Natural Skin Care Products Wants More Traffic

My old friend and fishing buddy, Mike, purchased an ecommerce business selling natural skin care products. The web is a dynamic ecommerce site with all kinds of bells and whistles. From what I know about skin care, which isn't much, he appears to have some good product lines. He needs more business.

A quick look at search phrase research shows that natural skin care products is a very competitive target with over 330,000 competing web pages for an absolute search on Google. An absolute search is when you enclose the query in quotation marks, which limits the search results to only pages with the query words in the exact order appearing somewhere in the page. Most searchers do not search this way, but the value of absolute search for SEO is that you can see what your real competition might be.

Typical of many dynamically generated web pages, the page titles for this website are generated bass ackwards. Every title starts with Natural Skin Care Products-Beauty Skin Care Products for Beautiful Skin. That's a pretty spammy title for Google and it is long at 71 characters and spaces. Use of punctuation in titles serves little good purpose except on rare occasion.

The biggest problem I see is that as you descend into the website, the additional title information gets added to the end of this already long title. Words in the title have a descending value from left to right so words added onto the end of an already long and spammy title don't help much. BUT, they do help.

The home page is no place to be found for natural skin care products and no place to be found for Natural Skin Care Products Beauty Skin Care Products for Beautiful Skin with the hyphen removed. With the hyphen in it is # 1 as you might expect.

I picked a product category at random - moisturizers - and picked the first item on the page Plantogen Hydrating Moisturizer. This page ranks # 1 on Google for Plantogen Hydrating Moisturizer.

If the page title was constructed Plantogen Hydrating Moisturizer Natural Skin Care Products this would be a much stronger title and less likely to be displaced by the work of competing web pages and mean SEO people like me.

So, recommendation # 1 is to reverse the assembly order of the page titles for every page in the website. Specific first followed by general. This should make a big difference in fairly short order and should be easy to implement.

I would do away with the -Beauty Skin Care Products for Beautiful Skin. Beauty skin care products and related phrases are very competitive and add little value to the title.

Recommendation # 2 is to add a meta description to every page, supporting the page target once. If you are going to make the most of ranking improvements, you want to have a compelling meta description that will draw searchers to your page rather than the other guys.

Get this done, Mike, and let's watch the results. We will report on the results and then look at the next steps to improve your website.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Stage and Cinema Review Review

Sarah requested my free SEO help file and a review of the stage and cinema review website.

Google shows 38 pages from this website in the index, a PageRank of 2, no links in. Most of the page titles in the website start with Stage and Cinema. The best targets related to stage and cinema reviews have to do with Broadway, off Broadway and movies (alas, we dullard Yanks are movie goers, not cinema buffs). A quick look at search phrase research related to stage and review is more about the Stage Door Deli (good corned beef and great cheesecake) than the performing arts. Ya never know until you do the research!

I think the footlights would really shine on this website with some properly directed attention to detail. The existing content can be retargeted for what it is, 3-4 hours work. The home page needs some static content to build a ranking for a lead target, something like off Broadway play reviews. The home page needs a unique selling proposition. I would like to know something about the folks who are running the website and the reviewers.

A schedule of off Broadway who's playing when and where would be helpful.

I would either put the reviews in a "within the URL blog" or set up a RSS feed for new reviews so that folks who are interested in on and off Broadway can subscribe to the feed and know whenever a new review is available.

I would also add a Google custom search engine so that visitors can easily search for reviews of a particular venue. If you don't mind AdSense, the search engine is free.

The webmaster needs to be a little pickier about formatting and layout. I would personally work on a more consistent way of titling reviews so that web page scanners (which make up 75% plus of your web visitors) can more easily scan the content. Posting the date when the review went online would also be helpful.

One thing I did note, there are some html page files in this web named with capital letters. This web is on an Apache server and Apache file names are case sensitive. Ideally, all of the file names should be in lower case with words separated by hyphens, not underscores.

The website has duplicate navigation bottom of the pages, an oversight?

OK, no more nit picking.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

eCommerce Ranking Blues: Not Enough Content

Robert at PTI Packaging in Wisconsin requested my free SEO help file and a quick look at his ecommerce website.

Nice job on the website, over 600 pages in the Google index, web is structurally correct (except for a few meaningless meta tags), robots text file, current xml sitemap, etc.

