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.

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.

This video tutorial requires Flash Player version 8 or above.

Click the link below to launch the tutorial.

Video SEO Tutorial with Stephan Spencer.

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.”

Click the link below to launch the tutorial.
Video Tutorial with Stephan Spencer

This video tutorial requires Flash Player version 8 or above.

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.

Beach Audio did a complete search engine optimization overhaul using in-house staff in April, and ever since, the search-generated sales have been rising steadily. Currently, organic search from Google accounts for about 10 percent of website sales, and the outlook continues to look good, especially with the holidays and their peak season right around the corner. Nonetheless, I see a lot of unrealized potential here.

From sculpting PageRank to improving title tags site-wide, Stephan’s review showed that this successful business could earn more potential from specific SEO-related tasks. For example, he recommends that:

Strategically passing link juice within the site is an underutilized SEO secret. I was impressed to see Beach Audio employing this to a limited degree. Specifically, some of the navigation links have been nofollowed (e.g. Order Status, Customer Help Center, Testimonials, Email Us, Check Shopping Cart, My Account, FAQ, About Us, Shipping Info), but this has been done inconsistently (e.g. in the page footer, Order Status and Customer Help Center are both missing the nofollow). There is link juice going to pages that are not strategically important, such as the Hacker Safe verify page and the latest product reviews.

On the search engine optimization side, he also recommended that the title tags be improved site-wide by tightening up their keyword focus and addressing the fact that “Beach Audio” is at the beginning (and end) of each title tag inconsistently. Stephan recommended that: “Putting that at the end is better than at the start, but best of all would be to remove it altogether to tighten up the keyword focus. Also remove the list of model numbers from title tags on category pages.”

These recommendations were written specific to Beachaudio, but can also be relevant to any retail site. Be sure to visit the full article for more technical details.

Stephan Spencer, founder and President of Netconcepts, reviews Veganstore.com in this article from Practical eCommerce.

Stephan’s primary concern with the site is that the keyword theme is pretty generic, not including the terms “vegan” or “vegetarian” next to really, popular terms like “shoes” or “food.” His recommendation to go after the “long tail” will help their site get found for their target market. He writes further that:

Going into the “Shoes” category page, there is an H1 heading tag containing “Shoes.” But again this is a similar issue to the anchor text pointing to this page: the word “vegan” is noticeably absent. Also, the title tag begins with the word “Shoes” instead of “Vegan shoes.” Additionally, this page is particularly problematic, in comparison to other category pages, because there are only two links to go deeper into shoes: “Shoes by Style” and “Shoes by Brand.” There is no list of different styles, nor a list of brands (e.g. New Balance and Wanderlust). Add those brand names and styles to this page and make them text links.

While many of the URLs are crawlable, Stephan indicated that they were still problematic because some of them included too many hyphens and other “links slipped through the cracks and don’t use the rewritten URLs, such as the links in the breadcrumbs, thus leading to duplicate page indexation and PageRank dilution.”

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.