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Thoughts on our website layout/content/SEO--help

H

hifimono

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
79
We recently switched over platforms with the company that hosts our website which provided us with a new layout, SEO-friendly URLs & alt image text.

I've been working on adding images, h1 tags & other text as well. (I did not design this site. I'm just maintaining it and working with the company who designed it regarding updates that I can't do).

I'm just curious on other's thoughts about the layout, possible errors (validator.w3.org), our current lack of a site map....etc

www.legendsofthefield.com

Your input is greatly appreciated since this is not my forté.

-Tom
 
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Viewing this on my iPad, so it may differ for you:

I don't like the img in the upper left cutting off your navigation bar
The different colors in your footer (mail, account, support...) should be separated by some sort of border
Images under news need margin, the text is hugging the image
Textbox and go button In the upper right go outside of their containing bar
Also not a fan of the white border around your main container

But, i like your layout! Little details here and there. Good use of grids :)
 
Should I be adding h1 tags like I'm doing under Baseball & Football?
The h1, h2 tags on the front page are also in the middle of the page.
Is this a big deal?
 
What about Duplicate title tags & Duplicate meta descriptions ?
Google Webmaster Tools says we have 3000 & 2000 respectively.
How does this affect us?

I'm also verifying our site with Bing & Yahoo.
 
There is an awful lot of text on the main page, it's too busy IMO.
 
Sorry I can't go through every validation error, there's over 70 of them. Just work them out 1 at a time.

Also your graphical headers look broken in Opera. The "Featured Items" and "Information" ones specifically. The Featured Items header has no transparency applied to the top right corner (looks grey), and the text for the headers are pushed way on the bottom.

I'm coming from a fresh install and I don't have FF, Chrome, etc. to test it on those. Other than that the layout seems to look normal. It's definitely not optimal but it seems to look the way it was intended to look.

Duplicate title/descriptions isn't a huge deal but it would be good to eventually create unique titles/descriptions. It won't help you get Google to index more pages but it will help people who search Google to click your link. If it's informative and explains what the page is about then people are more likely to click it.
 
I'm using xml-sitemaps.com to generate our sitemap.
I'm wondering if I should get the standalone version for unlimited pages... or if it even matters since Google will crawl our page...and just to go with the 500 page limit.
 
If you have FF I like the tool YSlow and Firebug... they do a good job of helping you break stuff down and see where a lot of your problems may exist... Your site got a 'D' overall in Yslow due to many HTTP requests and other items.. Definitely turn on GZIP compression if you can so that way it will help speed up the images/graphics within the site.

Personally I would expand your content panel width to take up more of the screen.. I am working on a 1280x1024 screen and the content takes up a little over a third of the screen.. Use your screen width to more advantageous sizes. Also, get rid of the memorabilia news at the bottom of the main page... make a quick link to it in your Feature Items module... Also, cut down your "Featured Athletes" section on the right side. Definitely WAAAAY to long... do the "Top 5" and then have a "view more featured athletes" under the final one. Then have that move to a dedicated page for you feature athletes.
 
A request for the domain root returns a 302 redirect to a page with a meta refresh = 0. This is a Bad Thing, you ideally want to return a page of content on a 200 error code, or if you really must redirect, at least do it via a 301.

The dupe title / descriptions will be causing content filtering at that scale, I would think. Certainly, the site isn't ranking that well for its main terms, and I suspect a lot of the pages have been pushed back to the supplememental index.

H1 / H2 headers are a good idea, so long as they are being used to mark up the page in a structural way.

The really huge thing that needs fixing is the root domain behavior. Then you'll be able to see whats actually going on
 
It actually took me about 3 tries to even get the page to load, don't know what is up with that, but at first glance there are a couple issues. Like someone said the image in the top left looks kind of weird there, and it also seems to be pushing the links bar over or something (the part with baseball, basketball gootball etc links across the top). It this bar is pushing further to the right than the rest of the page. Also the "help" and the "0 Items - $0.00" are outside the border of the page. This is what I'm seeing anyways, I'm using the latest firefox browser.

It doesn't seem to do this on every page for me, just when I click some links, I don't know enough about website building to help you, but it would seem to me that there is some sort of script error in there.
 