This website has the same issues that 90% of the better ecommerce webs online have:

1. The pages are not targeted based on research.
2. There is not enough content (text) on any page I looked at to earn an organic ranking for anything other than, perhaps, a manufacturer's unique part number.
3. My personal opinion is that this website has no soul. Maybe for most industrial buyers PTI thinks this is not necessary, but I spent 25 years in industrial sales and marketing both as a buyer and a seller and my business ALWAYS had a soul as a marketing strategy. If industrial sales is only about commodities the guy with the cheapest price who can make the delivery wins. Hard to be profitable if that's all there is to it. I would like to see some personality and one or more unique selling propositions. Why buy from PTI? Hopefully there is more to it than price and delivery.
4. I had to work too hard to figure out who PTIPackaging.com is and where they are located. Read about website credibility http://www.roncastle.com/website-credibility.htm This website has some of the elements in place but I would prefer to see a name address phone etc on every page in the website.

What to do to improve the organic traffic to this website? I would pick the top 20-25 items or product categories in this website, the ones that have the most bang for the buck for PTI, the ones that represent a competitive advantage as a seller, the best profit margin items, the ones we want to sell the most of because __________, the excess inventory that needs to get off the shelves and out the door, etc. and work on those items first. Page titles and tags based on research, 450-550 words of well written page copy. Get the changes online, crawled, indexed and see what happens. I would base my additional improvements budget and pace of change according to how the first round works. If this website does not have good webstats, get some. Opentracker.net is easy.

If you want organic rankings, you have to have good content. Most ecommerce websites don't.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Tax Man Gets Top Google Rankings

My new client, Mike Habib, and I have been working for about a month to get his existing website whipped into shape so that we can start earning some Google rankings. Mike is an Enrolled Agent with the Internal Revenue Service, meaning that he is a licensed practitioner to help you with your tax woes if you have any.

We did a structural redesign of Mike's web mainly behind the scenes to clean up some really funky web programming and structure. We did all the little things I recommend here in my blog.

Low and behold, Mike went on holiday for a couple of weeks and came back to find his home page # 1 on Google for IRS tax relief Los Angeles.

Here's the query http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_enUS239US239&q=irs+tax+relief+los+angeles

We have some other first page rankings as well which is not bad for a website with less than a dozen pages.

Now we are ready to pick some bigger targets - Mike assists folks all across the country not just in L.A. - and see what we can do.

I hope you don't have IRS tax problems, but if you do, you need Mike Habib.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

NetSumo Wrestling for Website Success

I am way behind on responding to help inquiries at the moment and in the process of catching up, my apologies.

Alex at NetSumo in the UK contacted me about his website. He wants to be on Google page one for something other than is company or domain name and realizes he is going to have to do something different to make this happen.

Google shows 15 pages in the index and no links in. All of the pages are titled the same, all are short on copy. The website is missing structural elements, no meta descriptions or keywords, no sitemap, no robots text file, etc.

The website has been online long enough to earn TrustRank I believe. The pages show a copyright date of 2005.

What Alex needs is to put together the priorities for his marketing plan starting with the things most important to the success of the business and start implementing changes based on search phrase research one page at a time. With 450-550 words of content per page, I believe this website can be producing tangible marketing results in less than 6 weeks.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

Online RSVP Service Earns TrustRank

My friend Jody Gabel, a professional event planner out in Seattle, and I started a partnership website back on February 23, 2007, http://www.bigeventregistration.com for providing online event registration and RSVP services to Jody's clients.

Jody has hired out these services in the past to service providers who are both expensive and not especially service minded. I am not sure why service companies choose to be not service oriented? No, X that. I know why. Bad management.

I suggested to Jody we do online RSVP registrations ourselves. We can both make some extra income while controlling the quality of the experience for her clients - folks like Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, for example.

The home page target for this little website is online RSVP service with secondary targets related to event management registration, etc. We wrote good page copy, etc., have written some additional content, and have languished for Google rankings until this past week. Without doing anything special or additional, we popped up on page one for our main target.

If you search Google for online RSVP service you should see this website # 5 out of roughly 2 million?

The question often comes up for new websites and Google, how long is it going to take for me to earn organic rankings based on the merits of my content without any negative influence from being a new website?

The negative influence for new websites has in the past been called the Google Sandbox, sand box, aging delay and various other four letter words. The aging delay is still in existence but the filter or filters Google uses to restrain rankings for new websites is less nefarious today than it was when it first popped into existence several years ago. Based on my experience, if you do everything correctly from the beginning when a new web goes online, the aging delay is a minimal factor.

The answer to the question in the case of this particular website is 225 days give or take a couple. Other websites in other markets could be different. But, when it comes to Google, one more definitive answer is one less question.

Cheers,

Ron Castle