Awesome round-up of social media tools that you can use on a practical, every day basis.

Some things are better when they're not free.

If Craigslist charged a dollar for every listing, what would happen?

Well, the number of bogus listings and repetitive listings would plummet, making the site far easier to use.

The number of scam artists using the site would go down, because it's more difficult to be anonymous when money changes hands.

The revenue of the site would soar, which means that the people running the site could get (far) richer, or fund digital journalism or change the economy of an emerging nation.

Money creates a sort of friction. In the digital economy, magical things can happen when there is no friction. You can scale to infinity. On the other hand, sometimes you want friction.

If you lead a group that allows anyone to join, for free, your group might be large, but it's not tight, it's not organized to make important change. Commitment slows things down in the short run, but ultimately aligns interests.

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As always, Seth makes a great point. Craigslist could make a lot more money if it charged $1 and 90% of its users would be happier because there wouldn't be so much spam. If the founders of Craigslist were interested in maximizing profit they would have done this a long time ago. They are simply interested in providing a better marketplace for everyday people to find what they're looking for. Profit is an afterthought.

Think about it the other way though. As soon as Craigslist charges $1 a slew of start-ups or other competitors are going to figure out a way to block the spam and keep the listings free. Right now there's no incentive to compete with Craigslist because it's so massive in terms of visitors and the spam isn't hindering people much at all.

Free might make Craigslist better, but it could also lead to its demise.

(which may not be a bad thing for consumers if it sparks enough innovation that someone figures out how to provide the same platform for free without the spam)

• Facebook
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• del.icio.us
• reddit
• BlinkList
• Furl
• Ma.gnolia

Tip: You can drag and drop the sources to put them in any order you want. Then bookmark the page to save that custom view.

This site is pretty sweet to use as a simple Social Media Dashboard. It has all of the major social services included. Try it out!

This is exactly what I've been looking for! We've been trying to pull Google Analytics data into some kind of reporting platform so that we can cross reference it with our back-end ecommerce application. Google Analytics has always been around 25% off of the real transaction and revenue numbers so getting both data sources into the same Excel sheet would be really helpful so we can calculate correct conversion rates and everything else. Great post SEOMoz

SEO Boy Keyword Rankability Tool

Make sure your capes are tied tight because your going to be flying high with joy when you read this. We promised you a tool and here it is! That's right SEO Boy proudly presents its' very own Keyword Research Tool! Do you remember when we discussed the number of competing pages and rankability with regard to keyword research? This post discussed why, what we call the "rankability score" is so important to properly researching your keywords. Yes, this process is time consuming and involves a lot of copy-and-pasting. With that said, we've made the job a whole lot easier on you. Our new tool incorporates the number of competing pages and the rankability score to give you a comprehensive list of keywords to start. With this list (you can save it as an excel file or email to someone) you will be able to eliminate, literally, hours of work from your schedule. Try it out and if you have questions about how to use the data to your advantage just review our post titled the Number of Compteting Pages and Rankability: The "Other" Keyword Research Metric.

This is an awesome tool from the talented guys at Hanapin Marketing. I'm just starting out in SEO and this is the kind of stuff I was spending a ton of time on with clients. Now I can use the same formulas, but just enter the keywords into the SEO Boy tool and export the results to Excel. That's value. That's a great tool...thanks Hanapin

SEO Report Card: PhotoWeights.com

September 11, 2009 · by Stephan Spencer

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This month’s site up for review is PhotoWeights.com. Owned by Susan Eaton, PhotoWeights.com sells personalized, do-it-yourself paperweight kits from family photos and other artwork. Eaton requested this "SEO Report Card" review.

Home Page

First things first, the home page has some major issues. When I turn off JavaScript, all the site navigation under the “Shop” section in the left-hand column disappears. Adding to that issue, the heading of the page is a graphic, and neither graphics nor JavaScript are visible to search engine spiders.

Aside from the text in the navigation links, there’s hardly any text on the home page. And, what text there is appears to be what I like to call "SEO copy," which is basically keyword-rich text written for spiders rather than humans, and tucked away at the bottom of the page out of sight.

But it gets a lot worse. "Select all" on the page and you'll see the following search engine spam is hidden as white text on a white background:

"paperweights, glass paperweights, paper weights, paperweight, paper weight, glass paperweight, glass paper weights, paperweight blanks, glass paper weight, paper weight kits, paper weight kit, paperweight kits, paperweight kit, blank paperweight, blank paperweights, paperweight blank, wholesale paperweights, clear paperweights"

Yikes! This is a banning penalty waiting to happen.