General thoughts:
- Another vote for "Yslow".... Many granular points can be summarized with that plugin for Firefox.
- Overall I feel the general layout looks cramped. (Widening the presentation area by just a few hundred pixels would provide more options for content positioning.)
- Side images run into each other with no visible separation. Basically a color blur.
- Business-driving pieces (ex: Mailing List) seem to take a backseat to less important items (ex: Facebook "likes" metrics).

Why should anyone care right now if a site validates W3C perfectly, includes various SEO nuances for Url's, and looks just as well on < 5% of the web browser market when the higher level design is in need of significant improvements?
 
>> Why should anyone care right now if a site validates W3C perfectly, includes various SEO nuances for Url's

Well, validation *is* a ranking factor in Google (albeit a very minor one), and getting URL structure right is just crucial. I see plenty of sites that should rank well but don't, because their dreadful URL structures effectively lock the spiders out of the content.

What a site looks like is so far down the list of "things that are important" it just isn't funny. A wise man once said "ugly sells", and it turns out he was right.
 
TallTroll said:
>> Why should anyone care right now if a site validates W3C perfectly, includes various SEO nuances for Url's

Well, validation *is* a ranking factor in Google (albeit a very minor one), and getting URL structure right is just crucial. I see plenty of sites that should rank well but don't, because their dreadful URL structures effectively lock the spiders out of the content.

What a site looks like is so far down the list of "things that are important" it just isn't funny. A wise man once said "ugly sells", and it turns out he was right.
Click to expand...
Url structure for "SEO friendliness" is trivial to implement; many e-comm packages have this OOB, or can be assisted with mod_rewrite, an ISAPI, or another minor programmatic capture/redirection.

The site as-is does not prohibit crawlers; it can be tweaked in some minor areas, but it's still possible. But the site is cramped and claustrophobic (especially the homepage), which will not help sales conversion.

My main point is website crawlers aren't making purchases and paying the bills; people are. Sales and customer-presentation are the areas needing the greater emphasis for the moment. Enough work has been put in SEO tweaks for now, plus other areas with a smaller ROI; though these areas should be revisited later when other larger tasks have been addressed.
 
>> Url structure for "SEO friendliness" is trivial to implement

Mmmm, not always - much depends on the backend setup. I'm not disagreeing with you, since it certainly *should* be a simple job, but writing RegEx rules requires that the existing URLs be consistent in the first place, so you can translate back and forth from exposed URLs to "real" ones consistently, and I can say from painful experience that it's not always the case

In a case like this site, where a 3rd party feed is providing a lot of the content, you are also at the mercy of the feed writers, who have nasty habit of changing cat names, reorganising their data structure, and all manner of other idiocy without telling anyone, and your lovingly crafted rewrite rules just break. I've even had instances of feed providers switching how they delimit their data without telling anyone

"Dude, I'm bored of pipe delimited data, let's do something sexy in XML"
"Coooooool!"

Yeah, awesome...

>> The site as-is does not prohibit crawlers;

Um, not technically, since a request for the root domain *does* resolve, eventually. But a 302 redirect to a page that only contains a meta refresh = 0 command is about as unfriendly as you can get without actually banning bots via robots.txt

Put it this way, if you asked Matt Cutts "whats wrong with my site?" at a conference, I'd bet thats one of the first things he'd mention
 
TallTroll said:
Mmmm, not always - much depends on the backend setup. I'm not disagreeing with you, since it certainly *should* be a simple job, but writing RegEx rules requires that the existing URLs be consistent in the first place, so you can translate back and forth from exposed URLs to "real" ones consistently, and I can say from painful experience that it's not always the case
Click to expand...
Agreed. But the task is something that can be discussed (and possibly reassigned) with the original developer of the E-Comm package... or at least getting the possibly Url combinations/querystrings to parse. This is simply managing relationships/partnerships, or some hired/staffed developers to do enhancements.

