Reevoo.com and Seo
We had an Seo consultant in yesterday. Although a lot of what was suggested was common sense there were a few interesting snippets of information.
- Seo is only just starting to become a viable marketing option in the Uk. Are we really that far behind the states?
- Google are working really hard on getting their bots to ‘see’ the page exactly the same as a user. This allows them to give a higher rating to content appearing in the top left hand corner of the page (the bit a user looks at first), regardless of where it is in the document.
- Google accounts for about 97% of search in the Uk, so although we talk about search engine optimisation, we really mean google optimisation.
- Xml sitemaps have little or no effect. The majority of reevoo.com may soon be made up of pages with little or no review content. The suggestion is that we keep these pages hidden from google, but by using rel=‘nofollow’ when linking to these pages from within the site, not by removing them from the sitemap.
- Having an unbalanced number of links-out vs links-in is bad. This is related to the above point. The reason we may well end up with lots of pages with little content is that we have a relatively long lead time between a product being released and us collecting reviews for it. We would like to be able to present some useful info for these products even if we don’t have reviews – links to relevant material elsewhere on the net seems like one way of reaching that goal.
- Google still recognises dial-up as the lowest common denominator when taking into account page download size and time. It was suggested that each page be no larger than 100KB. Hmm, prototype alone seems to weigh in at around 97KB, and we are sending 225KB of javascript for any given product page (example).
- Title attributes on anchors carry a lot of weighting.
- Links in content are more valuable than a bunch of stand-alone links.
- People aren’t particular interested in searching/filtering by price. Really?
A lot of the advice boils down to having a site that people actually find useful. I think that if we can work on that in combination with the basic principles of well formed documents, clean separation of presentation from content and of behaviour from markup, we’ll have a solid base on which to apply the tips above.
Oh, and the reason for the Seo chap coming in was in an attempt to find out why we fell off the google radar a few months back.
