It’s a rare experience to have site reviews with present and past Google visionaries in search. Matt Cutts, Greg Boser, Vanessa Fox and Tiffany Lane collaborated to share expert advice at today’s Search Engine Strategies San Jose Site Clinic Track session Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic
The reviewers didn’t pull any punches, “If you’re a spammer and are having your site reviewed in this clinic now’s the time to bail because we will call you out, you will get de-indexed and it will be funny.”
The heavy-hitter panel was comprised of Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media, Adventures in Search, Tiffany Lane, Search Quality Team, Google, Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC, Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Guru, Google Inc., and….The Site experts chose to review: MyPleasure.com – A sex toy retailer.
This expert-selected sex toys site is unique in that there’s no porn on the site and the founder is a sex therapist. Here’s the expert advice:
- If you want to get over the hump to sales, help users understand the product and know who is behind the site
- There’s too much stimulation on the page-swear to God I’m not making this up
- Conversion rate is low
- Add phone number so Bing.com can index and direct to a call
Site: RVZen – Site is in development, not available for review
- Great job with directory
- Keyword research
- Create community
- Made titles name of companies so you can rank for brand
Site: Meijer.com
- Don’t waste time with brand name in front on title tag if you’re not a well-known brand
- Leave as little as possible up to Google
- Google doesn’t recognize underscores as separators in URLs
- Simplify site structure
- URL structure is obstacle for Google
- Good link profile
- Adding original content is a big value to your visitors
- Analyze site search and help visitors find what they’re looking for
Site: TeamQuest.com
- IT Service optimization site
- Make it clearer who you are and what you do
- Do thorough keyword search as well as asking a user to describe what you do to get to the industry vernacular
- optimize videos for search
- Make sure that your blog, videos, podcasts add value, don’t do it just for the sake of doing it
- Host video on your own domain
- Keep WordPress up to date so it doesn’t get hacked
Site: CheapAirportParking.org
- Maybe choose a domain that is more brandable
- Lift nofollow’s for relevant pages such as FAQ which should flow page rank
Not all attendees headed the initial warning and this site got called out for paid links. This site will be lucky not too de-indexed for the sheer number of paid back links. Though the conversation went back and forth between the white and black hat benefits and potential downfalls, ultimately Google’s Matt Cutts got the last word.
“Buying links are bad,” said Cutts
The session started with sex toys and, appropriately ended with hookah
Site: Hookah-Shisha.com
- The site is doing a good job of social marketing and engages visitors with promo codes and incentives such as hookah points – again not making this up
- Great blog that talks about hookah etiquette and other community-minded issues
- Exceptional user reviews
- Drive traffic using plurals
- Drive traffic from the long-tail
Lisa Williams has been an online marketer for 12 years and search marketer for eight. Williams is CEO of MEDIA forte marketing located in Hood River, oregon which specializes in pay-for- performance search marketing for ecommerce sites.
