Welcome back Rankers. It is Kiwi day today, you didn’t know that did you? But my New Zealand friends were the only one’s to respond to me this morning when I said “Who wants a site review?” That’s probably because all the Aussies were still on the road or not looking at Twitter or whatever else, you know, it’s already midday in New Zealand.
Today’s reviews are for Siobhan and Jayson. Let’s have a look at unscrewed first. I’m going to do this site review process one on top of each other so that you get an idea of the things you need to check first of all when you’re looking at the health of your site from an organic search perspective. First thing that we do is have a look at the index. Jayson’s site is a Wine site unscrewed.co.nz and what I’m doing at the moment is having a look at what is already in the index. Google’s telling me that there’s 673 pages. I’ve drilled down a bit and you can see here I’m at the 55th page of results for this. What I’m starting to see here, Jayson is, I’m guessing, duplicate content and I’m guessing we haven’t got Tags set up properly in your Wordpress install. The other interesting thing about your site is (I’m in google.co.nz here and one of the other interesting things is that they don’t seem to have the Google+1 button yet which is a bit rude, but anyway Google must still be rolling it out) when I simply type your brand name or the main part of your domain name into Google I’m not getting all the extended site links, like we are with the other site we’re going to review this morning. I’ve typed in plunket and we get all these great site links. To me that says there’s something that Google’s having trouble understanding about your site. When we have a closer look at the site, you would hope that some of these menu items here would be picked up in site links but you’re not so I would have a look at Google Webmaster tools. Make sure that you get that set up so that you can go and see if there’s any problems with site links from Google’s perspective and the reason it isn’t picking up. We’ve had a bit of a look at the index and the main thing to look for there is anomalies, so if 673 pages, Jayson, is way to many which I suspect is the case, then you need to look at that. For any one else if it’s not enough then you need to look at that.
Once you’ve done that, then go and have a look at your site with your keyphrases in mind. What are the keyphrases? With Jayson I’m assuming that New Zealand Wine Reviews is the #1 phrase we need to rank for. What I would do is take that phrase and just look for instances of it on the front page of the site. We’re not getting it there so straight up we’ve got that phrase in the page title which is great but it’s not anywhere on the front page. We’ve got variations of that like Wine Reviews or Restaurant Reviews or Video Wine Reviews but we don’t actually have the phrase New Zealand Wine Reviews. It’s all about consistency in these things, get it in the page title, get it somewhere on the page and then get a link to it. I would suggest with Wordpress, maybe getting a footer menu so that all the different New Zealand Wine Reviews are categorized under one section of the site.
The next thing I would look at is what sort of headings you’ve got on the page. If you have a look here what we’re looking for is either H1’s or H2’s, Jayson in this case we’ve got a bunch of H3’s. Whilst Video Wine Reviews and Wine News are probably good phrases for you to have they’re in a H3. I would look at the theme and css attached to that and see if you can reformat some of these as a H1. Remember if you are going to use H1s and H2s and H3s which Google recommends you do then make sure you have them in order, don’t have a H3 above a H1. It’s basically signposting the content for the bots, this is the main heading, this is the subheading and this is the sub subheading if you get my meaning. So they’re the main things that stand out for me. Also Jayson, it’s great that you’ve got video here but I haven’t checked to see if Wammo who is the radio channel who’s doing this has got related videos switched on at the end of the video (that’s a biggy). What I am looking for at the end of that video is if you are embedding video into your site, we’ve got next in the channel but we don’t have related videos, you may not have any control over this Jayson because you may not have that relationship with Radio Wammo, but I would always just have related videos switched on. In my experience we find that it gets the bot out to the site more. So that’s one thing you can look at.
The other thing to look at too here is when you do that site:unscrewed.co.nz just have a look at some of the cache dates, The other thing you can look at with the cache is get a picture of how Google sees your pages. We’ll go to your front page and what I’m looking for is 2 things. One is when did Google last come out to see the site and you find that by clicking on cached and we can see it came out on 13th of September so yesterday. You don’t have a problem with Google coming out to the site and visiting the site. The other thing I want to look at is how does Google see this site, what is it looking at. For that we click on the text link, text-only version under the cached area and we can see here these are the things that it sees first. It’s picking up this bit of information here from the information attached to this graphic so it’s good that you’ve got new Zealand wine reviews there too. But you really need to get it on the page. Hopefully that’s helpful to you Jayson.
