This article was originally published under Practical Ecommerce.
Veganstore.com, operated by Pangea Vegan Products, is a site after my own heart.
As a recently turned vegetarian (as of a year ago), Iโm definitely in the target market. Too bad itโs unlikely I would have discovered the site. Thatโs because Iโm not strictly vegan, and the site isnโt targeting โvegetarianโ as a keyword. The only occurrence of โvegetarianโ on the home page is in the meta keywords โ and meta keywords donโt affect rankings (at least not positively!).
Regardless, I doubt Iโd come across the site in my searches โ even if I were a vegan. The site doesnโt appear on page 1 in Google for the most popular vegan-related keywords (according to Google Suggest) like โvegan,โ โvegan recipes,โ โvegan diet,โ โvegan shoes,โ โveganismโ and โvegan food.โ It does rank No. 1 for โvegan productsโ and No. 3 for โvegan body care,โ but those keywords just arenโt popular.
The problem begins at their home page, where the only body copy (excluding link text) is the keyword-less sentence asking visitors to sign up for the email list. No H1 tag either. Perhaps as a way to compensate, the home page title tag has been keyword-stuffed โ with five occurrences of the word โvegan.โ Definitely over the top. In fact, this โspammyโ title text is used repeatedly โ at the end of every title tag across the site.
The left hand navigation is a list of categories โ good that they are text links, bad that not a single one contains the word โvegan.โ Anchor text is an SEOโs secret weapon. Turning the โShoesโ link into โVegan Shoesโ will go a long way towards improving their ranking for โvegan shoes.โ No need to revise every link, only the ones that are highly searched on categories. I do like the โBest Sellerโ list of links on the home page. Too bad not a single one of those has the word โveganโ in the anchor text either.
The โFeatured Productsโ on the home page display the product names as text, but strangely they arenโt links. Instead itโs a graphical โDetailsโ button that is the link.
The Pangea logo, on the top left, leads to /index.html. Instead, it needs to point to / to avoid creating a duplicate home page for the spiders to index. Speaking of duplicate content, I found https:// pages being indexed in Google. Need those 301 redirects!
From past columns you may recall that duplicate content can push pages into Googleโs Supplemental Index. I employed a little-known trick for finding Supplemental Results (searching Google for โsite:veganstore.com * -asdfasdfโ and discovered 843 of Veganstore.comโs 1,540 pages are in โSupplemental hell.โ Much more analysis is needed to uncover the reasons for the scale of this Supplemental problem, but itโs certainly not limited to https:// pages.
Going into the โShoesโ category page, there is an H1 heading tag containing โShoes.โ But again this is a similar issue to the anchor text pointing to this page: the word โveganโ is noticeably absent. Also, the title tag begins with the word โShoesโ instead of โVegan shoes.โ Additionally, this page is particularly problematic, in comparison to other category pages, because there are only two links to go deeper into shoes: โShoes by Styleโ and โShoes by Brand.โ There is no list of different styles, nor a list of brands (e.g. New Balance and Wanderlust). Add those brand names and styles to this page and make them text links.
Veganstore.com has a category page called โFood Items.โ Instead, it really should be called โVegan Foodโ โ and this newly chosen keyword focus should be reflected in the anchor text, title tag, and H1 tag. On this category page, there are a handful of sub-categories such as โCookies and Baked Goodsโ โ that sub-category page should be targeting search terms such as โvegan cookiesโ and โvegan donutsโ but it does not.
The URLs have been rewritten to remove question marks, ampersands, and equals signs. Some links slipped through the cracks and donโt use the rewritten URLs, such as the links in the breadcrumbs, thus leading to duplicate page indexation and PageRank dilution. Despite the URL rewriting, the URLs are still problematic. Some product-page URLs contain way too many hyphens. Spammers tend to stuff hyphens and keywords into URLs, so exercise restraint. I also found URLs that are too many directories deep.
The PageRank score for the home page is a 6 (out of 10), which is not bad. There isnโt a steep drop-off in PageRank as one goes down the site tree, as I sometimes see with sites. I credit the spider-friendly URLs, at least in part, for that.
SEO Report Card
Veganstore.com
Home Page D
Inbound Links B
Indexation C
Internal Linking Structure C
HTML Templates C
Secondary Page Content C
Keyword Choices C
Title Tags D
URLs B-
OVERALL GPA C
