Sometimes, I get the chance to update my website critiques through video presentations. Last February, I had devoted some time to Discountflies.com. Over a year and a half later, I was able to revisit their site through a video tutorial.

You will need Flash Player 9 or above to view the video, hosted on Practical eCommerce. To see it, please click on Video Tutorial: Discountflies.com.

One of the types of articles I write is a website critique, or SEO Report Card, on Practical eCommerce. In a recent SEO report card, I talked about an IR 500 site called "Beachaudio.com."

Here's a little bit about what I had to say for this critique:

Ranked 359 in the Internet Retailer 500, and boasting over 45,000 products in its catalog and 151,000 pages in Google, Beach Audio has a lot of grunt. According to Troy McKinnon, their director of ecommerce, Beach Audio did a complete search engine optimization overhaul using in-house staff in April, and ever since, the search-generated sales have been rising steadily. Currently, organic search from Google accounts for about 10 percent of website sales, and the outlook continues to look good, especially with the holidays and their peak season right around the corner. Nonetheless, I see a lot of unrealized potential here. So let's dig in...

Their overhaul helped them to do a number of things right. Between optimizing their URLs, adding crawlable consumer reviews, and great indexation and rankings on their internal search pages, you can definitely see an impact from their efforts. Unfortunately, they do have a lot of barriers because their page count (151,000 mentioned in the quote) is inflated due to duplication and throw-a-way pages. Among the other things that they could improve site-wide? Title tags.

To read this article, please go to "SEO Report Card: Beachaudio.com," appropriate subtitled, " Write handcrafted title tags for all category pages and for product pages of best sellers." Enjoy!

Early, in January of 2006, I had given a site called "Balancedlifeproducts.com" an in-depth web critique at their request. Through the critique, I found that they had a number of issues ranging from no attention to inbound links and PageRank to poor keyword choices and title tags. I decided to revisit their progress, by reporting their findings in a video tutorial.

To see the tutorial, click on Balanced Life Products: SEO video tutorial. You will need Flash Player 8 or above to view the presentation hosted on Practical eCommerce. Enjoy! :-)

In an article hosted at Practical eCommerce, Amy Africa and I co-author an in-depth website critique on industrial tool supplier Product Tool Supply. Through my critique, I found a number of things that were affecting their overall SEO.

Only 20 pages exist in Google of the site PTS-Tools.com (according to a search for “site: pts-tools.com”), and of those 20, only one has a title or snippet with it. A lack of title and snippet in a Google listing indicates that the page content has not been indexed; Googlebot knows of that page's URL through links, but for whatever reason has decided not to spider and index that page.

PTS fares even worse in Yahoo, with only one page indexed. What of the hundreds of thousands of product pages, you may ask? Unfortunately, the online catalog is comprised of print catalog pages converted into PDF documents. Thus, there are no product pages available in HTML.

For more about this industrial tool supplier, visit my co-authored article entitled, "Tooling Around on PTS."

In an article I had co-authored for Multichannel Merchant entitled, "Red Envelope's Website Critique," I had gone into detail about the site's functionality and came across this interesting discovery at the time I looked at their site.

The category and subcollection pages are not making it into the search engines at all — not because of their spider unfriendly URLs, but because they are being specifically blocked through “disallow” directives in the site’s robots.txt file. Robots.txt is the place where you can give commands to Googlebot and the other spiders, such as “stay away from this directory” or “stay away from this file type.”

For more interesting details on this site critique co-written with Amy Africa, just follow the link above.