For today’s blog I’m going to do an SEO review for “The Pumpkin Patch”. The lady that runs this website follows me on Twitter so I thought I would take the time to review her website and talk about the things I would do if it were my own.
Firstly I love the logo! See photo below.
Not sure about the navigation menu. I tested the website out in Google Chrome and for some reason some of the menus don’t work properly. For example When I click the “hooray let’s play” button it flashes on and off. This means that I can’t actually load the menu. Always check to make sure that your site loads in every browser. For the record I tested the website in Firefox and it worked fine.
The page title tag on the home page reads “the pumpkin patch – educational toys store – educational toys”. The problem I have with this is the brand name is mentioned first. I am a strong believer that the brand name which in this case “The Pumpkin Patch” should come last. Fact is you’re always going to rank for your own name. The first words in the page title always get the strongest preference in the search engines. If I want to rank for Educational toys then you can be damn sure I’m going to mention that keyword first. Unless your website is amazon or ebay there is no reason to put your brand name first. Secondly in this case I would also incorporate some popular keywords like “gifts”, and “toys” into the title tag. I would recommend the new home page title tag reading “Educational toys – Gifts, Games, and puzzles – The Pumpkin Patch”. I like this more because after doing a keyword check I discovered that “gifts, games, and puzzles” are highly searched in the online educational toy genre.
After looking at the code on the front page I can see a snippet that reads content=”noodp,noydir” /> for this reason the home page isn’t being indexed in the search engines. If she was to simply change this line of code to read content=”doindex, nofollow”/> her front page would start showing up in Google.
Even when I specifically type in the websites URL into Google it doesn’t show up. Changing the code above would fix this and easily make the website far more visible.
The interesting thing is that this code error can’t be found on any other the pages.
If I investigate this further and do a site search in Google I discovered that only 18 pages are being indexed. This hit me as being quite unusual as there are literally hundreds of pages listed on the website.
The reason Google and all the other search engines are doing this is because the website is showing duplicate content in the product description. Google sees the page, sees that the same words can already be found on other websites and marks the website as being a copy. When Google thinks that a website is a copy it doesn’t index it. The only way around this is to write your unique descriptions for every product. If that means 3 weeks doing 200 product descriptions then so be it.
Exhibit A.)
The exact description can be seen over on this website.
URL’s need to be static. The example below is that of a dynamic URL.
The problem is that Google, Yahoo, and Bing don’t know how to read these URL’s. Maybe I should rephrase that. They can read them but they don’t really know what they are and your site isn’t being optimised correctly. URL’s should be filled with relevant keyword rich words. If your URL is filled with =,?, and periods you are already fighting above your weight. I know a lot of content management systems have search engine friends plugins you can install to correct this. For example JoomSEF for Joomla is a classic.
Other issues that should be addressed.
Have you submitted your products to Google base? Are you showing up in Google shopping? If not then I highly recommend getting a spreadsheet together of all your inventory and submitting it to Google Base. Great way of marketing your product, you are competing against Ebay and Amazon, you need to be everywhere they are.
Individual Page Titles for each product. For example if I look at the Trunki Trixie page it simply says “Trunki – Trixie” in the page title! Wasted opportunity, why not call it “Trunki Trixie – baby bag luggage with wheels”. Not everyone knows what a Trunki Trixie is. Try and be more descriptive with your page titles, I promise it will increase your views. Yes that means going through all 200 page titles and making them more descriptive.
That’s all for now, hope this helps take The Pumpkin Patch to the top of the rankings.