Inbound Links

As far as inbound links go, when I use the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool I can see that the site’s "inlinks" (as Yahoo! calls them) are very weak. Apart from the site’s own internal links, the total number of inlinks is 170 including the PhotoWeights blog (which is currently not active) and Caboodle.com, which is just PhotoWeights' product reviews that have been repurposed and thus are duplicate content.

Indexation

A "site:photoweights.com" search reveals 243 indexed pages. After navigating to page 2 of the Google search results, and switching my Google preferences to view 100 results per page, and clicking the “repeat search with omitted results included” option, I find that there are actually only 200 results indexed, not 243.

Perusing through the site: search results for PhotoWeights, I see some https URLs, which are almost certainly duplicate pages. This isn’t great news, considering every page offers an opportunity to rank for one or several keywords. And the more pages you have indexed, the more keywords you can target. Thus, a competitor with 10,000 pages would have an advantage over PhotoWeights with its 200 pages.

The indexation tab on the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool shows 343 pages indexed in Yahoo!. Even though I didn’t go through every URL, I’m pretty sure there are duplicates in that number.

I also notice the “Home” link points to "default.asp" instead of the canonical (i.e. primary) URL. This creates a duplicate page for the search engine spiders to find. Now, Google was able to figure out that the “default.asp” page was a copy of the home page and canonicalized properly, but Yahoo! didn't fare so well: it indexed both separately.

The “Category Index” in the footer is presumably there more for spiders than humans and provides little value, because the only categorization the site offers is paperweights grouped by shape (of which there are only five). There is also a “Product Index” in the footer, which only lists 25 products and offers no way of getting to a second page. Presuming this is supposed to be a comprehensive product list, my question would be: are there truly only 25 products for sale on this site?

Keywords

I was able to access a nice list of long-tail keywords that incorporate the word “paperweight” or “paperweights” using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Many of these terms were not mentioned anywhere on the PhotoWeights site.

Curiously, the singular form of “paperweight” is much more popular with Google searchers than the plural form. According to the Google AdWords tool, “photoweights” was only searched 110 times over the entire month of July, compared with “paperweight” being searched 165,000 times.

So, it would behoove PhotoWeights.com to target the singular form on its home page more heavily than the plural. Also, PhotoWeights should focus less on ranking for its brand name because of its low search numbers.

HTML Templates and CSS

Examining the HTML source, I see that the meta tags need some work, or they could be removed altogether. When I go to the home page and view "source" I can see there is a fairly long meta keywords tag with quite a bit of repetition in it. You can probably guess which word is repeated most, "paperweights". This is the case in the meta keywords across the site. Since the meta keywords tag doesn’t help rankings, and because this excessive repetition could be misconstrued by the engines as keyword-stuffing, I'd just remove the meta keywords altogether.

Secondary Page Content

Moving on to the secondary page, “Round Paperweights,” it looks more like internal search results (with "sort by" and "page 1 of __"). There is breadcrumb navigation, which is good. But there is no intro copy; and, again, the "H1" tag is “photoweights.”

The only copy on the page appears to be “sort by” and words that are incorporated into links pointing to other pages. This doesn’t give search engines much information for ascertaining a keyword theme. The same situation seems to appear in other secondary pages as well.

The “Design Gallery” section has a couple paragraphs of intro copy, which is refreshing, and it has a few keywords sprinkled in, too. Like the home page, though, the headlines on secondary pages are images, which means they are invisible to spiders. Even if they were visible, “design gallery” is not a good keyword.

Title Tags

There is an H1 tag, which is good. Unfortunately, though, it only says “photoweights,” which we’ve already established is not a good keyword. That same poor H1 tag is repeated across all the pages of the site

When I do a site:photoweights.com search on Google, I see that many of the title tags across the site either start with the keyword “paperweights” or with “photoweights.” I also found a number of duplicate title tags, which send a signal to Google that these pages are possibly duplicate content, and duplicate content ends up in the supplemental index, filtered out of the search results.

URLs

The URLs are inconsistent and fairly ineffective for indexing. Looking at the site: search results, I notice there are both rewritten and non-rewritten URLs; so some are search-engine friendly, with keywords and without ampersands or equals signs, while others are not as friendly. For example, “ProductDetails.asp” appears to be a script that serves up product pages.

