Archive for October 19th, 2008
Great River SEO Review
Let me give you a bit of a background on why search engine optimization (SEO) is important: your website may be invisible to search engines, and that means no one can find you. My goal with these reviews is to give these great companies some guidance on how to market their websites better and make it easier for people to find them. For serious web nuts, this will be boring, and for web newcomers, it will be a bit technical. If you have questions or comments, leave one!
My first victim is going to be the company that makes my favorite modern mic preamp—the Great River MP2-NV. I’ve never met Dan Kennedy, but if he’s as cool as his products are, then he’s a very cool guy.
First, take a look at the source code for www.greatriverelectronics.com. They’ve tried to cram every single search term into the meta keywords tag. Even though the search engines largely discount this tag due to heavy abuse back in the day by spammers, it still should be concise and relevant. Keep the keywords relevant to the page content and as this is the home page, find the general terms that cover the product range that Great River makes, or find some of the top search terms within Google Analytics. Look under the “All Traffic Sources” subsection and then, “Keywords.” These are the words that people searched for and then found your site. By the way, you are using some type of analytics program, right? That’s priority number 1! You need to know how people are getting to and using your website. If not, it’s like not listening to what your customers say about your products, except here, you don’t have to ask anyone—the data is right in front of you based on every visit to your site since you installed that tracking Javascript within the <body> tag…
Second and still looking at the source code, go to another page and pull up the source for that page—the title is the same. It shouldn’t be—the title should follow the main themes of any and every page. For instance, the “About Us” page should be titled, “About Us | Great River Electronics”. The title is one of the most important tags you can easily control on a webpage, so make it count. The meta keywords tag should be relevant to the page’s content. The meta description tag should also reflect the page’s unique content—Google will often use this tag in their search results, so it makes sense to accurately describe what is on that particular page for deep searches.
Third, there are no H1 tags. Everything is done with the paragraph (P) tag. Google uses the H1 tag to help determine the main idea of a paragraph or as something “extra” important. You have to remember that SEO is about a lot of incremental changes, not one big idea. Tagging a heading as slightly more important can help, if you make sure that important keywords are contained in that tag. Again, good SEO is as much about good “keyword management” as anything else.
One thing that Great River has done is use keywords pretty well. Their products are mentioned, and even on the home page, “mic pre”, “microphone”, and “preamplifier” are all used. For someone searching for a mic pre but using different terminology, this is great thinking on GR’s part. It’s important (again) to figure out what the top search terms people use to find you. You can also develop some pages to grab the long tail of keywords too that drive less traffic on their own, but together can make a bigger difference. Some of the longer tail keywords for GR might be, “best mic pre ever made”, “neve 1073 mic pre”, or “Steve Albini’s favorite preamp” (I have no idea what Albini is using now). The main pages are great places to optimize for general searches that drive a lot of traffic, and deeper pages or an AdWords campaign are great places to optimize for the long tail of keywords.
Speaking of AdWords, GR should really be running an AdWords campaign for misspellings, at least. Take for instance a search for “mp2 mic pre”. It’s possible someone is searching for the MP2_NV but doesn’t know what the thing is really called. Either optimize landing pages for this search, or spend some cheap money on AdWords to guarantee you show up for this search. Having said that, letting your dealers do the job for you is good, as Sweetwater’s ad for the MP2-NV comes up when searching for certain related terms.
Site map. Have a site map and make sure that your important pages (especially landing pages when you make them) are within two clicks from your home page.
What’s a landing page? It’s simply a webpage that is optimized for a particular search. If someone searches for “Neve 1073″ which they undoubtedly will, have a landing page that is designed with SEO in mind to rank in Google’s top 10 results for that search.
Also, do a better job of “alt” tagging your images. Google can’t read pictures!
Do your best to see that inbound links don’t say click “here” and then go to your website. They should ideally be formed like this: mic pre or best microphone preamplifier.
As you can see, there’s still a lot of ground to cover even for a website that looks good and has been around for years. There’s much more that you can do aside from what I’ve covered here, but even doing these things will help a good website do even better when it comes to search results. Search results drive traffic, and great products don’t always sell themselves.
Monkbam Recording Studios