Help with various bit?

[YNWA]

Hi again,

Right I have wrote some notes on what I have read on here, the web and from my diagnostics.

Our site is a e-commerce site for mens designer clothing. All back end editing has to be done by the web firm who host it. We can edit CMS stuff such as SEO title, descriptions, product info etc...

Any help or clarification would be greatly beneficial, right lets go (sorry about the long read).

• <70 title characters, this is something I am going to implement on the back of some advice on here. Does it matter what order words appear in the title? Eg) Mens Blue Armani Jeans Jacket or Blue Armani Jeans Mens Jacket. Would it really matter?
• Is it good practice or worthwhile to use seo titles with the colour of the item at the front? I ask this as I am not sure if we would be affected by starting the first few words of each title with the brand name. eg) Blue Armani Jeans, Red Armani Jeans as opposed to Armani Jeans in Blue, Armani Jeans in Red?
• SEO title still, should I just include what that item is and nothing else? Or does adding something else at the end go against you? eg) Blue Armani Jeans as opposed to Blue Armani Jeans | Mens Armani Jeans UK? Am I trying too hard to get relevant words in there?
• Our meta descriptions are about 170-220 characters long for each item/page, is this too much? Sometimes struggle with the uniqueness of descriptions, as we can have loads of the same item, but only the colour is different. So after 5 go's, words get harder to put together. What % of a description do you think needs to be unique?

Next is what comes from the crawl diagnostics

• Duplicate Page Titles: We are being warned because each page is showing up with a sort applied to it or pages that no longer exist. We also have filters for product types, so we show as dups for say all-clothing/armani-jeans/  has the same SEO features as shirts/armani-jeans/ and say jeans-trousers/armani-jeans/. I don't have the ability to SEO the filtered titles in the CMS. How would I fix this?
• Long URL: How important is the length of the URL? I make sure the URL is what the item is eg) armani-jeans-mens-jacket-6A554. The number at the end is the items style number. Should I always keep the URL as short as possible? And how far over the 115 is acceptable as for some items were only 1-10 characters over and its hard to go shorter?
• No. of links per page: Due to being an e-commerce site, pages such as TOPS could have over 100 products easy, not to mention the links in navigation etc... How important is this?
• Rel Cononical: We have 2,591 of these. What are they, how can I fix it? It is important?
• H1 tags: Should these be put on keyword phrases on each brands page? Should it go on the homepage only? How many H1 tags on a site/page can you have? I can't go back end code so webfirm would have to edit. Howver in CMS I can H1 product decriptions and brand descriptions, would that be useful?

Keywords within the CMS, how useful are these? They are becoming a pain to do, so I don't want to do them if I dont have to. How many would be too many?

Product On Page Descriptions: How long should these be? Does it matter if its a bullet list of features? Or should it just be 2-3 lines of what the item is, features etc...?

Sorry for the long essay, just my notes from the last few days.

Thanks

Will

ps. if you want to view the site its www.designerboutique-online.com

[RyanKent]

Hi Will,

At a high level, there are three aspects of SEO: website design/architecture, content, and promotion (links + social lift).

Everything begins with a solid website design. There are numerous major issues with the website design. I would recommend moving away from your current website developer and finding a quality developer. Many of the issues you are facing would be naturally taken care of with a better designed site. You can go through the items you listed and work to fix them, and your site should improve in rankings. The problem is you will reach a plateau. Other competitors with better designed sites will have a much easier time ranking higher.

The first glaring issue is the site's coding validation. HTML and CSS code is governed by the W3C. They are the world-wide body which compromises members from Microsoft (Internet Explorer), Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox), and others. Ideally each site's code should pass validation (i.e. no errors). There are valid reasons for having some validation errors. A site is not necessarily "good" because it validates, nor is a site necessarily "bad" because it does not validate. But when you reach the point of 50+ validation errors, there is likely a problem. Your home page has 170+ validation errors. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.designerboutique-online.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

My recommendation would be to put together a list of your site's requirements, then take the list to various developers and obtain some quotes. The technology used is not as important as the result. A quality site can be built using WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, .NET, and other platforms. If you are a small to medium business I would recommend a popular platform. I would also suggest avoiding any company who only offers sites on their custom platform. That recommendation may not be popular with such companies, but the reality is you are 100% stuck with the company. If you have a WordPress site developed (as an example) then there are developers around the world who can readily work on your site. There are extension developers around the world who create great add-ons which offer nice functionality. The costs from your end are lowered substantially.

Good Luck.