Now we’re going to switch over to the site that Siobhan has asked me to look at. Another New Zealand site plunket.org.nz Once again let’s go to the index site:plunket.org.nz, up here we see 14,300 results, that’s a lot of pages. When you dig deeper into these results, once again go to page 40 or 50 you can see that we’re starting to see a similarity in the URL’s and right down there I start to go “OK what’s going on here?” There’s something consistent with all these extra pages and you look at the description tags and it seems to be following a lot of geographic directory type of entries on the site. So if we go in here, have a look at that page and we can see that it’s probably got a lot of these sorts of pages. Problems with these sorts of pages that you’re going to have with Google is it’s going to dilute the rest of your content. Overall Google’s looking at your site authority for content and if you have a lot of pages that don’t really have a lot of content on them that can dilute basically the rest of the content on the site. Typically these sorts of directory type pages don’t have a lot of content on them. I wouldn’t worry about that too much just yet because when we have a look at (we’ll just go to the home page here) the site itself we can see here that Parenting Advice is something that this site presumably wants to rank for. When we go do a Google search in google.co.nz pages from New Zealand we see that they are already on the front page. Which is great so that 14,300 pages whilst it may be having some effect, maybe in the .co.nz space it’s not as competitive as you might think and therefore it’s not having a big detrimental effect because the competition above you maybe isn’t as hard. What I would look at first and once again, do what we did with Jayson’s site, have a look at the front page. Once again we’ve got the brand at the start of the page title, I would put that last. PlunketLine, I don’t know if there’s really any good reason to have that in the page title because it’s not really appearing in the search results. You can see here it’s cut off so it’s not really giving any benefit to people being able to find the phone number quickly. Once again we’ll have a look for those phrases on the front page of the site and I’m looking for parenting advice. I’ll do a search for it and we don’t have that on the front page so once again if you’re going to put these phrases in the page title get them somewhere and anchor them on the front page of the site. Also, Jayson going back to your site for a second, the nature of this site is that it’s a new site and your content is going to change regularly. Try to get some content on the front page of that site that is anchored there even if it’s down below the fold here it says something about this site and get some keywords and links to different sections of the site in there. That way there’s some consistency at least and some anchors to the front page of the site that Google will always know what the site is about. The other thing that I forgot to mention with your site Jayson, is that I had a look at the robots.txt This is the file, for those of you who don’t know, that tells all the robots that come out to your site how to behave, basically and what the can and can’t look at. You can see here you’ve got User-agent:, Disallow: and then nothing. That’s not really doing anything. If you had a / in here it would have blocked robots from everything so speak to your Web. Dev. But when we redevelop sites and build sites for that matter, sometimes we will disallow the robots to go into certain sections of the site because it just creates confusion for the robot. You might just want to have this that says Allow/ Disallow and then block out the directory that may be you don’t want it to go into. In the case of Plunket, you guys don’t have a robots.txt at all so Google doesn’t know what it should or shouldn’t be looking at, so it just looks at everything which is why you might have 14,300 pages.
But the main thing with Plunket really, is you just need to get some of those keyphrases you’ve got in the page title actually on that front page. Even car seat rental, or car seat rentals I should say, remember singular and plurals are always different. We’ve got rent a car seat here, why not make that …oh, and that’s a graphic anyway so Google can’t read that information anyway. Why not have an equivalent text version of that menu down here somewhere for people who use screen readers, the vision impaired. Why not get some alternate menu’s down there and make it more universal access if you like. And get the keywords in those links.
The other thing, once again, let’s have a look at the H1’s and H2’s and we can see here that you’re suffering from the same sort of issues that Jayson’s site was. That is, we’ve got this graphic as a H1 which I can understand why it’s done from a design perspective but it’s not really doing anything for the authority of the site or telling Google what the site’s about. Same here, H3’s all H3’s through here and of course all these things here, they’re all graphics. Oh, the other thing Jayson, those site links this is because Google knows that these are the constant anchor points to the site. For some reason it’s having an issue with your site. If we go and have a look at the case results of Plunket we can see here once again, 9th of September, so not to bad. It’s coming out on a regular basis at least. If we have a look at the text version you can see here that all those graphics are gone so a lot of those phrases that you would have in those graphics are lost, they’re not appearing anywhere to Google. There’s no problem using graphics for look, appeal and design reasons but make sure that you get some good alt information that tells Google about those graphics and tells Google what they are. Name the graphics, put the keywords in the graphics and this goes for everybody. It’s quite often overlooked, quite often a Web Designer is using an editing package they might batch a lot of their images and they’ll all come out with numbers as part of their file name. Make the file names descriptive, it gives Google some indication of what that image is about. If images are important to what you do, you might be selling products, fashion whatever, make sure you set up image search as well because that then is another channel to your site.
That is it for today’s show. Hopefully that’s helpful and we’ll see you all next week. Bye.
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