** New website - opinions/advice on seo please! **

[squeakybee]

Hi,

We've just finished developing our website with V7...

Feedback / advice / seo tips would be very much appreciated.
We're not ranking that well with words like "jellycat" and "belleek pottery" as we would have liked, not really sure where to take it from here...

thanks!


www.squeakybee.co.uk
The Squeakybee Company.

[compendia]

Hi, I've just had a brief look at your site so this is a brief comment. The site looks really nice, possibly the reason that you don't rank very highly is that it doesn't have that many words. For instance the jellycat slackajack monkey description reads 'pure and simply sweet'. That is what you are telling search engines about your product. At the very least you could makes the phrase 'this jellycat slackajack monkey is...' then you are repeating words in the title.

You have to be careful about repitition - it can be annoying for you customers and can lead to problems with search engines. The problem with a very undescriptive site is that as a far as google is concerned you don't have a lot for them to sink their teeth into.

You might also try creating extra pages which are informative for your customers and meatier for search engines, such as text driven 'what is jellycat' or 'why buy jellycat' pages.

I subscribe to a newsletter called sitepro news which has a lot of info on these topics and have found it really useful, though they do send out a fair amount of advertising.

Good luck, first impressions are of lovely site with great pics,

[Mike Hughes]

there are a few simple things you can do that will make a major difference.

1. As you don't use customer accounts, change your LHS navigation to use direct links rather than going via the cgi-bin. Search engines don't like these kind of links and can also get confused about what the real filename is (or think there's duplicate content). You may have to hand code these links into your primary template.

2. Focus your SEO attention on specific pages. Have one page aimed at searches for 'jellycat' and another for 'belleek pottery', etc. I normally use the section page for this as it's easy to make it rich in the targetted keyword (i.e. use it in the pagename, title, meta tags, headings, img alt tags, etc). Note that your main section page for jellycat should really be called jellycat.html rather than toys.html.

3. Don't use 'Online_Shop_' in every pagename. It dilutes the importance of any keywords you use in the pagename. i.e. "jellycats.html" will rank much better than a page called "This_Is_My_Webpage_That_Rambles_A_Bit_And_Oh_Did_I_Mention_That_I_Also_Sell_JellyCats.html"

4. Spread a few "UK"s around your pages. People often use Uk in their search term to get away from US sites in their searches.

Mike

[Luddite]

Just ordered from you - not exactly last of the big spenders but an orders an order!
I really like your site - nice and easy to use and looks good too. Always a winning combo. How long has your site been up and running? If it hasn't been up for long I wouldn't start getting too panicky about SE rankings yet. There is some great advice on this forum re SEO but you can get bogged down in it. My site has only been up for a year and i'm only now starting to give any real thought to SEO. However it didn't take us very long to get on the 1st page for many product searches - thats how good Actinic is. Getting more text and relevantly named alt tags made a huge difference though.

As my username suggests, i'm no expert - just expressing an opinion.

BTW, you might want to change the wording to 'last 3 digits' rather than '3 digits' on the verif code section in your checkout - there are some easily confused people out there!

Cheers - Nick

[Luddite]

1. As you don't use customer accounts, change your LHS navigation to use direct links rather than going via the cgi-bin. Search engines don't like these kind of links and can also get confused about what the real filename is (or think there's duplicate content). You may have to hand code these links into your primary template.

Can anyone give some pointers about how you do this?

[squeakybee]

Firstly,
sorry for the very slow reply

Compendia - I thing you're right regarding text content, I'll try to beef it up a bit in places. I've been meaning to add more pages, a write up on Jellycat is a good idea


Olderscot - is it necessary to hard code the naviagtion links if I have already have a site map?
Didn't think the "online_shop_" on every pagename would make a difference - I will look at removing this...

Luddite - many thanks for your order - hope your daughter likes the mouse!
Our site has been running with Actinic for about 1 month now, but previously with ekmpowershop ( eughh! ) for 3 months. Unfortunately, moving from ekm has caused quite a few dead links with Google. May need a bit more time for this to be crawled fully.

cheers Guys

[Mike Hughes]

is it necessary to hard code the naviagtion links if I have already have a site map?

Not necessary, but makes a major difference for SE ranking.

The site map helps the SEs find your page, but the linking strength is only 1/20th or so of what it would be if you linked directly from the home page (and this ignores the fact that you only have one sitemap page, whereas your navigation links are on every page of your site).

If you only make one change for SEO, this is the one to focus on.

Mike

[squeakybee]

ok, I'll look at that now....

Do you know how to remove the "online_shop_" part from the product name? - can't see a way of doing this!

I've noticed that products have names like
http://www.squeakybee.co.uk/acatalog...k_Pony_64.html

I'd like this to be
http://www.squeakybee.co.uk/acatalog...jack_Pony.html

any ideas?

cheers

[Mike Hughes]

I can't remember where the 'online shop' comes from, but it might be from the top of the product tree (although none of my pages do this and I'm not sure why yours do).

To change an assigned pagename, double click on the page in your catalog tree and click the layout tab. You can set the pagename there to be whatever you want.

It's always a good idea to decide on the pagenames you want before creating the catalog as changing the page will confuse the search engines for a while as they won't be able to find the old page anymore. To get around this, I recommend creating a .htaccess file to redirect the SEs (and customers) from the old page to the new one. A .htaccess file is very easy to create and there are lots of guides on the internet that show you how to do this.

Mike

[nasal69]

Hi,

Firstly I love your site. I think it is really clean and effective and one of the best Actinic based sites I've seen!

How did you get the title text at the top of the page to differ from the section text displayed in the navigation and the breadcrumbs?

Many thanks,

Neil

[squeakybee]

You mean the title at the top of the browser window?
That's just a change to the meta name tag within the head, and I think that's a bug anyway!

[nasal69]

Thanks for your prompt response.

How do you change the meta tag within Actinic though? Actinic takes the title from the section name doesn't it?

Do you have to manually change each HTML page it creates???

Thanks again,

Neil

[pinbrook]

in V7 you can add your own page title in the product dialog box.

In v6 and less the title is derived from NQVs

[nasal69]

Thank you - it's in the layout section. I hadn't noticed that before!!!

[nasal69]

Hi again,

I am looking to replicate the way you have the products in your sections linking through to a full information page rather than a pop up.

I have followed the faq below :

Go to 'Design | Text' and click 'Go to'. Go to 'Phase: -1' and 'ID: 2175'. The prompt there reads:

javascript:ShowPopUp('%s',%s,%s);

Change this to simply say:

%s

But this brings up the page as jacket%2ehtml rather than jacket.html which is obviously no good for SEO!!!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Neil