Am I Doing This Wrong? Ecommerce SEO

[REMOVE56]

I ran my site through the SEOMoz On-Page Optimization tool and one of the problems noted was "Keyword Self-Cannibalization" in this case, it was stating I was using the keyword "Board Games" too much.

Site in question:

http://theboardgamers.co.uk/

The problem being is that every product link contains the word "Board Game" - Which makes sense, but I guess it may look spammy to the SEO world.

Would it be best to remove the "board game" part from each internal link and only leave it in the URL structure?

[RobertFisher]

Rhys,

In looking just at the home page, and looking at the Site Grader results, I would say wrong is not really the best choice. You are doing it less than best for that term. Remember first that it cannot be looked at in a vacuum. I have sites that have pages that grade out less than perfect: eg. a title tag that is purposefully too long, etc. You are better served to ask yourself who your customer is and what are they looking for and then construct the page to deliver that and modify your on page around that.

Another thing I would suggest is that you check keyword queries (kw analysis) around your products. Having board game essentially on every page over and over will not help you. But, If you segment it, there may be gold in there and it may prevent the site from looking too spammy. An example I found when querying for about 5 gamer type keywords was this:                        local UK broad  local UK exact

Board games  301,000 18,100

Family games   74,000    1,900

Family board games      2,900      500

To me, I believe you should have a page on with family games as the key word (You actually have that as a category but then the title tag is Family Board Games). You should have a meta description that speaks to: Looking for fun games for the family...the board gamers has ....  In making sure you tell them it is a board game site, you let them know in case they were looking for something different.

Talk about family games on that page and make sure you do things like a correct H1, etc.

Then, make sure you submit your site to Bing and Yahoo as you are showing only one page in Bing and none in Yahoo.

So, stop focusing on one key word. For the home page, I do not think you have gone totally overboard (Do take out the key words tag), and if you make the categories be that and find out what people query you will help yourself.
One last thing, on one of the pages you say you are now the largest after starting out in Feb. You did not show up on page one, so you may want to modify that statement.

Good Luck.