SEO Assessment – Shoe Embassy

Removal of HTML Extensions

Many of the urls onsite currently end with the extension .html. This is unnecessary and ultimately add excess junk to the URL structure. For optimal performance URLs should be clean, keyword rich and not contain any unnecessary characters.

The removal of .html extensions is a simple yet highly important technical SEO aspect that can be implemented easily on Magento websites through the Magento’s built in functionality.

Once this area is implemented URLs such as https://www.shoeembassy.com/new-collection.html. would become http://www.shoeembassy.com/new-collection for example.

As well as providing a direct SEO benefit, it would also improve the site from a usability perspective.

Low Page Rank

PageRank is one of the ways that Google attributes authority to websites. The current pagerank of the homepage is 2/10. This is low; considering the average PageRank of a typical e-commerce site is 4/10. With a higher page rank the site would be expected to rank higher off longtail keywords.

The PageRank of the site can be improved in two main ways:

1. Reducing the number of links on site (or by adding rel=”nofollow” attributes) so less authority is leaked away from the site and is thus filtered through solely the domains pages
2. Increasing the number of topic relevant high quality links pointing to the site

H1 headings

Each page should have one h1 heading. There are currently none of the homepage. H1 tags tell the search engines what the most important topic of the website is.

Address Markup

In order to better associate the site to the appropriate shop locations address mark-up can be added to the company locations. This would enable Google to better associate the shop locations with the relevant demographical area. This would mean that the site gets ranked high for users searching within the local area.

Indexed Pages

The number of page currently indexed on Google is low. The site would benefit from having a lot more content added to it, as ultimately the more content onsite, the more keywords that Google considers the site relevant for; and thus the more search phrases the site is likely to appear on.

A simple way to increase content onsite is to implement a blog section, and to make regular postings to it.

The blog could also be integrated with the Facebook and twitter accounts so that new blog posts are automatically syndicated through social media, thus negating the necessity to manage the social media accounts; as heavily as now.

Publisher Markup

Your website is missing a rel=”Publisher” link to your Google+ Page. This type of authorship mark-up is great for your brand. It ensures that your company is featured in the Search Results next to your listing. The implementation of this aspect enhances online credibility and has demonstrated to improve click through rates by as much as 20% by making the site stand out more on the search listings.

Remove Meta Keywords

The site currently utilises meta keywords. Meta keywords are considered an obsolete SEO practice and as such should be removed. Bing has stipulated that it considers meta keywords as indicative of spam websites and Google has formally announced that meta keyword offer little to no benefit to SEO.

Robots.txt

The site is currently missing a Robots.txt file. This file is essential to ensure that Google is not allowed access to sensitive areas of the site, and should be implemented in order to both ensure Google is able to crawl the site appropriately and to diminish the risk of security vulnerabilities.

W3C Validity

The W3C Valdiation service currently shows a number of issues (Invalid: 13 Errors, 14 Warnings ­)for the homepage of the site. As best practice any issues of invalid mark-up should be addressed so as to ensure that the site conforms to W3C standards. The details of the errors can be found here:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=shoeembassy.com

Syntax errors can make your page difficult for search engines to index.

Rich Snippets For Reviews

The reviews sections on each product should have Micro data associated with them which will allow Google Star reviews to appear next to individual products on Google’s search results. This implementation of this area, allows for greater trust in the brand through the of social proof and has demonstrated to improve both click through and conversion rates by 20%.

Domain Expiration Date

The shoeembassy.com domain is due to expire in less than 1 year.

Google has stipulated that it considers domains registered for an extended period of time as more trustworthy and thus more appropriate for ranking highly than domains registered for a short period of time. This is because spam websites are usually registered for a short period of time and by registering the domain for a long period of time suggests to Google that you are committed to your brand.

Alt Tags

A number of images onsite are currently missing Alt tags. Alt tags help Google understand the images used on the site, and can enhance visibility of the site through Google images, as well as increase how relevant the site is considered for the keywords used in the alt tags. Alt tags should be keyword rich and meaningful to endusers.