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Jason's review of inexpensivescrubs.com
By Jason
Contributing Writer
Article Date: 12.10.02
I had a look at the site and would like to offer my comments. Not sure if I
want these to be published in general, but certainly to the people at the
site.
The site looks good and is easy to navigate, that is for users, but not
necessarily for Google.
My personal opinion is that you must first make pages the search engines
will like, then work around that to make it more user friendly. What is the
use of a nice site that no one can find?
I must admit to not being familiar with this industry. But I believe that if
you sell "maroon drawstring pants", then anyone who types that into a
search engine should be able to find you.
Personally I think people concentrate too closely on individual key words
and are missing out on a lot of people who many be interested in your site.
Sure there are specific key words you really want to target, but that is not
the be all and end all.
Take my site, www.etackle.com.au
as an example. We sell fishing tackle. If
you search for fishing tackle you will be lucky to locate us. Yet we get
around 7,000 referrals from Google/yahoo
combined each month. And believe it
or not these referrals are on over 2,000 different search terms in the
month.
We do well enough on fishing tackle, but those searches come from the Oz
Yahoo. So its people who want it from here in Oz.
I am not sure we really want the people searching for fishing tackle as our
most valued customer. There is so much tackle, and we sell such a small
percentage of it.
Fishing tackle on Google returns over 600,000 results. People looking for a
store will do that search, see how many results and then start refining it
more specifically to what they want. Looking for brands and specific
products.
Now if someone is looking for a product we sell specifically, then we
definitely want that.
Think of a clothing store. Do you want people walking in who want clothes?
Or do you want people walking in who want the jeans you are selling?
I have structured the site around a few basics. A lot of changes I have done
have not gotten out yet, but our results are increasing. I did sets of
products in different ways and then checked the results on Yahoo. Once I
deciphered which was performing better, I started to structure the other
products like that.
The basic run down is:
1. Home page. This is targeted at the fishing
tackle keyword. Every product
(around 1,000) has a link to the home with fishing tackle in it. This is
improving our results slowly.
2. Product categories. These are structured
like the 'doorway' pages you
here about. Each is angled at a keyword. Every product in that category has
a link back to the category page with the keyword in the text and name of
the link. The important elements I have found that you are missing is: a.
page title has the keywords in it, b text on the page as the keyword, c
there is a picture with the keywords as alt text.
3. Sub categories. Same as 2, but each category
also has a link up to is
previous category with keywords in it.
4. Product pages. Each product has links to
its category or doorway pages
with the keywords in it. Where ever possible the picture has the product
name in it. There is text in the page with keywords in it. And importantly
each product is its own page! The more products you have, the more link
popularity you will have.
Fortunately e-commerce seems to lend itself well to this search engine way
of thinking. Every page cannot be found by every keyword. But as you seem
to have the same keywords on every page, I wonder what the search engines
think about the pages? Which is your page for Scrubs? Perhaps you should
have several pages for different kinds of scrubs, all with links to the
home page and let that be the desired page for that keyword.
Also, order is important. For example you have 'pants drawstring' as a link.
You will find it hard to beat out pages that have 'drawstring pants' in
them. Which is how I would search for them anyway.
I most often get beaten in two ways. One is link popularity and the other is
having the keywords in the actual URL. These two areas I am working on.
Another discovery I made, much to my dismay, is that searching for 'shimano
fishing reel' and 'shimano fishing reels' do not return the same results.
That is something I am still struggling with. You will notice the same if
you search for drawstring pants and drawstring pant.
And to really bake your noodle - search Google for 'fishing line'. Then look
at the cached version of the page that has the #1 rank. The keyword does
not appear in the page. Its number one from links pointing to it!
That's my 2 cents worth, I hope it helps.
Cheers,
Jason
http://www.etackle.com.au
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