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Ward's
appears to have done some search engine optimization (SEO), and it was
a good start, but I discovered costly mistakes and much opportunity yet
untapped. Currently its site is not present in the first five pages of
Google for key terms such as “lab equipment” and “lab supplies” or for
category names such as “microscopes” and “chemicals.”
The
costliest SEO mistake I found was the duplicate site Ward's has in
Google, due to the lack of a permanent redirect from wardsci.com to
www.wardsci.com. Some sites link to the former URL; others link to the
latter. Because all the links on the site are relative rather than
absolute, when a spider starts crawling the site from wardsci.com
(without the “www”), it is able to spider an index of an entire copy of
the site at the alternate URL. By combining the duplicate sites, Ward's
would aggregate the Google PageRank scores of the two sites into one.
For example, the www.wardsci.com
home page has a PageRank of 6, as does that of wardsci.com. Once
aggregated, the resulting home page could end up with a 7 (which is
markedly higher than a 6, due to the logarithmic nature of PageRank).
You can confirm that these two URLs are seen as unique pages by Google
by searching for “cache:wardsci.com” and “cache:www.wardsci.com” — each has a different “retrieved on” date.
Stop those characters!
Ward's
rewrote its category and product URLs to eliminate “stop characters” —
question marks, ampersands, and equal signs. But the approach it used
is not ideal.
For
one thing, variables are separated by underscores, and underscores are
not word separators in the eyes of Google. Consider the URL “http://www.wardsci.com/category.asp_Q_c_E_1447_A_Electrochemistry.”
The word “electrochemistry” is not seen by Google or counted as a
keyword. There also appear to be some superfluous characters in these
rewritten URLs (“_Q_c_E_” perhaps). Many of the product URLs have
exceedingly long file names (e.g.
“http://www.wardsci.com/product.asp_Q_pn_E_IG0006937_A_Fully+Extracted+Sheep+Brain+with+Dura+Mater+Preserved+Specimen”),
which may not seem very palatable to a spider (not that a sheep brain
could be very palatable under the best of circumstances!).
The
product category links in the top navigation and the sidebar are all
text, so extra bonus points for that. All the major search engines
associate those underlined words with the page being linked to.
The
HTML code could be tightened up quite a lot. The HTML includes a number
of comments, and tables are being used for layout, which is not very
efficient coding practice. By tightening up the code in the various
category page and product page templates, the relevant product-related
copy could be brought higher up on the page. Also some intro copy
should be added to the category pages, as there is nothing there to
reinforce the page's keyword theme.
From
the category pages, there are links to view all products in that
category; those point, however, to a search results page with six
parameters in the URL — a complex, search-unfriendly URL structure.
Those definitely need to be rewritten. Each product on the category
page is linked to three times: from the product photo, from the product
name, and from a “More Info” button. It would be best to add
“rel=nofollow” to the photo and button links so that they are no longer
counted as “votes” by the search engines. That focuses the search
engines on the remaining product link, which just so happens to be a
text link containing relevant keywords.
Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS) should be used to reorder the flow of the HTML in
the templates so that the keyword-rich body copy appears higher up in
the page, above the navigation. Heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) should
emphasize text important to the search engines; then CSS can style that
text appropriately on the screen. On category pages, the category name
should be an H1 tag. CSS code is currently included “inline”; instead
it should be placed in an external .css file.
Product
pages should link to related products, thus adding more “votes” for
those products. Links to internal search results on related keywords
would be nice too, particularly if those pages were search engine
optimized.
Ward's
product and category pages include breadcrumb navigation links.
Normally this is a good thing, because these are keyword-rich text
links. But Ward's breadcrumb navigation has been implemented
incorrectly: The category and product URLs in the breadcrumb are not
rewritten, thus providing the spiders with another version of these
pages to index and more duplicate content.
Curiously,
while surfing around the catalog I found that the top featured product
in the “Forces and Motion” category had a breadcrumb containing “404
Page Not Found” and a message at the bottom of the page that this item
is no longer available. Clicking on that “404 Page Not Found” link in
the breadcrumb led me to an “Oops! Sorry…” page that doesn't actually
return a 404 status code but a 200 instead — thus this “Oops” page can
get indexed and displayed in search results.
The
title tags aren't too bad. The category pages include the category name
in the title; product pages include the product name. I'd recommend
dropping “Ward's Natural Science” from the title tags to help tighten
the focus.
Spending its juice
The
site has strong backlinks, many from relevant science-related sites,
and good link neighborhoods. Being part of the VWR family of catalogs,
Ward's has a fantastic opportunity to acquire links from sister sites.
The “.edu” and “.gov” backlinks (for instance, “www.csh.rit.edu/projects” and “cms.llnl.gov/sourcecl.html”)
are like gold due to the pristine link neighborhoods they are in and
the authority status bestowed on many of them; such links cannot be
bartered, bought, or stolen. Ward's problem lies in how it “spends” the
link juice given to them.
I
would advise blocking all the “quick order” product pages from being
indexed, because they really are not good pages for SEO — or searchers
— to land on. These pages have very little keyword-rich copy, no intro
text, no product copy, just some product names. From an SEO
perspective, Ward's would be better off “spending” its internal
PageRank on more keyword-rich product and category pages.
More
important, the page number links should be text links rather than a
pull-down list. The pull-down is not search-engine friendly; spiders
can not fill out forms. There is a “Next>>” link at least, but it
is crucial to have a better path into Ward's rich supply of products
besides following page after page of “Next>>” links. By the time
the spider gets to page 50, all the PageRank will have dissipated.
Ward's
has a good-size product catalog, so once its SEO is in order, the
company should be able to capture a lot of “long tail” search traffic
as well as a number of head terms related to the categories it sells.
Would you like to have your Website critiqued by our panel of pros?
If so, e-mail Mark Del Franco (mark.delfranco@penton.com) with the name and URL of your Website and some basic information about your target audience.
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