SES San Jose Site Clinics
Every conference I speak at I tend to get a site clinic, but it still surprises me how many times I see the same old mistakes,
Title Tags: Greg Boser calls it the wish list I call it the 1 out of 3 rule. Basically it’s when you stick all the keywords you would like to rank for,
WeSellFlowers.com Buy Flowers, Plants online, buy flowers online
Please I wouldn’t even click on that title try to structure them well for User first then search engine, it’s no good ranking if you are losing 20% clicks because you title looks poor..
Buy Plants and Flowers online today from WeSellFlowers.com
Also unless you are Ebay or IBM put your brand at the rear, most people won’t have heard of you before so don’t waste that precision real estate,
The Homepage: this is my personal favourite the www or the NON-www pick one and stick to it and 301 the other, I saw more than one of these at SES San Jose in my site clinic, btw you are leaving Page Rank on the table and may cause dupe content issues if you site is down for any period of time, also don’t link back to you home page with index.php root is fine, in the last site clinic I had the worse example
domain.com resolved Pagerank 3
www.domain.com resolved with Pagerank 5
The homepage had 2 links, www.domain.com/default .php and www.domain.com/Default.php , just keep it consistent search engines tend to get this right for you but I have seen case where they don’t and it just all falls apart.
Images: Think load time people, if I have to make small talk in a site clinic becaue your site is taking so long to load (even on a crappy connection people still have those!), Think what a PPC click is going to look like I would hit the back button so fast if it’s taking an age to load. also think Quailty score issues.
Relative URl V Absolute URL : this is a no brainer for me Absolute Absolute Absolute.. just think proxies, what if a proxy hits your site at least your Absolute URL will get you a back link, if you use relative links you get dupe content.
Images that look like banners : nothing to do with Seo more to do with usability, the time that i see people stick special offer banners that look like they are affialite banners never ceases to suprise me
Jaan Kanellis 1726 days ago
http://www.jaankanellis.com“Relative URl V Absolute URL : this is a no brainer for me Absolute Absolute Absolute.. just think proxies, what if a proxy hits your site at least your Absolute URL will get you a back link, if you use relative links you get dupe content.”
Can you explain how this happens in more detail?
SEM News: SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 26, 2008 - Search Engine Marketing 1726 days ago
[...] SES San Jose Site Clinics, Dave Naylor [...]
brewgin 1725 days ago
“Also unless you are Ebay or IBM put your brand at the rear, most people won’t have heard of you before so don’t waste that precision real estate”
Personally I prefer to put the brand at the front for usability reasons.
Title tag info shows up in your browser ‘back’ history and in tabs. I’m an avid tab user. Let’s say I’m comparing products and I have company A, B and C open in different tabs. Keep in mind there’s only so much room for text.
If they all start the title tag with their respective brand names, then I’ll always know which is which:
A | Buy your flowers…
B | Flowers, plants, funer…
C | Gorgeous flower arrange…
If they all stick their brand at the back, this is what you could get:
Buy your flowers online for…
Flowers, plants, funeral | B
Gorgeous flower arrangements f…
Of course favicons can help, but this is one of the reasons why I prefer to use the brand name at the front. Also makes looking up your pages in SERPS a lot easier as your eyes don’t have to jump from left to right at the end of the titles while you’re scanning downwards.
Then again I haven’t done any conversion research, so it’s just personal preference.
g1smd 1724 days ago
The problem with “brand first” is that on long title tags it is the information unique to that page which gets cut off in the SERPs, leaving a site listing with every title tag for that site looking identical!
Unless you can guarantee every page title being short enough to never cut off in the SERPs, put the brand last.
brewgin 1723 days ago
If you stick to 60 characters they’ll always show. If your title tag is longer than 60… well it’s either a bad title tag or you’re shit out of luck.
Sometimes you’ll get slapped in the face with long brand names or keyphrases. And you’re right, that’s when brand name last is definitely the way to go.
Dan Horton SEO 1723 days ago
Brewgin, good to see you’re on topic
Get the brand at the end. Certain it’s 60
Let’s not sit on the fence here, most people want a call to action too. If branding is so critical consider the banner.