If Little Pixie Gifts has an SEO weak point, it is in the URLs. As search engines spider the URL addresses along with title tags and page content, each URL should reflect the keyword theme of the page. Instead, Little Pixie Gifts has URLs like http://www.littlepixiegifts.com.au/cart.php?target=category&category_id=62. While such a URL doesn’t necessarily hurt things from a search engine perspective, it certainly doesn’t help.

To read the full article, visit Practical Ecommerce.

Panelists:
Lauren Freedman, President, the e-tailing group
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Amy Africa, President, Eight by Eight

Pinkorpunk.com is a fairly new website, which may partially explain its PageRank of 0. But, the other factor in the ranking is the site’s small number of inbound links. Yahoo! sees 45 links from outside sites while Google doesn’t list any at all. Inbound links translate to PageRank, and higher PageRank translates to better search engine results. This site, with its vibrant content, should have no problem garnering links! A linking campaign is in order here. Research online directories and get listed in those that still have decent PageRank (many have been recently demoted by Google in that regard). A blog is also in order, especially with such hip content. Online press should be a target as well, as should social media avenues like MySpace, Flickr and Facebook.

For more about this niche eCommerce store, visit the Practical eCommerce website audit here.

This month’s report card website is Seenon.com, an ecommerce site that tracks the fashion tendencies of the famous and sells those garments and accoutrements to interested consumers. The site is pleasant to the eye and has an exciting, almost urgent feel to it, but how does it do in terms of search engine optimization? Not bad at all actually, and to that end, I thought it would serve as a good example of attractive and aggressive design that does not come at the expense of SEO.

For more about this fashion site web audit, visit Practical eCommerce here.

Jeff’s expertise begins with a critique of their home page:

I always harp on having a sitemap linked to the home page, and while some sites need it less than others, Agoodyarn.net could benefit from one almost immediately. A sitemap, which is a page that has links to all the major categories an subcategories of a web page, helps search engines through all the sections of a site. It can also be a shopping asset for customers. Almost all of the textual content on the home page is set as link text. Not only does this water down the keyword promotion that the links might garner, but it’s also just plain spammy. While it may not be the webmaster’s intent, this is a form of link stuffing, and it is frowned upon by search engines. The site’s title and logo text, “Fine yarn, classic patterns and odd notions,” are not textual but graphical, and therefore invisible to the search engines.

Be sure to read the full article for how simple fixes and a savvy re-design of their eCommerce site can boost this yarn retail store’s website and their overall SEO.

The site focuses on hip, modern and stylish adolescent clothes for tweens (ages 7-12). Juvieshop.com is just over one-year-old and the site has built a PageRank of 3 for its homepage. Its theme is wholesome and the site is pleasant to the eye.

Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, covers a hip site that is targeted toward a specific age group in this website audit.

Jeff writes his recommendations based on his review of benchmarking, their Flash-rich home page, PageRank, title tags, and URLs. One of the most useful tips that Jeff provides is with regards to building links.

Inbound Links and PageRank
PageRank for the home page of the site is 3, which is low. This is easily explained by the number of inbound links the site has. Google sees exactly one link from an external site. Yahoo sees 909 links coming in, which is below average for an ecommerce site. Why the difference between the search engines? Yahoo! and Google are different technologies that simply “see” a different number of links. In actuality, the “real” number of links is most likely either number, and those numbers should be thought of as benchmarks or estimates. Regardless, a link-building program is in order here. PageRank is built primarily on the number of quality, inbound links to a given site. The higher the PageRank, the more likely it is that pages in a site will come up in Google and other search engines for a given query. High-quality directory submissions, like DMOZ (Dmoz.org), are definitely in order, which can help boost PageRank (and therefore search results) of a linked-to site. Remember, directory submissions (the act of submitting one’s site to directories) are an important part of an overall link building strategy. Juvie also has a blog, which can also attract inbound links, but it has not been updated in roughly two months. Fresh content is imperative for attracting traffic and potential links.

In this way, Jeff relays that targeted keyword themes and great on-page SEO aren’t the only elements necessary to ensuring a site’s SEO benefit — directory submissions, blogging, and fresh content are “imperative” to increasing inbound links over time and garnering good PageRank.

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Video SEO Tutorial with Stephan Spencer.

Traffic down? Conversions starting to wane? It could be any number of SEO issues. Finding free online tools to hone search optimization for an ecommerce site can be tough. There are a lot of them out there, often promotional in nature, and they offer varying degrees of features and reliability. Some spit out data that is simply erroneous and applying this sort of information to website design can be useless at best and deadly, in Internet terms, of course, at worst.

In this article originally published on Practical eCommerce Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, writes about Aaron Wall’s Website Health Check tool, a beneficial “free” SEO tool that offers easy-to-read, uncomplicated reports on a number of issues that includes missing title tags and meta descriptions to checking for duplicate content and verifying your error pages are returning the correct code.

Jeff also recommends some of Stephan Spencer’s previous articles for more SEO tool information and suggestions “on developing an SEO toolkit, Google Webmaster Tools, and SEO: Tools For Link Building.”

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.”

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Video Tutorial with Stephan Spencer

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