Also, many of the rewritten URLs are indexed in Google using underscores to separate keywords. Google does not yet recognize underscores as word separators, so those keywords will look all run together in the eyes of Google. On the site, I notice these same URLs have hyphens instead of underscores, so I presume the underscores were replaced with hyphens recently and Google hasn’t gotten around to re-indexing with the updated URLs (although I do see a few hyphenated URLs in Google’s index).

The URLs in the home page’s navigation are relative rather than absolute, so when spiders find the secure version of the website at https:// they will find the entire site again at a different location, namely https://www.photoweights.com. Thus, as mentioned above, some pages were indexed twice, creating duplicate content issues.

This URL issue should never happen. Https URLs tend to be for checkout functionality, and such pages should be no-indexed and links pointing to those pages should be no-followed anyway, because they add no SEO value. One way to get rid of the https URLs is to canonicalize them with the corresponding http version using the canonical HTML tag, <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>, that came out this year.

Summary

All in all, there’s a fair amount of work to do on PhotoWeights.com, but the good news is a lot of it is easy to implement with some technical skills.

SEO Report Card
PhotoWeights.com

Home Page Content F-
Inbound Links and Page Rank C-
Indexation B-
Internal Hierarchical Linking Structure D
HTML Templates and CSS D
Secondary Page Content D
Keyword Choices B
Title Tags C
URLs C

OVERALL GPA D+

Request an SEO site grade, by emailing seo.report@practicalecommerce.com.

Related Articles

• SEO Report Card: eHobbies.com "Uncommonly Sophisticated"
• SEO Report Card: SimpleFamilyLiving.com a "Train Wreck"
• SEO Report Card: Poor SEO Choices Cost Worthy Charity

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This article is filed under Search Engine Optimization and has the following keyword tags: SEO, search engine optimization, tags.

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2 Comments

Jared Brickman says:

Friday, September 11, 2009 · 08:41 PM

The pitfalls mentioned in this article are helpful thanks!

westfloridacomponents says:

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 · 06:05 PM

Do you ever do any follow up on the sites that you review? I'd love to hear what steps the site owners took and the results.

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Share your opinion.

Great look into how a professional reviews a site for SEO

An awesome application used by Techcrunch to live blog the Apple keynote today. It was amazingly fast and with a good blogger this tool can be used in so many different ways~

Surviving and Thriving as an Ecommerce SEO

By Everett Sizemore

Having done SEO for many different types of websites, from enterprise-level content networks, to geotargeted personal injury law websites, to my own affiliate websites and blogs – I feel as though I’ve earned the right to say this: eCommerce Websites Are The Most Difficult to Optimize. Sure, I’ll catch some flack for that, but what the hey… maybe it’ll earn a few disagreement links.

I’ve been doing SEO for eCommerce websites for the last three years, and would like to share a few things I’ve learned in that time. Eventually I’ll expand on each topic in its own blog post.

Keep Categories Out of Product URLs

I know some SEOs will tell you that you need to stuff URLs with keywords, but it is such an insignificant factor that it doesn’t warrant the messy duplicate content problem it creates. What happens to that URL when you move a product to another category? Do you have more than one URL for a product that lives in multiple categories? What happens when you change a category name, or remove a category? ALL if these issues are resolved if you don’t use this (…product/category1/subcategory/productname.html) and instead just use this (/product/productname.html). You can put that product in any category, move it around, add it to more categories… the URL will never change.

Make It Scalable

While you should endeavor to manually optimize every single product page (see below), sometimes that doesn’t happen right away; and sometimes you miss a few. So make sure you have some defaults in place, which come standard with most eCommerce systems these days: 1. Title tag is inherited from the product title. 2. Meta description is inherited from the first 150-155 characters with ellipses after the last complete word if it isn’t the end of a sentence. 3. Meta keywords, while not very important (if at all) these days,  you can often latch on to things like categories, and product title to auto-generate the default list. 4. Product image alt tag is the product title. Etc… you get the point. Your goal is to have a product page semi-optimized automatically the moment a new product is added.

Optimize New Products ASAP

Get a daily/monthly/weekly (it depends on how often it’s done) list of all of the products that were added to the site in that time period so you can go in and optimize the pages on an ongoing basis. Alternatively, do the new product uploading yourself so you can optimize as they get uploaded. Don’t rely on your scalable automation (see above) for anything more than just a fail-safe.

