Parallel Path Corp. specialists held an SEO site review at , where they analyzed the search engine optimization implementation of two unaffiliated sites, Bebe and Yeti Cycles. The analysis
86. Contact Information Bryan Connally + SEO Account Manager bconnally@parallelpath.com John Schoofs + Analytics Services Manager johns@parallelpath.com
Editor's Notes
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JSBased upon a study done of our clients, 70-90% of users click organic first
Keyword research and selection will largely determine the organization, architecture, structure, and content of your website. They are the foundation for everything.Understanding and defining your Website Goals, Competitive & Market Analysis, and delivering useful information to your target audience – know this, before you begin keyword discoveryKeywords need to strike a balance between: potential traffic, relevance, and ability to rank.Keywords should be selected with short (1-3 months), middle (6 – 12 months) and long (1+ years) term ability to rank in mind.Keywords should also be reviewed for intent. If you rank well for information queries, but poorly for queries with transactional intent then you are not present at the point of the buying cycle when a user is actually purchasing a solution/product.PPC campaigns can provide invaluable data about which keywords actually lead to sales and leads. Without this data you can only infer a searcher’s intent.Taxonomy – Consistency…..
Internal Assessment Notes:Analytics will tell you things like which keywords lead to conversions, which keywords bring in a lot of traffic but result In poor engagement metrics such as bounces, time on site, goal conversion rate, etc.PPC Search Query reports because they are not the keywords you bid on, but the actual keyword phrases that user’s typed in that then triggered a particular keyword within the adwords account. This is a big difference!Understand what your transactional phrases are. These may not be your most trafficed phrases. Also, if you have access to click stream analysis tools, or PPC software that can to do conversion attribution you can see that while a given phrase may not be a phrase that users convert on, it bring users into the site early in the cycle and often results in conversions further down the click stream. Competitive:What you do with your own site, try to do for your competitors.See what keywords they are bidding on. Where do they appear? This is a good indicator that these particular phrases bring in revenue. If a competitor is buying a phrase via Adwords it is probably a pretty safe bet that there is revenue to be had there.Understand why competitors are ranking for various terms? Is it on-page, domain authority, linking (quanity vs. quality), a combination of all these factors? What?Market AssessmentCompete.com is a great way to see where you target market goes online.
Data taken from: http://searchengineland.com/revisiting-the-basics-of-video-seo-48270Youtube accounts for 28% of all Google Searches.Comscore stated that 183 million users watched 34 billion videos in May 2010Youtube is not just about video games anymore. It is about education. Need to know how to change a diaper, remove a broken lightbulb from a socket, give a speech, get started with a new piece of software? It is all right there.Youtube and video related results related to user queries are also displayed very prominently within the SERPs.
Pages are scored by google from 0/10. PageRank is equally distributed to all links on a page. Don’t waste PageRank on pages with little traffic value such as about, privacy, terms, contact, my account, shopping cartHow you link internally indicates to the engines which pages you feel are most important – if your going after competitive phrases on these pages you want to pass a higher percentage of page rankBe conscious of how your linking from your top pagerank pagesuse your keywords in the anchor text, be consistent throughout the siteCreatively use uncrawlable scripting to link to low value links and destination pages so they are effectively inhibited from passing PRBC end pass to JS
JS beginThis is especially important with the roll out of Google CaffeineYslow and Page Speed addon for the Firebug Firefox add on are especially useful – great for developers and non-developers alike! There was an experiment written up recently (last month or two) about a group of SEOs who took a site and did nothing but on page performance and code optimization. Traffic went up 40%. Seasonality and benchmarked authority, history, and other ranking factors were not covered. Either way the results of the experiment echo what we’ve seen as well.
Improve on foundational SEO & Page Speed of website Comprehensive reports help identify key problem areas These tools are so robust we could do an entire session on them, so they are really worth your investigation. All of these add-ons are free
These reports are simple for anybody to create and result in actionable items that you and your team can take to make foundational improvements. JS end
Video:Video meta dataVideo transcript serviceVideo RSS (MRSS)Google Instant:1. The main impact of this change is an increased review and refining of search results before clicking. This could result in less traffic from search engines but would increase relevance and the potential for conversion.
Title Tag indicator of Sites SEO SophisticationCall your products what they are. Use recognizable naming conventions. Recognize how people search for your products or services. Flash based website – no htmlDirect product sales limited to ApparelHome page title tag limited – not following” popular naming conventions” for products “cycles”. Better choice would be “mountain bikes”Lack of Meta Data – not leveraging the available description characters to improve CTR, new product announcements, offers, news, etc…
There are ways to optimize flash to leverage some traffic and ranking. A view of Google’s cache show’s these methods aren’t being utilized and nothing in the site is visible to the crawlers..
Site resolves for both the www and non www – meaning there are two versions of the site. A 301 redirect or canonical tag should be put into place on the non WWW version as it has fewer linksThis will serve to concentrate the linking and improve results.A lot of people like to talk about duplicate content. Yes, there is a duplicate content issue here, but Google recognizes that not all duplicate content is necessarily spam. Duplicate content comes in many forms: www vs. non-www versions of a website, multiple linking structures for a given page (very common for ecommerce pages), faceted architecture, CMS creating multiple URLs because of capitalization, or adding “/” character. There REAL PENALTY IS LINK POPULARITY DIFFUSION. YOU WILL NOT GET THE CREDIT YOU DESERVE.Not bad link popularity – take a look at the competition for “mountain bikes”
Mountain bikes – 80,500 monthly queriesUsed Yahoo Site Explorer: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.comAll data shows total inbound links for the entire site excluding any internal links.
