The fifth of in my series of SEO Report Cards for Practical eCommerce magazine led to the "deconstruction" of AirTroductions.com, which is an ecommerce-enabled matchmaking service for road warriors (currently over 17,000 registered).

I found it to be a solid website, which, with some tuning, would make for a better ride in the search engines. And with fewer than 30 pages in Google, there was indeed room for improvement. 

I've highlighted a few of my findings from this SEO mini-audit:

• Opportunities abound to get many more pages indexed. For example, every airport code search result (like this one) should be indexed, but currently the only way to these pages is through a web form. Remember, spiders can't fill out forms.
• Every page indexed has the same title tag. This makes it significantly harder for the site to effectively target a range of keywords. That's because each page has its own "song" based on the page's keyword focus, and crafting a unique title tag for that page based on its keyword focus is essential to really make the page "sing" well to the search engines.
• The home page (http://www.airtroductions.com/) is a 302 (temporary-style) redirect to http://www.airtroductions.com/Anonymous/Login.aspx, which may be causing some loss of link gain. A 301 (permanent) redirect would be better here than a 302. But a "rewrite" would be best of all, since in that case the URL wouldn't appear to change at all upon loading the home page.
• Pages at airtroductions.com (without www.) are appearing in the search indices in addition to www.airtroductions.com pages, leading to a dilution of link gain and indexation of duplicate pages. Permanent (301) redirects from airtroductions.com URLs to corresponding www.airtroductions.com URLs would be just the thing here.

Get the rest of my findings in the full article here.

The fourth of my SEO Report Cards led to the "deconstruction" of online golf equipment retailer Golfgods.com, whose president Jason Mischel was lamenting over the "quality" of the site's 5000-6000 visitors per day. Their #6 ranking in Google for "golf clubs" wasn't to be sneezed at, however it wasn't the hole-in-one they hoped for. 

Some of my findings...

• Inbound links of any real importance were in short supply. The Google PageRank score for the home page was 4 out of 10 (which is quite low considering that PageRank is on a logarithmic scale).
• The home page contained hundreds of links, which is way more than Google's recommended maximum of 100 per page.
• From the home page, the brand pages were only available through a dropdown nav (remember: spiders can't fill out forms). The most popular brands should be text links.
• Golfgods.com has a blog, which is very forward-thinking from both SEO and branding perspectives. Unfortunately, there were no text links to it to pass it link gain, only JavaScript-based links to individual posts which the spiders can't crawl.

For the rest of the findings, read the full article here.

UPDATE: There has been some confusion whether my critique was of the old Golfgods site or the new one. And the answer is that the critique is of the OLD site -- the one that was NOT developed by my company, Netconcepts. Just thought I would clear that up.