Written By John Aloia SEO/SMM Specialist with Active Web Group
The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Active Web Group.
This week we were supposed to start a new part of our blog. It’s supposed to be a point-counterpoint piece called, well, we haven’t worked that out yet, but, a colleague of mine, Michael Panuthos and I were supposed to write this together.
The thing is, we chose this site and after some analysis, both separate and together, we found that we were in total agreement about what’s wrong here.
First off, let me start off by saying that, just because your ex-roommate’s half-brother’s niece’s cousin has a computer and knows a little bit of code, it doesn’t mean you should let them build you a website. I’m not pointing fingers here, but, well, I feel like the analysis speaks for itself.
The Site
The URL of the site is “kardashianfragrance.com”. So, without the fluff, here is my analysis.
Update: Either they read this article or someone told them what they were doing wrong and changes have been made to remove the frames and start some SEO. The only thing is, now the site is EXACTLY the same on two different URLs; the one I have reviewed below and kkgragrance.com. Can you say “duplicate content”? I knew you could.
Below is what I saw on February 11, 2011.
Frames…
Really? Frames? How very “1999” of you. At the risk of sounding elitist, my 6 year old son knows this is a bad idea. “Why” you ask? For one thing frames make SEO almost impossible. Basically, your index or main page loads up with your primary content and then, when a link is clicked the new content just loads inside of the main page. The information that is necessary to SEO is never passed on to the browser. This is very similar to what happens with the crawlers.
Let’s look at it like this. Let’s say you have a product that you are really fond of and you buy it on a monthly basis. Now, let’s say that you want to put the page that the product is on in your favorites but, it is in a frame. So now every time you click on that link in your favorites, you find yourself at the sites home page, instead of the product page. Very much the same thing happens to the crawlers. They follow the links on the page and they keep finding themselves in the same place. Pretty soon, they just ignore your site altogether.
If the content of the page is loading up in a frame but the main part of the page isn’t reloading, then there is no opportunity for things like the title and the Meta description tag to change. These tags should be unique to each page. They serve important functions for the search engines and should not be ignored.
Flash
The entire content of the homepage is Flash. Do you know what the crawlers see? NOTHING.
Google claims that it has made some headway with crawling Flash, but this is still in its infancy.
While it looks pretty, it isn’t going to do well with the search engines and it is definitely something I would change. The same effect can be garnered using HTML 5. Even the use of a JQuery slider would be better for SEO.
Content
For the love of perfume, please, put some text content on your homepage. You need some kind of text content on the homepage. It has to be something that can be seen by the user too. Google is pretty strict about spammy tactics such as hidden content. This includes using white text on a white background. (The same goes for black so don’t even think about it.)
Content is king and solid content on the home page will always help with SEO. It needs to be informative and useful to the end user. The relevance of the content on the homepage will set the tone for the entire site.
Honestly, looking through this site, I was hard pressed to find any real content anywhere but on the product level pages. Even at the product level, content was sparse and keyword density was questionable.
There should be some kind of content on every page of your site. Here I have found entire pages of Flash and images but content is scarce. Also, I’d like to mention that, using the word “image” as and alt tag on an image, really isn’t acceptable, especially on every image.
URL Structure
What URL structure? It’s all framed. The pages all have the same address in the address bar, the same “kardashianfragrance.com” title and no description or even keyword metas.
Inbound Links
None. This site has no inbound links or Social Media presence of any kind. Kim Kardashian’s Twitter on the other hand scored a 100, but it isn’t linked to this website, so, it doesn’t count. This site has not been shared on Facebook either.
Brass Tacks
There are products available for sale on the site, but no one will ever see them because no none will be able to find this site. A search of the term “Kardashian Fragrance”, the sites URL, returns results that include multiple perfume sites but, not this one.
So, what have we learned?
We’ve learned that I can be pretty sarcastic and we’ve learned that Kim Kardashian NEEDS SEO.
Active Web Group is not affiliated with Kim Kardashian, kardashianfragrance.com or any of their affiliates.
