Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks again for your responses. Top man.

Yes it will. Had to re-write a few items myself and any little change will make a new URL.

301 it is best.

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

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

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

I am in the same boat. Few competitors have had years refining their sites before us, yet when looking some of the top rankers are so black hat its untrue.

See here: Look at that page, linked up to death.  At the bottom almost loads of links to the brands again. Check the title tags on each page. I thought mine at 70-120 characters was bad, they must be touching 200-300.

People say, yes well that site could drop off the face of earth if there caught, but come on, how do you compete with that if they are not being penalised for it?

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

Hi Robert,

Thank you very much for the response. Some of what you say makes complete sense. Let me explain further.

This site was built in or around 2007, it is my uncles store, which is a bricks and mortar store as well. From 07 to Sept 2011, they basically didn't know how to run a website, and were burnt several times by SEO firms and also by the people who built the site and continue to do the updates we request for it. Its a very limited site and needs updating fast, as the features just are not there to help us grow. Take H1 for example, I have no control over this, the company that done this site is a multi million pound firm, owned by a national newspaper in the UK.

When I came in in Sept 11, I changed a few things and do it for free. As they have been stung for so much on the past, so they are already playing catch up on their budget and on their competitors, who have had all that time from 07-11 to build themselves up.

£500 is a going rate in the UK, and I would happily pay it. But the problem is that I don't think the budget is there to pay it without getting results. A company who have redesigned the competitions 2 sites and done a full SEO package for them, we looked at, almost went with but decided to try me to just start getting more visits and sales first. To see us through past Xmas. Our competitor are now dropping that SEO firm, who are a big company, becuas ethey are not getting them any results and are paying them a fortune, well over £500 a month.

Since I took over in Sept 11, our visits have gone up some 40%, our sales from Sept - Dec are up 40% on the same time last year. But for Jan and Feb, we seem to be dropping back down in sales. Our Twitter account has gone from 50 to 850 followers, we now have a FB page and on over 250 Likes. We have just set up a blog and a YouTube channel also. So we are progressing and growing.

The problem I see is we have a week were sales are great, then we die off for 4-6 days, then it picks up, then it might go dead for a week, then another bust.

When I first took over, I did the www. thing in Google, I have selected the www version. I have told the web design firm to 301 to that. So I am not sure why its web5, I will pick this up with them. They are a nightmare to work with and considering that site cost £15,000, yes £15,000 its an absolute joke for what they got in return. It feels like basic OsCommerce to me. Terrible stuff.

The title tags I am in the middle of changing, I know they are too long. When I first started I did them to just get stuff online, as the products didn't even have a title and were overloaded with keywords (like 30 words). So I am slowly but surely changing titles to fit into the 70ish characters.The descriptions, I do try to mix them up. With so many products and all similar bar the colour, it becomes hard to get this. eg. 10 t-shirts, same make, model and style, yet only colour is different. By the 5-6th one, your struggling to something totally unique.

The Like 2 Fight ad was put up for a friend, as we have big customers from the professional boxing, MMA, UFC etc... come in store. It will be gone soon. Thats another thing with those images, I have no control to say pop up in new window. I agree totally about that point, I hate that myself.

We get decent traffic through the Creative Recreation Trainers and various style keywords, same with Cruyff Trainers, certain style we rank well for.

I guess I am trying to do too much too fast.

As I say, we are willing to pay but the company is on a tight budget, it can't afford another failure at this, 4 years of failure has left them lagging online. The store does very well but online, things need to change. So I would rather learn this stuff myself and help for free at this moment, than risk them signing up a £3000 campaign that could see them go under.

If I drew up a list of tasks such as

-shorten titles
-try harder on descriptions
-get rid of like 2 fight ad
-sort out the www problem
-get the H1 shorted, what would your advise be on this? Throw the H1 on a keyword phrase?

• Anything else?

Thanks again for the response.

If anyone else has any pointers, I welcome them.

Thanks Will

Hi,

Would someone or a whoever is willing to, help me get me head around what the OSE is telling me?

I had a few quotes from firms who used this and they basically tried to sell me the world for £500 a month.

So I have done my own SEO over the past 5 months and I think the figures are slowly going up, as are visits and sales (albeit slower than the visits).

The site is www.designerboutique-online.com, if anyone is willing to take a look around, throw me some constructive criticism, some praise and some tips/hints etc... that would be great.

Our budget is very small, hence the reason for doing it myself, so maybe if I could take some advice and put it into action, I could start making some big changes.

Some competitors to compare us with are:

www.odsdesignerclothing.com

www.tessuti.co.uk

www.uniquemenswear.co.uk

www.endclothing.co.uk

www.psyche.co.uk

Thanks

Will

Defo wait mate. Bit early yet I think. I am sure ours took at least 3 months to start picking some up.