TallTroll said:
In a case like this site, where a 3rd party feed is providing a lot of the content, you are also at the mercy of the feed writers, who have nasty habit of changing cat names, reorganising their data structure, and all manner of other idiocy without telling anyone, and your lovingly crafted rewrite rules just break. I've even had instances of feed providers switching how they delimit their data without telling anyone
Click to expand...
This is not an atypical concern when dealing with *any* external requirements for your site to function and stay current. There are validation routines that can be done, and even requested from the feed maintainer (such as XSD). This is simply another responsibility on the feed maintainer to publish changes in a timely manner, but deserves some homework by the implementer to know when things change and *when* to process these changes. Again, just part of design to CYA.

TallTroll said:
Um, not technically, since a request for the root domain *does* resolve, eventually. But a 302 redirect to a page that only contains a meta refresh = 0 command is about as unfriendly as you can get without actually banning bots via robots.txt

Put it this way, if you asked Matt Cutts "whats wrong with my site?" at a conference, I'd bet thats one of the first things he'd mention
Click to expand...
The whole point of using a different HTTP handler is to intercept these calls is to prevent the hard-302 errors and handling mechanism from receiving the brunt of the legwork for parsing Url's. Having a failover to 302 handling is also recommended, but it isn't your single front-line processor. I'm sure you could find other people, such as UI/UX, that would disagree with Matt Cutts in that priority list. But the list of "what who's who disagrees with anyone else" is a downward spiral that doesn't ever get a clear resolution.


@TallTroll: I agree that we're coming from the same general direction. Coming back to my main point: the OP has done a good job of getting people to the site so far, and there's plenty of things to do to enhance, but the visual mess is difficult to navigate and is off-putting. So sales-conversion from any SEO is at risk, and sales foot the bill for the website, hosting, etc. And that is what I see as the current highest issue for getting revenue from the site.
 
>> I'm sure you could find other people, such as UI/UX, that would disagree with Matt Cutts in that priority list

Absolutely, and to a greater or lesser extent, they'd be right to argue the point. The current behaviour is just a near lockout for spiders though, certainly Google, because they can't handle 302's correctly, even with 1000 PhDs on staff. They never have, either, and if we've told them once, we've told them a thousand times, I swear

Since the meta keywords tag is useless for anything but seeing what phrases someone thinks they should rank for, I took the liberty of checking a few out, and the site is tanked for most of them, if it even ranks at all. Other than the 302 >> meta refresh causing a canonical struggle and / or getting perilously close to "sneaky redirect" territory, I can't see another objective reason for that

I even used the Magic Wildcard (tm) process to see what terms Google thinks the site is strong for. As an example, the site ranks #1 for "Authentic Blue Chicago Cubs", but only because no other page on the entire interwebs uses that exact phrase in their title tag. This is not the behaviour of a well site :(

>> So sales-conversion from any SEO is at risk, and sales foot the bill for the website, hosting, etc

I do totally take your point, yes, but fixing this one issue would let the site gain a lot of rankings (which is not necessarily the same as traffic, granted) that it *should* be getting. If people are seeing it, they might then be persauded to buy, but I'd be willing to bet that the site isn't getting much traffic from new visitors via search engines at the moment.

Fixing it wouldn't detract from the user experience (and in fact would likely improve it immensely, because I suspect the redirect mares nest is responsible for a lot of the long load time issue), and would deliver significant new traffic, I think. Once you've *got* some traffic, you can work on converting them. Relying on repeat business and direct nav traffic isn't doing the site a long term service, IMO

However, I'll freely admit that as I'm an SEO guy, I tend to see things in terms of SEO. It's not like I'm advocating a massive SEO-led refit of the site, just sort that HTTP code out...

Damn, we've totally hijacked this thread
 
Hijacked, indeed :)

Getting back on topic.... If the search engines are completely unable to crawl anything on an online goods shop, then there's a big issue. I'll concede my point as the current top priority given that information. But the good news is that the OP has tons of good info in this thread to evaluate.
 
I'm just going to comment on the layout as that's what I do.

It's a bit out-dated and too busy. It looks like it's ~5yrs old, which is pretty long in internet years. What makes it out-dated? It's cramped, there are too many elements on the screen at once, and the text could be bigger. It takes a few seconds to figure out where you need to go on each page, and I feel there needs to be a clearer separation between sections.

But hey, I'm snobby when it comes to layout. Your website looks OK and it functions. That's all that matters.
 
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