content and links on the page to make it more commercial — e.g., adding links pointing to important products/categories, and search engine optimizing the page and conversion optimizing the page to drive more purchases.

Switching gears, let’s look at the SEO within the site. First off, I was pleased to see most URLs were devoid of “stop characters” and contained keywords separated by hyphens. The tabs at the top of the pages are comprised of keyword-rich text links. These are great SEO features.

There were plenty still to optimize, however. For starters, I’d advise:

• Changing the links that point to your home page using /index.htm to / instead, so the spiders will no longer find a duplicate home page while exploring the links of the site.
• Switching from using HTML tables for layout to using CSS. Such a change is friendlier to users and spiders alike.
• Appending rel=”nofollow” to the product image and “more info” links, because those links aren’t as useful as the links with the product name as anchor text. Nofollow is a great way to channel a larger share of PageRank through to the links that matter most.
• Not having so many H1 tags on the home page. That looks over-optimized.
• Dropping the “links” page, or, at a minimum, drop all the directories from that page.
• Installing a 301 redirect on http://millcraftfurniture.com/ because there’s currently a duplicate site for the spiders to index there — which isn’t helped by the fact that all the links are relative instead of absolute.

Here’s the directive for httpd.ini to do this magic:
[ISAPI_Rewrite]
RewriteRule ^/category/([0-9]+)\.htm$ /index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=$1 [L]

Replace links to the old-style category URLs with the new style. Repeat this approach for the product and manufacturer-page URLs.

The Problem: Search engine spiders can’t operate pull-down menus.
The Fix: Change “search by brand” from a pull-down list (search engine spiders can’t fill in forms) to a list of text links. Since Daddies Board Shop carries too many brands to set up text links for all of them, only the top 20 should be linked. Then make a “brands” page with links to the full list of brands and include a link to that page.

The Problem: Duplicate pages create multiple problems.
The Fix: To reduce the amount of duplicate pages currently in Google’s index, change the link URL for the logo on the top of the pages from /index.asp to /, and 301 redirect all pages under https://daddiesboardshop.com/ and https://www.daddiesboardshop.com/ to the corresponding page on http://www.daddiesboardshop.com/.

The Problem: The blog needs a new location.
The Fix: Move the DBS Blog off blogspot.com to a domain the business controls (e.g., blog.daddiesboardshop.com or boardfanaticblog.com). This will link the SEO-rich blog content to Daddies Board Shop’s website.

The Problem: A lack of links.
The Fix: Build links and PageRank through “link bait” campaigns that will draw attention and links. For instance, invite video submissions of tricks/stunts, then award winning entrants a “Daddies Black Belt” web badge they can proudly display on personal blogs or sites, linking back to Daddies’ review of their stunts.

The Critique Project
Melanie Loveland and her son Dan built a business together around a mutual passion — snowboarding. What started as a small, brick-and-mortar store in Portland, Ore., has evolved into a full-fledged multichannel merchant. It was a process the owners didn’t foresee when the business started in 1995.

Their business has seen dynamic change in the seven years since it launched a website. Daddies Board Shop now generates 80 percent of its sales through online channels and only 20 percent at the Portland store.

In February, when Practical eCommerce offered a once-in-a-lifetime complimentary website critique to one lucky recipient, Dan (along with many other website owners) petitioned for the critique — and his site was selected.

As part of the critique, five firms took an intensive look at Daddiesboardshop.com to analyze its problems, the opportunities for search engine optimization, its general Internet presence, site search, pay-per-click advertising and customer experience/usability. The firms were:

• Search Engine Optimization: Netconcepts, Stephan Spencer, President
• General Internet Presence: Red Door Interactive, Reid Carr, President
• Site Search: SLI Systems, Shaun Ryan, CEO
• Pay-per-click Advertising: Key Relevance, Christine Churchill, President
• Customer Experience/Usability: Optimal Usability, Richard Kerr, Usability Consultant

1. The URLs contain session IDs — a no-no for SEO — but upon review of the cached version of the home page, I was relieved to find the session IDs are not being assigned to Googlebot. It appears there is “bot detection” happening behind the scenes, so when a spider like Googlebot is detected, session IDs are removed from the URLs in the links.

I double-checked and none of the session ID-containing URLs have made it into Google’s index. The session ID notwithstanding, the “product” and “category” URLs are relatively friendly to search engines. However, the product URLs do not contain keywords; they are product number-based. Ideally, the URLs should include keywords.

