Advice appreciated

Molberts

Hi all,

What a great forum, I never even knew it was here on boards!

I'd love to get some advice and opinions if you don't mind as you all seem very knowledgable in this area

My business started online and when the retail location opened, the site was sort of put on the back burner in the sense that the shop was getting most of the love and attention and the site was sort of left to do its thing. The shop took off and the site sales started slipping, so I decided to have the site revamped/redesigned last year: http://www.mollys.ie/store/index.php

I'm not 100% happy with it design wise but more importantly our google rankings seem to have slipped a good bit.

I have been paying a company to manage our adwords but I'm knocking that on the head as its really not bringing anything in sales wise.

I don't fully understand the issues discussed in this forum in relation to SEO, tags and things like that; so I'm concerned that I'm doing (or not doing) something major that is damaging our rankings. Also its nice to get outside opinions (good and bad!)

Thanks in advance!

notnem

Hi Molberts,

Your question covers a lot of ground First thing I think you need to look at is you have the exact same Meta Tags for every single page on your site. You have a lot of keywords in these meta tags, but they are all general.

Here are a couple of issues to get started with:

- The URLS are very seo unfriendly
- You have 301 canonical issues

Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards

Notnem

IrishBusiness

Hi Molberts

first of all, cute site

are you set up with any kind of web analytics (Google analytics is a good start and is free)? This gives you info on traffic to your site (visitors, visits, page impressions etc) which you can look at and drill down. you can see how people are finding you, and using what terms. this can form the basis as to which words you might need to refine for your page keywords (each page should have its own tailored set of keyword meta tags that relate to the content on that page).

also, i would push the irish aspect of your shop. I buy pet products online and i have never come across your site before - i search using "irish" as a keyword, as i dont want to spend huge amounts on shipping and i want to support irish companies. have a look at the search engines, type in the words you want to be found under and see which sites are coming up. have a look at what they are doing that you may be lacking.

its a start and i hope its of some help. your web development company should be able to help you further, esp regarding the page urls etc

Molberts

Thank you very much for the speedy replies

Notnem, thanks for your comments and suggestions.
Probably a huge mistake but I had been leaving that whole side of things to someone else and concentrating on the day to day running of the business, but I guess I need to take this on board myself as it needs to be improved.

By SEO unfriendly urls do you mean that the paths are "numbered"? Would it be possible for me to "name" them instead?


IrishBusiness, thank you We are very proud to be an Irish company, I'll definitely push that more. I'll set up Google Analytics if it hasn't been done already.

One more question - will I *break* my site if I attempt these changes myself?! (They 301 is just a redirect right?) Or are they easily done?

As you can see, this area is not my forte, but I am very eager to learn. The fact that the shop sales are actually up on this time last year gives me a lot of faith in my business, I just believe the site is underperforming greatly.

Thanks again,

Molberts

notnem

Hi Molberts

Molberts wrote: »

By SEO unfriendly urls do you mean that the paths are "numbered"? Would it be possible for me to "name" them instead?

By seo unfriendly URLs I mean they are numbered. For example if I click on Dog and Cat beds, I get a link like this:

- http://www.mollys.ie/store/product_info.php?cPath=67_114&products_id=1108

Dynamic urls are harder for search engines to understand and I think you could have issues along these lines. For example if I think a unique piece of text from the link above and search for it in Google within your own site, it can't find it. (link to example)

As regards naming the pages yourself, I'd need to know about what you are using to add / edit pages or products, but most CMS have easily integrated solutions for this.

Here is a link to a post which will give you further information about urls.

Molberts

Thanks again for the suggestions. I've been talking with my designer and he's made some other suggestions so hopefully altogether I'll start to see improvements soon!

happy09

Your are easily found in google. I searched pet boutique and pet accessories and your link was on the first page and very noticable! Good job!

My suggestion is to participate in forums...especially pet forums. Helps a lot. Good luck!:D

zAbbo

Dropping in rankings when a site has been revamped? - is it possible the site structure and layout has been changed?

My quick advice

- Install Google Analytics to report on website performance
- Review contributions for your shopping cart(it's OSCommerce or Zencart?), you can get all sort of useful one's for SEO etc.


I'd be a little concerned if your web developer hasn't already done this, as well as taking the correct measures when the website was revamped to ensure no lose in rankings or any crawlability issues

I wouldn't make any changes until I'd have a good view of historical data (using Google Analytics/Any Stat package)

I think people tend to get caught up with SEO 'tweaks' when ultimately 90% of them aren't going to make the massive improvement to your sales.

Get the basics right, look at what your visitors are doing, improve the conversion process & then focus on continuing to improve this cycle.

gypsy777

The sites ranking pretty well in honesty. Thats a cool little niche you have there.

i personally wouldnt worry about un-search engine friendly urls as most of your traffic will be hitting the index page which is fine. Im in agreement with everyone on the analytics front. See where the traffic is coming from and what it is doing first...then reinforce where you are performing well and assess what other improvements can be made.

Molberts

Thanks again everyone for your replies!

I just got the header tags and category names sorted, I also checked out the most searched for keywords and renamed the actual categories accordingly.

Google analytics is next on list!