[YNWA]

Thanks for the response. You make valid points that I already know about.

The web design firm stitched the owner up with a terrible site 4 years ago and I came on board in Sept to try sort a few things out.

The option of upgrading the site is on the agenda, but currently the budget is not there (we have a bricks and mortar store also) to get one.

I will note what you say and attack the web firm with requests to sort it out. But again, we dont want to hand them any more £££ for a job they made a hash of and one we might move from.

So it looks like the current work I noted will have to be done, just to help get more sales, visits etc... if it plateus it plateus, because the option for a new site is at least 3 month away.

Any pointers on the other bits?

Cheers Will

[RyanKent]

Some specific answers to your questions:

**Does it matter what order words appear in the title? Eg) Mens Blue Armani Jeans Jacket or Blue Armani Jeans Mens Jacket. **

Is it good practice or worthwhile to use seo titles with the colour of the item at the front?

Yes, the word order can make a difference, especially in a competitive niche. The question is, which keyword is a user searching for the product most likely to type in? Also remember the title tag is weighted with the first words earning the most weight. Do you feel "Mens" or "Blue" is the most searched for term? Or possibly "Armani"?

SEO title still, should I just include what that item is and nothing else?

Ideally you should focus a single keyword. The keyword is dependent on many factors. What keyword receives the most traffic? How competitive is each keyword? How relevant is your content to the keyword? How likely is that keyword to convert on your site?

Our meta descriptions are about 170-220 characters long for each item/page, is this too much?

Yes. They should be under 160 chars. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

Re: Duplicate Page Titles, you should use the canonical tag to identify the primary page. This tag will resolve the issue with the various sort orders. Also if you offer the same page via multiple URL paths, the canonical tag is your best means to resolve the duplicate content issue.

Re:Long URL, the meta description link above also discusses this issue. Keep them short and meaningful.

**Re:**No. of links per page, keeping under 100 links per page is a good rule of thumb. There are no hard and fast rules. Some sites could offer 80 links on a page and it could be too many, while another site could offer 150 links and it might not be enough. Understand your links control how PR flows throughout your site. If you provide a link to your best selling product and your worst selling product, you are telling Google these pages are equally important which is generally a bad idea. Try using category pages to reduce the links on any given page.

Rel Cononical: We have 2,591 of these. What are they, how can I fix it? It is important?

This question concerns me as it is more of a beginning SEO question. I strongly recommend reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO. It is a short and excellent guide which addresses most of your questions. The canonical tags do not necessarily need to be "fixed". It depends on how they are implemented.

Re:H1 tags, ideally each page should have one H1 tag which focuses on the keyword for the page.

Overall, my recommendation is to review the Beginner's Guide to SEO. Once you are done, examine your site and these questions and work through the guide again. At that point, you will need to decide whether to tackle these issues yourself or hire a SEO. Many of these issues are basic and you can work through them yourself. My concern is many of these topics would best be handled by a solid site design.

On the one hand, you can spend thousands of dollars addressing these issues. On the other hand, if you earned one more sale per day, you can increase your sales by thousands as well. The market is highly competitive. You need to earn a first page spot in rankings to truly perform well. The sites at the top often have professional developers and SEOs. It's entirely possible to do it yourself if you have the time and dedication.

[YNWA]

Cheers. I will give that a read, thanks.

I guess it all come down to the site we have. Its old, its crap, its badly done and it has no features. Something a new site would fix.

Guess this job just got a lot bigger than first thought.

Cheers Will

[YNWA]

Also may I ask, with the meta description. FInding it hard to put whats best/accepted.

For a green bomber jacket by the brand MA.STRUM I have...

"Green Mens MA.STRUM Jacket. Style MA1099. With a Removable Hood, Breathable Fabric and 2 Outer Pockets from Designer Boutique Online"

Does that sound ok? Or should I go along the lines of cutting the product features in favour of a more we sell this and that approach?

eg. Green Mens MA.STRUM Jacket. Style MA1099. Designer Boutique stock a wide range of MA.STRUM clothing and are official UK stockists.

??

Cheers

Will

[RyanKent]

The goal of the meta description is to encourage users to click your result. The description should be accurate, otherwise the user is highly likely to bounce from your web page.

I do not have any recommendation regarding the two descriptions you shared. The length of both seems fine. Both begin with offering a detailed description of the product. This information should differ from the title tag as it is generally not helpful to offer duplicate information in such a small space. Otherwise it's up to you as whether to promote this individual product versus your site.

[YNWA]

Thanks again for your responses. Top man.