Excerpted form Wikipdia:bebe stores (name is legally and officially uncapitalized)[3] are an Americanclothingretailer founded in 1976. The name was inspired by, and is pronounced as in, the phrase "to be or not to be" from the play Hamlet.[4]Manny Mashouf, who emigrated to the United States in the early 1970s, opened the first bebe store in San Francisco[5] during a time when three categories dominated the women's wear market: junior, bridge and misses. Having discovered a demographic that was neither junior nor bridge, Manny aimed to break the mold by offering this under-represented population of stylish women distinctive and inspirational fashion bearing an unmistakable hint of sensuality. His concept stuck and bebe reaped early success.bebe designs, develops and produces a distinctive line of contemporary women's apparel and accessories, which it markets under the bebe, bebeSPORT, and 2b bebe brand names.bebe stores, inc. currently operates 312 stores, of which 215 are bebe stores, 32 are 2b bebe stores, 64 are bebeSPORT stores (this includes bebe/bebeSPORT 2-in-1 stores) and 1 is a bebe accessories store. These stores are located in the United States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Canada. bebe also has an international division in Egypt, Israel, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey, and UAE. In addition, there is an online store at www.bebe.com.To further brand exposure, the company signs celebrities for longer ad campaigns. Brenda Song was the face of bebe's 2007 ad campaign. The company signed actresses Rebecca Romijn as the face of bebe from Spring 2007 through Spring 2008 and Eva Longoria as the face of bebeSPORT from spring 2007 through spring 2009.[7]Mischa Barton was the face of bebe's 2006 ad campaign.In 2008, Bebe selected advertising agency MD70, with Creative Direction by Fredrik Peterhoff to produce Bebe Holiday and Spring 2009, Bebe Sports and Bebe Accessories Spring 2009 campaign.[8] Photographed by Camilla Åkrans, styled by Julia von Boehm and shot in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, the Bebe Spring campaign features model Anne Marie van Dijk. The spring campaign appeared in the February and March titles of Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, as well as billboards and phone kiosks in New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. A campaign video will run in stores and online at Bebe Video.
bebe.com is not ranked in the top 100 for any of the following terms: stylish women's clothesstylish women's clothing, women's clothing, women's clothes, women's apparel, trendy women's clothing, trendy women's clothes, cute women's clothing, cute women's clothes, trendy women's apparel, cute women's apparel, stylish women's apparel, womens clothing, womens clothes, womens apparelWe went with the misspelling because it is more often searched than “women’s apparel”Bebe does do slightly better on Yahoo and BingThe highest ranking for any term found in the title tag is in position 29 on Bing so there is room for improvement.
Synonym saturation?
Recommend using “URL Rewriting” in order to clean out nonsensical parameters. Rewrite URLs to incorporate keywords relevant to the page and on-page products.Remove “Categories” and “Products” from URLs and Title TagsMake the Title tags keyword richUse more specific keywords. Sweaters is too broad a descriptor. “Women’s Sweaters,” or “Trendy Women’s Sweaters” would be better keywords for ranking purposes.
There is no content on this page, just a series of links.Google has no idea what this page is about.Adding content, product descriptions, etc. would likely help bebe.com rank much better for a variety of keywords.
The IA could be improved here. Jeans are something that people search for in a lot of ways. Using a term like denim does not differentiate between skirts, shorts, capris, jeans, stretch, boot cut, low rise, hip hugger, bell bottom, etc. These are all great areas to bring in additional traffic and further help users to find what they are looking for. They could improve 1. Rankings, 2. Findability, 3. User Experience, 4. Traffic if they did this.
How are you linking back to this page internally – anchor text?Are all these links away from this page absolutely relevant?If so, are you using the correct KW’s on the optSummary Metrics: 72,715 External Links 94 links on the homepage 4 homepage links leave the domain 111 EDU Links 1 .GOV Links
In addition to no content we found there were no heading tags at all (H1, H2, H3, etc.). The H1 is the second most important on-page signal that Google looks at.There were 11 meta tags which is too manyThe code did not validate (641 errors, 1243 warnings.
In addition to no content we found there were no heading tags at all (H1, H2, H3, etc.). The H1 is the second most important on-page signal that Google looks at.There were 11 meta tags which is too manyThe code did not validate (641 errors, 1243 warnings). While there will be some, this is way too many.
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http://whois.domaintools.com/bebe.com
Mountain bikes – 80,500 monthly queries
Questions to ask the audience:Tell us a little bit about you site?What are you business goals or objectives for this site?How has your site been performing against your business goals so far?Where do you get the majority of your traffic? PPC? SEO? Direct? ReferallHave you done any SEO on the site? What have the results been like?Didyou do the SEO yourself or contract the work out? How wasthatexperience?What are youlooking to improve on or do nextwiththis site?
Mention Todd is also available for Q&A in the audience as well.