Never, Ever, Use Manufacturer’s Product Description

You know that default product description that came from the distributor or manufacturer? Guess who else is using that exact same copy on their product pages? If you guessed “everyone else” pat yourself on the back.

Set Product Names in Stone

If your URLs are based on product names, what happens when someone in merchandising decides to change “Pink Widgets” to “Pink Fluffy Widgets”? Does your URL change? Instead of doing redirects every time a product name changes, it is more scalable and optimal to just lock-down the URL so that it stays “pink-widgets.html” instead of changing to “pink-fluffy-widgets.html” when the product name changes.

No Matter How Similar The Products, Always Write Unique Descriptions

Let’s say you have a line of similar widgets. Don’t just name them Red Widget, Blue Widget, Big Widget, Small Widget… and expect that to get you decent search results when the rest of the product description is the same. I know there are only so many ways to describe a widget, but do your best to describe each one separately. Changing one or two words here and there isn’t going to do the trick.

Redirect Removed Products Right Away

Get notifications in real-time as products are removed from your site so you can 301 redirect the URLs in case other sites were linking into those product pages. NOTE: Products can come and go at any time, while categories tend to stick around longer, if not indefinitely. What happens when you redirect the product that you redirected the first one to? Keep it simple. Redirect to categories and avoid multiple 301 hops. If you can’t get notified (or even if you can) check for broken links and 404 errors on a regular basis. Google Webmaster Tools will tell you which URLs gave them a 404 error, and where they were linked from when they hit that URL.

Teach Them How to Fish

Schedule a training session with anyone who touches the website, from the designer who might upload an offer image, to the copywriter who uploads product copy, to the merchandising team that moves around products, categories, fill slots, etc… Keep it simple and high level, but get across the importance of original content, keyword appropriate copy, using only canonical URLs, image alt tags, etc… If nothing else, make sure they know WHEN to notify you about something – such as a category change.

Be In The Know

The higher-ups and the merchandisers aren’t thinking about you or SEO when they decide to change the name of a category from “Widgets” to “Best Widgets”. They don’t think about how that change is going to affect the URL, and if you’re not paying attention all of your links into that category page will go down the drain…. at least until a week later when you’re looking at the 404 logs and spit coffee out of your nose. It takes time, but do whatever you can to make sure you are consulted on ALL THINGS WEB. Even if it’s just an email CC, make sure you’re in the loop.

Don’t Trust Vendors

Keep everything in-house that you possibly can. In three years of doing in-house SEO for an eCommerce business, I have only once been happy with a vendor (out of dozens). They will promise the world and deliver Somalia.

Use the Canonical URL Link in Your Header

Even if you follow all of the guidelines above, an ecommerce site is bound to end up with some non-canonical URLs out there. For instance, tracking URLs, or internal search result URLs. While it should not be used to “fix” poor site architecture, such as the examples above, the canonical URL link tag is yet another tool in your arsenal for ensuring that all of your traffic, listings and links go into the right pages/URLs.

Put Content on Directory Pages

Directory pages are just big lists of products that show up when a user has drilled down as far as they can go into the category navigation. The vast majority of eCommerce websites out there just list products and don’t have any textual content, other than product names. Search engines love these pages IF you put some content on them. All you need are two or three sentences introducing the products: “Our selection of large, blue plastic widgets are perfect solutions to your widget problem. Larger and bluer than average widgets, they’ll be a hit at your next party.”

Affiliates Rock

Any ecommerce business without an affiliate program is plum crazy. If your competitors have affiliate programs and you don’t, which brand do you think is going to get picked on in comparisons on affiliate websites? I’ll tell you one thing; it won’t be the people who are paying that affiliate 10% commission on every sale. If nothing else, it is a good brand reputation management strategy.

Affiliates Rock But Don’t Reconvert the Believers

Remind your affiliate manager that if someone is blogging about your products already there is no need to get them to join the program. Why pay for the cow when you get the milk for free? And why turn a perfectly good, page-rank passing link into an SEO-unfriendly affiliate link?

Go to SEO Conferences

You need to be with your own kind from time to time. As the only SEO in a company, it is even more important to network with others in your industry. You will learn things, make new friends, and come back reinvigorated.

