First thing I have to say about the site – it looks damn good and has definitely been setup by a SEO savvy web developer.  Basically, it already ticks the right boxes in terms of SEO:

1. Good content
2. Unique page titles
3. Good navigation (nice use of CSS for good visual effect and search engine access)
4. Good layout of content which lends itself well to keyword categorisation and optimisation

In all honesty if you were to come to me looking to hire me for professional SEO services I would turn you away because you really don’t need it.  You have a good SEO friendly site already and all you really need to think about is working on your keyword targeting a little better and then look at all important link building.

Nonetheless, I’ll make a few comments about the site – which you will have to excuse me for because it’s nothing more than nit picking but there are a few little things worth tweaking and won’t take you more than a day to do.

Adjusting your headings

This page has a great heading: http://www.apex-networks.com/support/outsourced-it-staff.aspx - it’s marked up using an H1 tag and it not only has your target keyword in the sentence, but also sends out a clear message to help your visitors quickly determine what the page is about.

I personally think that you should look at applying this concept to all of your pages as some of the service pages simply have one or two words as the title – although this would be sufficient for SEO, you can add more keywords in there to help target other terms as well.

Not essential, but goes that extra mile and can potentially help you grab a little more traffic.

Keyword targeting

I think your current approach to keyword targeting is a little on the soft side.  Ideally, you want to take every product or service you have and head over to Overture or Wordtracker or something and do some serious keyword research.  Find dozens of keywords for each product and service you offer and a few more to cover your generic business area.

When you are done with that, simply list all your pages and assign the keywords to each page as appropriate.  “Blue widget sales” gets assigned to your “blue widgets” page and so on.

Pick the best ones for each page (in terms of traffic volume vs relevance).  That’s your main keyword for that page.  Select a few more similar keywords – those are your secondary keywords for that page.

For example - ”Red widgets” might be your main keyword, and your secondary keywords will be “Red widgets for sale”, “red widget services”.

Use this data to re-optimise each page – it shouldn’t take too long – adjust your titles and headings appropriately (don’t feel the need to stick every keyword in there – mix it up a bit!).  Then rewrite your page copy to include these terms here and there.

You do this done and you will have expanded your keyword portfolio by a great deal, opening the doors to a much broader range of search traffic.

Content

Small word about content – it’s all pretty damn good – just a few pages are a little low on content compared to others, so perhaps try and pad that out a bit.

Meta

You are using common Meta descriptions and Meta keywords on each page.  Need to write up some unique content for these.  Don’t be tempted to use a few lines from your page in the description – your Meta description gives you the chance to write a keyword rich short sales pitch for the page.

Include the keywords that you are targeting (so when you rank for those terms, search engines will be more likely to use your Meta description for the snippet of text in the results) and write something that will encourage people to visit your site.

Page Title

Personally I would go with “Keyword – Brand Name” but “Brand Name – Keyword” is just as good.  It’s really personal preference and I wouldn’t worry about it.  The main thing is that you have the keywords in there somewhere.

Local targeting

This is key as many of your search terms alone will be very competitive and as you don’t serve a national market you want to look to refining your keyword targeting.

Some local SEO tips here.

I think an easy way to do this would be to add a small tagline to the footer of your page – something like, “Apex Networks – Business IT and Support solutions in Kent, London, UK” (your current homepage heading).  This adds a little more relevant keywords to each page and also adds in some local town names, etc to help you rank for local searches.  Stick this around about where your address is and that should do it.

Non WWW version of the domain

Doesn’t resolve.  It really should 301 redirect to the WWW version.  Not a huge deal for SEO unless people miss out the WWW when they link to you (which most won’t) – but worth fixing.

Index.aspx

www.apex-networks.com and www.apex-networks.com/index.aspx are the same page.  Not a huge problem (Google is ignoring the /index.aspx version), but you could throw up a 301 from /index.aspx to your root domain for consistency.

Link building

Obviously a key area.  Some of the backlinks showing on Google are obvious link exchanges which I would avoid, if for nothing else they aren’t that effective.

Take 10 minutes to Google for lists of free directories and spend an hour each month submitting to a few – be sure to get into the big ones first.  Also paid directories such as Business.com are good links to get if you have a budget to spend and here are some others.

To end with…

You have a great site – kudos to your web developer!  It’s really up to you whether or not you want to go a little bit further with your SEO efforts – how’s the web traffic you have converting for you just now?  It’s really a business judgement call to make but I think it would be worth it as they are all minor tweaks here and there and can make a difference.

Any questions feel free to let me know.

Cheers

Scott

The first one to be submitted was Homme-Rock.com, submitted by Jason Tye.  Homme Rock is men’s jewellery and accessories e-commerce site and has had some DIY SEO work carried out which includes keyword research based on public keyword tools and some free / paid directory submissions, blog comments and articles for link building.

