Search and post jobs for the Multichannel Merchant. Including jobs for brand & agency marketers, e-commerce, catalog marketers, ops & fulfillment, direct marketing and more.
If there's extra room, the site can use
some plugs at the bottom, although I'd recommend using banners that
drill deeper into its own site, not other sites on the left. (Right
now, it has a left-hand plug for its parent company's food gifts
catalog Figi's, which would be better served on the right-hand side
from a user perspective.)
I'd
also totally revamp the middle column of the entry page, not to make it
prettier but to make it more aggressive. Right now, it doesn't look
like there's anything to buy. There is a link to pants, but that's it.
For apparel, it's especially effective to have pictures of people
wearing the clothes that you're selling as well as embedded commands
(“add to cart” or “buy now” buttons) to order them.
In
a perfect world, Old Pueblo Traders would have more products featured
on the entry page, especially in the middle column position. It should
also consider making its right-hand plugs a bit more aggressive and
entertaining. People look at the right-hand column before they are
about to leave, so the best performing plugs are often the ones that
look like advertisements.
Creative
is the key when it comes to plugs, and you should test a lot of it to
see what works best for your users. Things that work are usually
bestseller lists, recently viewed items (if applicable), category
features, one-question polls, e-mail sign-ups, free offers, and
anything with a deadline. (Deadlines create urgency and cause people to
focus. They are especially effective in the top of the upper-right-hand
column.)
After
that, the product pages need the most work. Old Pueblo Traders has some
great photography, but its individual product pages need improvement.
Long-term, it should really work on developing Web-friendly copy for
its products, as it appears that most of the copy is taken directly
from its catalog. But rewriting all the copy will take a lot of work,
so in the meantime, the site should work on the quick fixes.
To
immediately improve the product pages, the merchant should make sure
that it has “add to cart” buttons on every view. For a lot of its
products, it has a big picture, a little bit of copy, a price in red
and nothing else. The user has to scroll down to get the buying
options. These days that's simply not acceptable when it comes to Web
shopping.
Old
Pueblo Traders should also work on its system for adding to cart. When
you add to cart on its current site and you haven't correctly put in
all the variables, you are brought to an empty cart, which is terribly
confusing at best.
The
company also needs to do a better job of presenting alternate views.
Many of its products have them (more than one visual, that is), but
they are presented in a very bizarre fashion — usually several
teensy-tiny pictures all stacked on top of one another.
Additionally,
the site should look at how to present deals. This is, by far, the
thing that Old Pueblo Traders is best at: offering discounts and
combination prices throughout its site. The special offers are
presented in red and are sometimes quite long; the site should make
deals look less like disclaimers and more like something you simply
must look at. Old Pueblo Traders should put a deadline on deals — even
if it needs to keep extending it — and it should develop a special
category page of all its Web specials.
Unfortunately,
the type of redirect used was a temporary one (302) instead of a
permanent one (301). I discovered this through the use of a server
header checker (http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php)
A 301 redirect passes PageRank and link popularity to the destination
URL, whereas a 302 redirect does not. Luckily, this is an easy thing to
fix.
From
an SEO standpoint, the home page is a very important page. Typically,
it's given the most weight by the search engines, so it's crucial to
make sure to put one's best foot forward when it comes to the home
page. This site's home page doesn't come across to the engines as
particularly strong for keywords outside of the brand name. The home
page's title tag is simply “Old Pueblo Traders,” and as such is devoid
of important non-brand keywords such as “women's,” “clothing,” and
“shoes.”
By
going to “view source” in my Web browser while viewing the home page, I
discovered something rather alarming: a meta keywords tag 317 words
long. That is about 300 words too many. This can be misconstrued by the
search engines as keyword stuffing, and can result in a penalty or
unwanted additional scrutiny.
Other
issues with the HTML include the lack of H1 heading tags, table tags
being used for layout, and HTML comments adding unnecessary “code
bloat” to the page.
Excluding
links on the page, the only text on the home page is “(c) 2007, Arizona
Mail Order Company, Inc. since 1946.” That's not much for the search
engines to ascertain a keyword theme. The reason I didn't consider the
text within links in making this observation is that link text is used
by the engines more to ascertain what the linked pages are about than
what the home page is about.
