SEO improvement comments please!

[alexwren]

Hi Forum,

I would be very interested to hear any comments anybody has on how www.christopherpiperwines.co.uk could be improved for the search engines.

The site has been live for 7 months and has already obtained some reasonable traffic. However things can always be improved!

Many thanks in advance

[Mike Hughes]

Never mind the search engines, what about the poor visitors? I looked at your site and couldn't find a way to navigate to the wines. Lots of stuff about grapes, recipes, maps, etc but how is anyone meant to browse through the products you sell?

Mike

PS. This is also true for the search engines. If people can't navigate to the wines then neither can the search engines.

[leehack]

I got to agree with Mike, that site needs a rethink. How the hell do you get to buy something? Took me a minute to get anywhere, your visitors will have long left by that time. Information overload and basic fundamentals of an ecommerce site missed - get your products on show and make them easy to find and navigate to.

Forget search engines, your visitors are infinitely more important at the moment.

[alexwren]

Thanks for your comments so far.

Unfortunately our original mock-ups included much better navigation but these were rejected by the client in favour of the broader menu system.

As we are about to undertake a partial re-design I shall take the comments back to the client and I am sure we can address this.

However if you have time to offer SEO comments as well this would really help.

[gabrielcrowe]

one for jan:

http://www.christopherpiperwines.co.uk/acatalog/drew_00-01l.gif

moled wine. roflcopter.

[gabrielcrowe]

oh, i almost forgot, the site review.

Brutal truth, your navigation truly sucks.

you have no (findable) search facility. {irony?}

I (and many other online shoppers) can find info about wine on wikipedia.

if you're not going to use actinic to sell products, then give up on SEO. there is little point in batling for position in a world where the customer has little patience for cluttery shops.

or at the very least, use a set of top level section links in a obvious palce on the first page, instead of all that useless clutter.

in its current state, this site is a waste of a good designer and it'll never sell anything that cant be bought from a tidier shop

[Mike Hughes]

OK. I've looked again from an SEO point of view but there really isn't much to comment on. From what I can see there is no SEO going on and even the basics are missing.

If you really want to improve the search engine positioning then I can really only suggest that you start reading around the subject and applying what you learn. There is a lot of advice to be found on the forum already that will get you started.

Mike

[alexwren]

From what I can see there is no SEO going on and even the basics are missing.Mike

Thanks for your feedback Mike,

By basics I assume you are ignoring the product titles (and therefore the page titles)? This is the most important area of promotion in this industry (certainly for their prospective customers). Froogle and an extensive PPC campaign are in operation. We are not after the "wine shop uk" type phrases...

I was under the understanding (and there are mentions of this elsewhere in the forum) that Actinic should work pretty well 'out of the box' for SEO assuming you are using fully researched (or official) titles for products.

I was really wondering if there is anything else I might do to help the product pages achieve better rankings. I appreciate the comments made about the home page (this will be addressed). However most visitors to the site will enter directly into a product listing page or sub category depending on their search terms.

[gabrielcrowe]

i must stress to you sir, that you are missing the critical point.

if people dont like the site. no matter how often you point them to your products, they wont buy them.

google adwords are great, but in your natural links, you'll do badly if they are dropped into a useless section.

you need to address serious structual problems, before you address your search engine rank.

its that simple.

[alexwren]

Examples of phrases currently in the site statistics include

penfolds grange
brunello di montalcino
retsina
glen carlou pinot noir
wild rush cape red

As you can see they are quite specific in some cases. What I was wondering was are each of these products looking their best for Google, MSN, Yahoo etc?

[leehack]

If you sustain a top 5 position, preferably top 3 position on those search terms and those are terms regularly used and searched for, i think your work is done personally. I'd be looking into how often such terms are used and more importantly how often they are spelt incorrectly also.

[alexwren]

i must stress to you sir, that you are missing the critical point.

if people dont like the site. no matter how often you point them to your products, they wont buy them.

google adwords are great, but in your natural links, you'll do badly if they are dropped into a useless section.

you need to address serious structual problems, before you address your search engine rank.

its that simple.

Don't worry I am not arguing with anyone!:D

I totally agree about the site layout and intend to dig up the original designs that we did that fully featured shop categories (although not sure how the 100 odd categories is going to fit!). Another problem is that we created a system to export the products (4000ish) into Actinic from their accounts system that contains all the titles, desc, prices etc).

I guess we could attempt to divide the site down into countries followed by regions. This would create an extra level of navigation for the visitor although it would be less daunting to view. This means we could list the countries on the home page ok.

Not sure how my importer tool would handle this (but thats my problem).

Any comments?

[Mike Hughes]

I've kind of told you the answer already. As far as SEO is concerned they are one step away from being invisible.