Also, if I didn't set up a 301 re-direct, how long would it take my pages to come back to were they were?

Thanks.

As I do not have access to the sites back end code. How long would this type of job take? As the web firm charge hourly and from my web knowledge it should only take 5 mins?

I can change the name of the URL via the CMS but I cant 301 pages from it, or go back to the old url to do anything, if you know what I mean.

Thanks

Will

Hi,

I am targeting a brand called Creative Recreation, who are a trainers brand. We currently rank ok-ish for certain terms for Creative Recreation Trainers, Footwear and Creative Recreation [INSERT STYLE NAME HERE].

Our main search term I think we would like to improve on is "creative recreation trainers" as we are 6th for this.

Our domain name points to the brands page as designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/creative-recreation/

Now what I want to know is, would it be worthwhile or would it affect my current rank/index if I changed the end of that url to read /creative-recreation-trainers/ thus getting the keyword phrase in the url?

Creative-Recreation is a hard one to crack as you have a lot of competition from the brands site etc..

Any ideas on this?

Cheers

Will

If you must use Analytics, I would drill down to the source of referral within analytics. This will give you the URL, page, or whatever. I think you can also drill down to the referring IP etc...

You need to log were they come from through them. Export your results every month and see a pattern.

If you get 500 referrals from website B's IP or URL, then its a sure way of knowing they are throwing people at you.

But Mats answer is best, will give you times, not just dates and will also give you more detailed info.

These articles, how would they feed competitors and create new ones?

I am lost in the world of articles , blogs and link building. Surely a successfull business should be link building via off site backlinks?

Cheers mate.

So effectively would I be producing say a really good article on how to wear Armanio Jeans, load it with good advice and then dump my anchor text on a phrase and also sign the article with an available at sitename.com?

Were would these articles be published? On your e-commerce site, blog, youtube or other blogs?

Would you mind taking a quick scan through say www.designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/creative-recreation/ page and let me know if my SEO title, desc and keywords(although I think keywords are pretty redundent nowadays) for that page and its items are ok? Same with item names, descriptions etc..?

Thanks

Will

Thanks for the reply.

Not sure what you mean? As were an e-commerce site, out content is changing daily/weekly with new stock arriving. I try to change the banners on front page and text displayed on front page every 1-2 months.

I have contemplated doing a SEO refresh on our pages and items. Basically going through the SEO Title, Description etc... and typing it out in a different way. Will this mess up previous rank and is it best to leave alone once you've done it?

eg. I have Grey Armani Jeans Denim Jacket as a title, would it be helpful after a few months to change this to Grey Mens Armani Jeans Denim Jacket R266W. The end number is the model style number for that item so it is relevant.

What content development would you suggest?

As the current site is limited in the CMS, and a web design firm currently do any updates, which they charge £100 a hour for (of which we don't want to pay them for as we want to move away from them to a new site, plus they ripped us off over this site and are basically a pain in the ass).

I am trying to create a catelog of gifs to put on front page, also in coming weeks going to re-hash the photos to cut the backgrounds out (some brands require you to do this in order to sell their clothes).

We are also creating own blog and Youtube channel, to give updates and reviews of new stock, vip visitors to the store, style advice etc...

Look forward to your response.

Thanks Will

Hi, I took the SEO work over on this site in September 11, so I have had about 5 full months working with it.

I thought my initial work was a success, we have had more visits each month since I started with the exception of Jan, as Dec was always going to be high. But Jan was higher than Nov. Overall from Aug to Dec visits were 40% up on the previous year. Same with sales, we had a 40% increase in sales in December, alone, and 40% over the 5 months Sept to Dec when compared to the previous year.

However Jan and Feb, although visits are still higher than when I took over, sales seem to be slowing down then all of a sudden a burst come in and were looking good again.

I am working on getting articles put in blogs to get the inbound links up. As they were terribly low.

I have taken the Twitter account from 50 followers to over 830 as of today.

I set up our facebook page which currently has 240+ likes and growing daily.

I am constantly on twitter and facebook with competitions, new stock, sales etc..

I do the on site SEO work and off site work. I am starting to worry that visitors and sales are going to slowly drop off, even with all the work I am putting in.

The site is www.designerboutique-online.com, could anyone suggest improvements and other ways to increase visits and also increase our page authority and google rank?

I am looking at a new campaign targeting a trainers brand, which we currently rank well for on the styles we sell.

Anything of help would be great. Thanks, Will

ps. I know we need a new site, currently need to increase visits and sales in order to fund one.