A
Google search for “old pueblo traders” reveals that Google has adorned
Old Pueblo Traders' home page listing with “sitelinks.” Sitelinks are
shortcuts to sections of a site and are most likely to be shown for
brand name queries. Sites have to achieve a certain status with Google
to earn sitelinks. It's good to see that Old Pueblo has achieved such a
status.
If
Old Pueblo Traders is not happy with a particular sitelink, the company
can request that it be removed using a tool within Google Webmaster
Central (www.google.com/webmasters).
Overall, though, the sitelinks Google selected were good: Footwear,
Dresses, Intimate, Tops, Online Outlet, Contact Us, Jacket Dresses, Sun
Dresses.
The
snippet displayed in the home page's Google listing — “Comfortable,
carefree fashions and shoes in everyone's size, color” — could be made
more compelling with value propositions like “affordable” and “highest
quality.” This is easy to modify in the home page's meta description
tag. Such changes should help to increase clickthrough from the search
results pages.
The
left-hand navigation is text-based, rather than graphical. That was
good to see because, as mentioned above, those underlined words are
important clues to the search engines as to the pages' keyword themes.
The
URLs across most of the site's pages are dynamic. Dynamic URLs have
question marks in them and, optionally, equal signs and ampersands. The
more parameters (i.e. the more equal signs), the less palatable the
URLs to the search spiders. Most pages have two parameters.
It
would be ideal to remove all dynamic elements to the URLS — all equals
signs, ampersands and question marks. That would entail URL rewriting
via a server plug-in like mod_rewrite or ISAPI_Rewrite, or proxy-based
optimization. And relevant keywords should be injected into the URLs.
Most
of the product pages indexed by Google have a “category” parameter in
the URL, as can be seen in the following search results: http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Aitem+site%3Aoldpueblotraders.com&num=100.
But some of the indexed product page URLs are missing this “category”
parameter. Omitting the category parameter does not seem to change the
content of the page. So I would recommend simplifying the product page
URLs consistently across the site by omitting the superfluous category
parameter and using only the item parameter.
Title
tags for the majority of pages start with “Old Pueblo Traders” instead
of important keywords. Words at the front of the title tag are given
more weight by the engines than are words at the end. So it would be
best to move “Old Pueblo Traders” to the end of the title tag or remove
it altogether. Removing it would make the title tag more focused on the
remaining words.
I
would suggest adding “rel=nofollow” to the HREF tags in the links to
pages such as “your privacy rights” and “check out,” because they do
very little for the site's SEO. It is better to funnel more PageRank to
category pages, and none to pages that aren't desirable from a rankings
perspective.
Speaking of indexation, Google shows 2,240 pages of www.oldpueblotraders.com,
and Yahoo shows 4,886. Old Pueblo Traders also has two other
subdomains: one for the online outlet store and one for its Intimate
Appeal brand. Outlet.oldpueblotraders.com has 695 pages in Google and 1,865 pages in Yahoo. Ia.oldpueblotraders.com has 446 pages in Google and 154 pages in Yahoo.
Without
knowing how many SKUs Old Pueblo Traders has, I can't tell how much of
the catalog this represents, but compared with other online retailers,
these numbers seem rather low. The more pages indexed, the more Long
Tail search traffic that can be captured.
The
PageRank score of the home page, according to Google's toolbar server,
is 4. PageRank on category pages is either 2 or 3, for the most part.
Most product pages have a PageRank of 0, and only a handful have a
PageRank of 2, according to the PageRank Search tool at www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/. PageRank is logarithmic in scale, so a 4 out of 10 is actually quite low. A 2 out of 10 is extremely low.
Improvements
to the site's internal linking structure will pass a greater share of
PageRank to the pages that really matter — such as category pages and
pages of top-selling products. Even so, some serious link building and
social media optimization is in order, which will drive much more
PageRank to the site. The greater the PageRank, the more important the
page is and the better the ranking.
In all, it looks like Old Pueblo Traders can get some easy SEO wins on the board without too much effort.
