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Article 1 - The Baseline
Web Site Analysis - The Teddy Bears
Direct Site
First Impressions – the "soft" stuff.
This is graphically a most pleasing site and exudes
warmth, fun and bears – who doesn’t love a teddy bear.
The cursor is a Teddy Bear that follows you around the
site and leaves
Paw prints behind – very creative and will cause the
site to be talked about and visited - an excellent tool
– site uses good music as well. There may be the
opportunity to make the site a little more
"cute" by having more bear pictures on the home
page. The site works well and provides opportunities for
change to suite various seasons or activities.
Site Navigation
There are a number of sub pages accessible from the
home page. These pages display the range of bears
available, allow you to read the visitors book and make an
entry (an excellent marketing tool – more on this
later), become a club member (another excellent tool),
contract Steve Ogden (the owner), provide information on
how to buy the bears and other activities. This important
"pointer" to the rest of the site needs to be
highlighted. The button uses the term "Search our
Site" – it would be more advantageous for the
visitor to be able to read a table with a description of
each page and a "hot" link. Don’t make your
visitors guess where they have to go - make it obvious and
simple, provide lots of information.
It is easy to navigate through the rest of the site and
the navigation bars are well placed for ease of access.
The Site Structure, Code and Metatags – the "hard"stuff.
Each Search Engine uses a different algorithm to
determine the ranking of a site – the detail of this
information is not shared around but each Search Engine
will provide you with broad guidelines. In attempting to
outsmart the search engine algorithms to optimise your
site rank you need to recognise some broad rules. Follow
the HTML code structure of <title>,
<description>,<keyword> and use your main
keyword/s in each area . This has to be done with some
discretion as overuse of keywords will be regarded as
"spam" by the engine and your site may be
removed entirely.
Teddy Bears Direct website developer – Steve Fowkes -
has done a good job with keyword selection and placement.
I would recommend reducing the keywords in the Keyword
Content area to about forty, there are too many at present
and relevance is the important aspect. Whilst search
engines can be case sensitive there is no necessity to
repeat the keywords in lower and upper case – this is
also true of derivatives eg "teddybear" and
"teddybears". The spam issue is of concern here
as well.
Rankings.
The following keywords were chosen for the ranking
analysis –
teddy bears, club, bear, teddy, bears, teddy-bears,
teddies, antiques, collectable, australia, arctophile,
collectibles, hug, artist, stuffed animals, stuffed toys,
softtoys
Australian Search Engines and Directories.
The site ranks number one on Anzwers and WebWombat,
number two on AltaVista Australia, number three on Excite
Australia but couldn’t find the site on Yahoo Australia
(Search Directory and very important). All up this is an
excellent result.
International Search Engines and Directories
In terms of the major International search engines and
directories the same keywords were used and the following
engines and directories covered
The site ranked seven and four respectively for the
words "actophile" and "softtoys" on
Infoseek/Go network. It ranked number twenty five for
"teddy bears" and "teddy-bears" on
Google and twenty and thirty nine for "actophile"
and "softtoys" on the Yahoo webpages. No other
rankings have been achieved on any other engines or
directories.
Our Goal
Our goal over the next three months is to get the Teddy
Bears Direct website into the top three positions on
Google, Yahoo (website and webpages), AltaVista and Open
Directory project. Once this has been achieved we will see
the impact on the other major engines and track the impact
on Steve’s sales ( in percentage growth terms not
revenue – that’s confidential).
How?
1. Reduce the number of keywords used in the keyword
content area and focus the keywords around the core
business activity – teddy bears.
2. Change the "search" bar to a descriptive
table "hot" linked to the other pages on the
site.
3. External and internal links are of critical
importance to most search engines. Jeff has a number of
links on his site to other Teddy Bear sites. These links
will be brought to the front page so that the engines can
spider them as well. This adds to the
"relevance" of the site and will improve the
rankings significantly.
4. Once this has been completed then we will look at
developing "doorway" pages. More about this at a
later stage.
5. Site "stickiness" You recall how Steve has
set up a visitors book and a club. These are wonderful
marketing tools to keep people on the site and bring them
back again. They are also the basis for the establishment
of an opt-in e-zine (electronic online magazine which
people choose to receive on a regular basis). The magazine
could cover a spectrum of activities ranging from members
meetings, important collections, articles, cleaning and
care of bears, bear recipes (honey I think!) - the list is
endless, the purpose - to build the site brand and
community relationships. Steve has ideas about birthdays
which will grow relationships as well. The site could
include short stories about bears which could be
downloaded and used as children’s bedtime stories – a
competition could even be started for the best short story
(prize – win a bear if you get a friend to write the
best story), songs about bears, poems, colouring-in
competition etc. The purpose is to drive more people to
the site and get them involved – the sales will follow.
The next article will cover the implementation of some
of the things we have talked about so far....
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