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.