2. The “shop by product” and “shop by department” nav buttons are set up as mouseovers with lots of text links under the mouseover. The mouseovers are executed as CSS, so the links function as crawlable static text links — ehhh-xcellent! (as Mr. Burns would say).

3. The site doesn’t do a 301 redirect from Modernmini.com to www.modernmini.com, which means two copies of the site will get indexed — one at www.modernmini.com, and one at modernmini.com. A number of pages appear in Google’s Supplemental Index. Many of these are Modernmini.com pages rather than www.modernmini.com. Installing the proper redirects should clean up some of these supplemental results.

4. In the category and product pages, “Modernmini” is the first word in the title tag. That is not ideal; important keywords should lead in the title tag and “Modernmini” is not a useful keyword. I wouldn’t bother moving it to the end of the title tag. I recommend it just be removed.

5. It would be nice to see the main content of the page higher up in the HTML in a more prominent spot. Using CSS, you can reorder the HTML — putting the left-hand nav lower in the HTML with content placed above it. Prominence could be further enhanced by removing the inline CSS code that bloats the page; instead, place it in an external CSS file.

6. The site uses breadcrumb navigation, but unfortunately, the breadcrumb all but disappears at the product level — only the “home” part of the breadcrumb remains. This seems to be a bug.

7. It is not clear from the title tag or from the body copy what the main keyword theme of the home page is. I would think that “children’s furniture” or “baby furniture” would be appropriate keywords to target, but surprisingly the word “furniture” doesn’t appear on the home page at all — only tucked away in the meta description tag, which won’t help Modernmini’s rankings.

8. Product names are used as the title tag content on the product pages. Sometimes this approach is fine, and sometimes it’s less than ideal. For example, the Celery Lullaboo Rocking Cradle really should include the keywords “baby” and/or “infant” in the title tag, and probably “wood” or “wooden” as well.

9. The product pages do not make use of H1 heading tags. The product name is not given extra weight by the search engines, as it employs the same font treatment as the rest of the copy.

10. The site could really use a custom 404 error page. Given the number of Modernmini listings in both Google’s and Yahoo!’s indices that lead to those very ugly “404 Not Found” error pages, fixing this problem should be a priority that gets prompt attention. The Modernmini.com site appears to have suffered in the past from a server misconfiguration that allowed error pages to get indexed.

The misconfiguration has been rectified, but many of these broken pages are still hanging around. Thus, visitors directed by the engines to such pages have a poor user experience; they are unlikely to do anything but immediately click out of the site. Develop a custom error page to suggest related pages (based on the visitor’s search query) and prominently offer a search box and site map.

Hats off to Kyle for showing such initiative. Now let’s have a look at his creation.

One of the bigger opportunities I see here is the fact that there are no product pages. Category pages show a collection of products, each with a several-sentence description. Unfortunately, none of these product names clicks through to a product description page containing a product-focused title tag, H1 tag and page copy (including ingredients, food that the product complements, relevant recipes, etc.).

For example, it is unlikely The Honey Jar will rank for “apricot whipped honey” because that product does not have a page dedicated to it. It’s only mentioned on the “Whipped” category page, two-thirds of the way down the page. The words “apricot whipped honey” are not even present on the page because the product names are all presented as graphics (no alt tags either).

The title tags (which are about 12 words too long) are all the same across most of the site. This severely hampers the pages from “singing” to the search engines. The “whipped” category page should be singing “whipped honey.”

• The URLs are all quite good. They are all short, devoid of “stop characters” and include keywords.

• Although not an SEO issue, the page elements don’t line up quite right on a Mac.

• Much of the “text” is trapped within images — including product names and sometimes even the descriptions. For example, on the “Candles” page, most of the product-related copy is within images. All that definitely should be converted to text so the spiders can read it.

• The “recipes,” “definitions” and “FAQs” pages are all “coming soon.” Neither shoppers nor spiders think much of pages still under construction.

• As it stands, the site has very few inbound links. Yahoo! Site Explorer (Siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) shows a mere six. Thus it’s not surprising the home page’s PageRank is a painfully low 2. Link building should be Kyle’s first order of business. You can have the best content in the world, but with that poor PageRank it won’t do you any good.

Start by examining competitor sites that rank well (e.g., Honey.com, Honeyassociation.com) and see where they get their “link juice.” Then contact those sites to request a link. Kyle has a great story to tell as a 17-year-old ecommerce entrepreneur, and cleverly-worded link requests will be a great place to start telling it.