Take your first example 'penfolds grange'. The phrase appears twice on a long page of 60-70 different wines. It's not in the header, not in the page title, not in any links to that page.

Take a look at that page yourself. Forget the search engine algorithms, all they're doing is trying to work out what a page is about. Do you think that page is about 'Penfolds Grange' wines or is it about wines from south Australia?

I wouldn't know that penfolds grange is on that page. I had to search all your pages on australia and scroll more than halfway down 70 wines to find it. You're not presenting it as being important to your website so it will pretty much be ignored by the search engines.

A quick check shows me that you're not in the top 100 results for 'penfolds grange' in any of google, msn or yahoo (.co.uk) and that doesn't surprise me.

The only way to improve the situation is to do a bit of learning and implement what you learn.

Mike

[alexwren]

Take your first example 'penfolds grange'. The phrase appears twice on a long page of 60-70 different wines. It's not in the header, not in the page title, not in any links to that page.Mike

Thanks again Mike,

I totally hear what you are saying. I guess the fun part of sorting this out is the fact that every product that appears in the site (and any additional items such as page title/meta tags etc) is going to have to be in the import file. We cannot make any changes within the Actinic software as they will be overwritten when the next hierarchal import takes place.

Also seeing as Actinic 6 cannot show each product on its own page (thats why we have used the dreaded extended info pop-ups) would upgrading to Actinic 8 help? I cannot see another way of getting the product within its own indexable page.

[gabrielcrowe]

are you sure it cant?

cant you make a single section and put your product in that?

i think codepath do a tool that lets you force single products per page.

[alexwren]

are you sure it cant?

cant you make a single section and put your product in that?

i think codepath do a tool that lets you force single products per page.

Hmmm - I shall have a look at that.

Thanks

[ackerman]

Thanks again Mike,
Also seeing as Actinic 6 cannot show each product on its own page (thats why we have used the dreaded extended info pop-ups) would upgrading to Actinic 8 help? I cannot see another way of getting the product within its own indexable page.
Of course you can. You just have one product on a sub-section.
Have a look at my site, where all the instruments have their own page.

[alexwren]

Of course you can. You just have one product on a sub-section.
Have a look at my site, where all the instruments have their own page.

I was really on about the fact that you can't have the extended info page as a normal web page within the site rather than a pop up window.

[Mike Hughes]

A couple of things to watch out for:

1. Don't be too specific on your keywords or you'll miss out on a lot of traffic. Use wordtracker to find the words people are searching for (their free trial works fine for me). For example here are some results for 'penfolds grange' showing the number of predicted monthly searches. Ignore the absolute numbers as they are typically way off, but they do give a decent indication of relative frequency.

1. Penfolds (30)
2. Penfolds Wine (16)
3. Penfolds Grange (12)
4. 2001 Penfolds Grange (9)
5. Penfolds Grange Wine (9)
6. Penfolds Winery (6)
7. 1955 Penfolds Grange (4)
8. Penfolds 2002 Grange Review Ratings (4)

I've ignored the irrelevant results, but you can see that out of the 93 potentially relevant searches, only 12 (or 13%) were for exactly 'penfolds grange'.

2. The other thing to watch out for is that with one product per page your navigation has to be spot on (as many here have said already). Customers have to be able to find that page easily within 2-3 few clicks and the same is true for the search engines. A page that can only be found after clicking 8 links is never going to found by a customer and will be rated very lowly by the search engines as well. For penfolds grange you're probably looking at something like 'Australian Wines> Fine Wines > Penfolds Grange Wine'

Mike

[ackerman]

I was really on about the fact that you can't have the extended info page as a normal web page within the site rather than a pop up window.
Why don't you just put your extended info into its own sub-section page instead. That would be dead easy to do. Your extended info contains a lot of information and they would look much better on their own page, where you can do all the SEO stuff.

[alexwren]

Why don't you just put your extended info into its own sub-section page instead. That would be dead easy to do. Your extended info contains a lot of information and they would look much better on their own page, where you can do all the SEO stuff.

Any chance you could give me some hints on how to do this please?

Sounds ideal...

[ackerman]

Any chance you could give me some hints on how to do this please?

Sounds ideal...
Actually it will take a bit of work I think from memory.
Your current products (with the extended info) will need to be changed to sub-sections. So each sub-section (when clicked) will equate to one web page.
Each of these sub-sections will just have one product, and will contain the info that you currently have in your extended info.
All the same information will be there, so a lot of it can be done with cut-and-paste.
Change the html page title to the same as your product. Give any pics the same title. This sort of thing will improve your SEO a great deal.

I can see it will actually take a little while, as it means altering the structure of your site, and the way you think of it. You could do it section at a time though.