Never Stop

It is easy to get stuck in a rut when you do in-house SEO for an ecommerce business. Bad vendor relationships, overwhelmed development staff, looking at the same old site every day… But your work as an SEO is never done. There is always content to write or tweak; competitive analysis to be done; more long-tail keywords to pick up;  new links to be had… There are always new conversations happening on various forums, social media websites, answer sites, and blogs, which can be monitored and, if appropriate, joined. I have a whiteboard on my wall with a list of tasks (redirect pages giving 404 errors, write an article for a blog, check analytics for new page-two performers…) that I randomly pick from when I’m feeling bored, or so overwhelmed that I don’t know where to start my day.

Put Your Blinders On

SEOs who work for huge ecommerce sites can often feel overwhelmed with the amount of tasks to perform and keywords on which to improve. One solution to this problem is to keep a small list of “Golden keywords” (50-75 keywords, tops) based on the ones that produce the most revenue from PPC campaigns, have the highest conversion rates, or even just because they’re industry vanity keywords that would make your boss happy. Focus on those for a week. Forget about all of the other keywords and all of your other tasks. Just pick a few at a time and do everything you can to improve upon just those keywords. Tweak the titles, copy, alts, internal links, external links… Every journey begins with the first step.

Interlink

I can’t stress enough the importance of interlinking your pages, especially if – like most large eCommerce sites – you have several levels of navigation using “ify” navigation code. Featuring your top sellers/lowest-COGs/overstocked/most-searched items on category pages isn’t just good for driving more traffic from the pages, but will also help them rank. Every link from a home page or main category page is important. Are you linking to pages that you don’t care to rank?

Automate Product Interlinking

If you hard-code interlinks between products you’ll be in for a world of hurt 404 errors at some point when products start getting removed. Interlinking is hugely important, but try to automate it on the product level.

Separate Brand from Non-Brand Keywords

Most large eCommerce websites are associated with a well-known brand, at least within their industry. Brand-related keywords rank higher, bring in more traffic, convert at a higher rate, have higher AOV’s… and generally muck up the data in your analytics reports. If you seriously want to get some SEO metrics worth looking at and acting on, the only way to do that is to filter out brand-related searches.

Sweat The Small Stuff

It is easy to get hung up on huge site architecture issues and mega-website problems like some of the URL-related examples described above. Yet, often times such issues are out of your hands, at least for awhile. Instead of giving up and spending your day on Twitter because you’re waiting to hear how many months and tens-of-thousands of dollars it’s going to take to get that custom footer you asked for – go back to the small things, like alt tags, content on long-tail product pages, and even directory submissions and/or some article distribution. Always be making progress, even if it’s an inch at a time.

Have Your Own Websites

If websites were cars, I’d describe the one I drive at work as a bus. It takes forever to turn around, put on the brakes or speed up. The engine is huge, complicated, difficult to work on and greasy. On days when I get frustrated that a simple menu change can take months, I like to go home and work on my own websites. Like go-carts or sports cars, their engines are small, clean and fast. I’ve highly customized them and can make that menu change in five minutes. All I need in my toolbox is notepad, an FTP client and a cup of hot coffee. If you don’t enjoy doing SEO enough to consider it a hobby, perhaps you’re in the wrong profession to begin with.

Be Persistent

My nickname at work is “Tenacious E” because I don’t give up when something important needs to be done. There are projects that I’ve been shuffling through the red tape for over two years. While sometimes I feel like throwing up my hands and saying “To Hell With IT!” I realize that I’m in this for the long-run and, even if I can’t get rid of that crappy java-based navigation for another year, it will eventually pay off.

Other Tips

• Read the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog
• Be Everywhere: Yahoo Answers, Twitter, Facebook, Forums, Blogs…
• Build Relationships: With bloggers, industry talking heads, social media people…
• Know Your Competitors: They are usually in two groups – those competing with you on the first page of Google, and those competing with you in the industry. But they aren’t mutually exclusive.
• Regularly update or automate your sitemaps
• Use the same URLs in product/affiliate/PPC/shopping feeds that you use in your navigation
• Dynamically insert noindex,follow tags on “sort” and “pagination” URLs.
• Have several product feeds (RSS/XML), such as “new products” and “best sellers”
• Automate Alt Tags on directory-level pages (<ALT>{INSERT PRODUCT NAME}</ALT>
• Get new products uploaded faster than your competitors. Be first to market!

Comments (25)

Great tips on ecommerce SEO. This is extremely relevant to what I'm working on!