• A blog would be a perfect adjunct to this ecommerce site. Kyle could blog about honey, about small-town America, about wholesome food, about being a young entrepreneur. A blog would be a great way to develop loyal readers/customers as well as generate links.

• Google has very few pages of Thehoneyjarhome.com indexed, only 16, and most of those are in the Supplemental Index. Upon closer examination it appears that Kyle has redesigned the site and many of these supplemental pages no longer exist. Rather than leading searchers to a 404 error page, searchers and bots should be redirected via a 301 (permanent-style) redirect to the corresponding page at its new URL.

• The home page is pretty light on content. All the product category names appear as images and there is no intro copy to speak of. There are a few sentences of “our story” preamble and a sentence under the “featured product,” but that’s about it for non-navigational copy.

The home page is given the most weight by the search engines, so make the most of the opportunity and reinforce the keyword theme of “honey” with lots of honey-related text content — and don’t forget to have an H1 tag, too!

For Gifts By Delivery, the ramp-up begins in early October. The fourth quarter last year brought in 65 percent of the company’s annual revenue. It makes the most of this time, doing everything it can to maximize sales with advertising and marketing. That’s because Gifts By Delivery knows the inevitable dip and flattening of the revenue line is right around the corner, in the New Year.

Competing for organic search visibility during the holiday shopping season requires a ramp-up in online marketing — namely, link building and link baiting — many months in advance. It should start now, in fact.

Giftsbydelivery.com’s main SEO weakness lies in its links. A lack of link importance really holds the site back. The site’s home page PageRank score is only four and as you click deeper into the site, it quickly degrades even further. In fact, most pages have a PageRank of zero.

Furthermore, a link:www.giftsbydelivery.com search on Google shows only 25 backlinks and that’s including internal links to the company’s own site. It’s true that Google only reports a sampling of the back links; even so, it’s a dismal showing.

More telling is the fact that nearly all of Giftsbydelivery.com’s pages are in Google’s dreaded “Supplemental Index.” These pages clearly lack the link importance required to earn them a place in Google’s main index. Even though Googlers (that’s what Google employees call themselves) argue to the contrary, having all your site’s listings labeled “Supplemental Results” is like a Google death sentence.

Not surprisingly, I found the site’s Google rankings to be quite poor. For important keywords like “wine gift baskets,” “gift baskets,” “fresh fruit baskets,” “food gift baskets” and “gourmet gift baskets,” Giftsbydelivery.com did not show up in the first five pages of Google results. It’s obvious that something in the company’s SEO is broken.

Gifts By Delivery embarked upon a link-building program about a year and half ago, but it wasn’t a good program. It probably did more harm than good. When the site’s owners realized the quality wasn’t there, they opted to cancel the program.

Garnering good links takes time and expertise. And then it takes more time before the PageRank benefit from those links really kicks in. Now is the time to enlist the help of a link building expert to identify link targets, request links, make directory submissions, distribute search engine optimized press releases, formulate “link-bait” campaigns and so on.

Throughout all this, it’s necessary to remember that the anchor text of the links is crucially important. It’s no accident that the majority of the sites on the first page in Google for “gift baskets” have the phrase “gift baskets” in the domain name. Sites like Gourmetgiftbaskets.com, Adorablegiftsbaskets.com, DesignItyourselfgiftbaskets.com, Winecountrygiftbaskets.com and others easily acquire links with the phrase “gift baskets” in the anchor text. After all, it’s part of their names! Somehow, Gifts by Delivery must compensate for this disadvantage.

Overall, the on-page SEO was in pretty decent shape.

URLs of category pages and product pages are search engine optimal — keyword-rich, free of stop characters, set up with a flat directory structure with minimal slashes and with hyphens separating the keywords (rather than underscores, which are bad).

There’s a 301 redirect from giftsbydelivery.com to www.giftsbydelivery.com, applied site-wide (not just on the home page), eliminating a duplicate web site in the search engines. Nice!

Title tags on product pages lead with the product name, not the name of the site — which shows an understanding of keyword prominence. Some category page titles (e.g., gourmet.html) are keyword-stuffed.

The meta descriptions and meta keywords are unique to each page, which is good, though at more than 50 words, some of the meta descriptions are too long. I recommend the site reduce the length in each case by half.

The H1 tag on the home page is “Let us reach across the miles for you” — no good keywords there. The category name is marked up with an H1 on category pages, and the product name with an H2 on product pages. That’s good, but for some bizarre reason many product pages carry an H1 tag with nothing but an HTML comment.

Speaking of comments, I see a plethora of HTML comments in the templates that could be removed to streamline the HTML code.

The costliest SEO mistake I found was the duplicate site Ward’s has in Google, due to the lack of a permanent redirect from wardsci.com to www.wardsci.com. Some sites link to the former URL; others link to the latter. Because all the links on the site are relative rather than absolute, when a spider starts crawling the site from wardsci.com (without the “www”), it is able to spider an index of an entire copy of the site at the alternate URL. By combining the duplicate sites, Ward’s would aggregate the Google PageRank scores of the two sites into one.

For example, the www.wardsci.com home page has a PageRank of 6, as does that of wardsci.com. Once aggregated, the resulting home page could end up with a 7 (which is markedly higher than a 6, due to the logarithmic nature of PageRank). You can confirm that these two URLs are seen as unique pages by Google by searching for “cache:wardsci.com” and “cache:www.wardsci.com” — each has a different “retrieved on” date.

Stop those characters!

Ward’s rewrote its category and product URLs to eliminate “stop characters” — question marks, ampersands, and equal signs. But the approach it used is not ideal.

For one thing, variables are separated by underscores, and underscores are not word separators in the eyes of Google. Consider the URL “http://www.wardsci.com/category.asp_Q_c_E_1447_A_Electrochemistry.” The word “electrochemistry” is not seen by Google or counted as a keyword. There also appear to be some superfluous characters in these rewritten URLs (“_Q_c_E_” perhaps). Many of the product URLs have exceedingly long file names (e.g. “http://www.wardsci.com/product.asp_Q_pn_E_IG0006937_A_Fully+Extracted+Sheep+Brain+with+Dura+Mater+Preserved+Specimen”), which may not seem very palatable to a spider (not that a sheep brain could be very palatable under the best of circumstances!).

The product category links in the top navigation and the sidebar are all text, so extra bonus points for that. All the major search engines associate those underlined words with the page being linked to.

The HTML code could be tightened up quite a lot. The HTML includes a number of comments, and tables are being used for layout, which is not very efficient coding practice. By tightening up the code in the various category page and product page templates, the relevant product-related copy could be brought higher up on the page. Also some intro copy should be added to the category pages, as there is nothing there to reinforce the page’s keyword theme.

From the category pages, there are links to view all products in that category; those point, however, to a search results page with six parameters in the URL — a complex, search-unfriendly URL structure. Those definitely need to be rewritten. Each product on the category page is linked to three times: from the product photo, from the product name, and from a “More Info” button. It would be best to add “rel=nofollow” to the photo and button links so that they are no longer counted as “votes” by the search engines. That focuses the search engines on the remaining product link, which just so happens to be a text link containing relevant keywords.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) should be used to reorder the flow of the HTML in the templates so that the keyword-rich body copy appears higher up in the page, above the navigation. Heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) should emphasize text important to the search engines; then CSS can style that text appropriately on the screen. On category pages, the category name should be an H1 tag. CSS code is currently included “inline”; instead it should be placed in an external .css file.

Product pages should link to related products, thus adding more “votes” for those products. Links to internal search results on related keywords would be nice too, particularly if those pages were search engine optimized.

Ward’s product and category pages include breadcrumb navigation links. Normally this is a good thing, because these are keyword-rich text links. But Ward’s breadcrumb navigation has been implemented incorrectly: The category and product URLs in the breadcrumb are not rewritten, thus providing the spiders with another version of these pages to index and more duplicate content.

Curiously, while surfing around the catalog I found that the top featured product in the “Forces and Motion” category had a breadcrumb containing “404 Page Not Found” and a message at the bottom of the page that this item is no longer available. Clicking on that “404 Page Not Found” link in the breadcrumb led me to an “Oops! Sorry…” page that doesn’t actually return a 404 status code but a 200 instead — thus this “Oops” page can get indexed and displayed in search results.

The title tags aren’t too bad. The category pages include the category name in the title; product pages include the product name. I’d recommend dropping “Ward’s Natural Science” from the title tags to help tighten the focus.

Spending its juice

The site has strong backlinks, many from relevant science-related sites, and good link neighborhoods. Being part of the VWR family of catalogs, Ward’s has a fantastic opportunity to acquire links from sister sites. The “.edu” and “.gov” backlinks (for instance, “www.csh.rit.edu/projects” and “cms.llnl.gov/sourcecl.html”) are like gold due to the pristine link neighborhoods they are in and the authority status bestowed on many of them; such links cannot be bartered, bought, or stolen. Ward’s problem lies in how it “spends” the link juice given to them.

I would advise blocking all the “quick order” product pages from being indexed, because they really are not good pages for SEO — or searchers — to land on. These pages have very little keyword-rich copy, no intro text, no product copy, just some product names. From an SEO perspective, Ward’s would be better off “spending” its internal PageRank on more keyword-rich product and category pages.

More important, the page number links should be text links rather than a pull-down list. The pull-down is not search-engine friendly; spiders can not fill out forms. There is a “Next>>” link at least, but it is crucial to have a better path into Ward’s rich supply of products besides following page after page of “Next>>” links. By the time the spider gets to page 50, all the PageRank will have dissipated.

Ward’s has a good-size product catalog, so once its SEO is in order, the company should be able to capture a lot of “long tail” search traffic as well as a number of head terms related to the categories it sells.

Two Hands registered its domain in September 2006 and launched the site in November based on a customized installation of osCommerce. In December it reached out to SEO forums asking for advice. Some of the advice was good and was taken on board, such as switching from dynamic URLs to static (i.e. no ? & = characters), and addressing its duplicate site issues (both www.twohandsworldshop.com and twohandsworldshop.com were getting indexed). That I was happy to see, although the latter should have been solved using 301 redirects rather than BASE HREF tags.

Some of the advice given I didn’t agree with, such as a focus on exchanging links. My hope is that Two Hands didn’t give that suggestion too much credence, since - as I have written in previous columns - reciprocal links are discounted by the engines as they do not appear to be “earned.”

Regardless of what the folks at Two Hands do to the site itself while it sits in TrustBox purgatory, these enhancements will do little good. Off-page factors (clever link building and link baiting) should be the site owner’s immediate concern, as that is what will shorten the site’s time in the sand.

It’s worth noting that this unfortunate situation could have been avoided altogether by acquiring an old domain (circa 2001 or older), preferably one that hosted a well-linked site with a long history in Archive.org, rather than just a parking page.

I became certain of Twohandsworldshop.com’s sandboxed status as I conducted Google queries for product names like “onyx pillar candle holder” and “tropical silk coin purse” and had to dig deeper than the first couple pages of results to find Twohandsworldshop.com. Considering its backlinks, PageRank, lack of spamming and content-rich product pages with the product name in the title tag, one would expect to see a Two Hands product page on the first page of results for such obscure search terms - unless Two Hands had been sandboxed.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the company in Froogle and sometimes in Google’s web results in the “Onebox” - which are three results pulled from one of Google’s vertical engines and immediately precede the natural (unpaid) results on some queries. Onebox results lead with text like “Product search results for tropical silk coin purse.”

The backlinks were rather weak, which is to be expected given how new the site is. Thankfully, a sitewide link from the blog of the founder’s father (Citizenbrand.typepad.com) helped prop up the site’s link importance. Much more effort is required here, though.

Not to neglect on-page issues entirely, there’s plenty to be done to improve the site. The home page definitely needs some work. When I viewed the home page in the Safari browser on my Mac, I got a bit of a shock, as you can see from the screenshot (above). It seemed like they ran out of budget halfway down the screen! That’s one heck of a long (and large!) H1 heading tag - four times too long, I reckon. It smells like keyword-stuffed doorway page copy.

Upon inspecting the HTML of the home page, I found meta keywords and a meta description were present but left blank. If you have nothing to say in your meta tags, say nothing at all. In other words, either include some text in the meta tag or leave the meta tag code out entirely.

In general, the HTML could definitely be improved by adding H1 tags to category and product pages and intro copy to category pages, as well as by reducing code bloat by removing all HTML comments and avoiding the use of tables for layout. A number of pages employ the same exact title tag of “Two Hands Worldshop,” a big no-no, as you want to make each page appear unique to the engines.

The logo in the top left, the Shop link, and the Home link in the breadcrumb navigation all point to the home page but at /index.php instead of at /, which can lead to a duplicate home page getting indexed. (There is a duplicate home page at https://twohandsworldshop.com in Google, incidentally.)

I was initially alarmed to see session IDs (osCsid) in the URLs. However it was a false alarm. None of those osCsid-containing URLs made it into Google’s index and only one into Yahoo!’s. Hats off to the folks at Two Hands for detecting spiders and selectively stripping session IDs from the URLs for them.