Disclaimer

This isn’t a full SEO strategy.  What you’ll get here is roughly equal to the kind of thing that I might write up in response to a forum thread asking for site feedback.  But that said, I’ll try to format the response a little better and add in some more detail and hopefully some of the other SEOs lurking around can add in their own opinions (or speak up if I’m talking rubbish!).

Keyword examples for Homme Rock

Read this first.  I wrote it for this review, but it was suitably generic and I don’t want to repeat myself in other reviews, so I made it a separate post.

Some examples of keywords to target and appropriate pages to target them:

• mens jewellery – homepage
• mens gold jewellery – top level product category 1
• mens silver jewellery – top level product category 2
• mens jewellery UK – homepage
• exclusive jewelery for men – slogan
• mens jewellery accessory – slogan / homepage
• antique jewellery men – top level product category 3

So here we have a couple of keywords that can potentially be targeted to the homepage: mens jewellery, mens jewellery UK, mens jewellery accessory.

On page optimisation

On page optimisation refers to anything you can do to your site to help with SEO (without leaving your site) – so the key areas are:

• Meta + Page Titles
• Content
• Interlinking of pages

Using our keyword examples from above we can optimise the homepage using our 3 terms + our slogan term by targeting page title, H1 tags and some of the copy on the page:

• Page title – Mens Jewellery and Accessories for sale in the UK – Homme Rock

Why?  This targets our main 3 key phrases as well as including the word “sale” (useful for catching searchers who qualify their searches), as well as adding some branding to the page title.

This can be good for helping with click throughs as well – our title now says what we do, rather than just being a list of keywords.

• Meta Description – Homme Rock offer a full range of affordable mens jewellery and accessories for sale in the UK and worldwide.

Why?  Well first of all, this is a different line of text from our title, but still includes our target keywords (meaning the description is more likely to be used in SERPs).  We have also added in affordable (which can be changed to “exclusive” or “classy” or whatever as appropriate) and noted that we deliver worldwide (if appropriate).  This basically just helps reinforce what we do while at the same time repeating our keywords without being too spammy looking.

• Meta Keywords – just list the targeted keywords (and company name)

Why?  We don’t need to go overboard listing keywords – simply keeping it relevant to the page will suffice.

• H1 tag – Mens Jewellery and Accessories for sale in the UK – Homme Rock

Why?  Simply repeats the title tag.

• Content

A more complex area to optimise, but some general tips:

1. Repeat your targeted keywords, but don’t be preoccupied with keeping them together.
2. Perhaps refer to a product (within the description) as being “the ultimate mens accessory” or a “mens jewellery box” being a “must have”.

Basically, get creative.  You don’t need to say stuff like “Our Mens Jewellery and Accessories are the best Mens Jewellery and Accessories for sale in the UK”.  That’s just naff.  Keep it creative and tell your visitors what you do, what you sell and why you are the best – through writing this and keeping SEO in mind you should be able to knock together some great sales copy that’s also good for SEO.

Interlinking pages

Follow this process for each of your pages, and remember when writing your content you should be linking any relevant keywords to related pages.  So if you mention “Silver Mens Jewellery” on your homepage to get your keyword density up, then link it to your silver mens jewellery page.

Homme Rock SEO Audit

Generally the SEO is pretty good – pages are ranking for terms that they are targeting, but I feel that the homepage is much stronger than a lot of the deeper pages and this needs to be improved upon.

For example, this page targeting mens braclets uses two H1 tags – the first is up the top, linking back to the homepage and the second is where the heading should be (just before the content) with only a single keyword.

I would make these changes:

• Ditch the top H1 tag (keep it as a plain text link though – the way you change it from page to page is good, although it would try to keep the specific product pages mentioning the product type over the generic product category though).
• Keep the bottom one, but reassess the keyword targeting based on what I’ve said so far. 
• General on page optimisation should be kept relatively generic for this type of page (top level category).

I think something like “Mens Sterling Silver Bracelets for Sale” would be suitable – anything more specific should be targeted on specific product pages.

Most of your category pages use single word terms for headings and breadcrumb navigation – I’d update these to at least include “mens” to help keep the keyword targeting more specific.

For example, on this product page, we could keep it targeting “cuff bracelet for men” (or whatever keyphase shows the highest search volume) and as a secondary goal target the brand term, so:

• Title: Cuff Bracelet for Men from Fred Bennett
• etc

Note the capitalisation – not important for SEO, but I do think it is an important small point to take care of (in terms of the result looking good in the SERPs).

Branding

There are some variations in how you refer to your business on your site – sometimes homme rock, sometimes homme-rock – you should look to try and take a standard approach to this that’s mirrored site wide.  Not so much a SEO thing, but it looks better.

General

Some of your pages are a little low on content (mainly the product pages) so I would consider trying to write more comprehensive descriptions for your products (I know it’s tough – there’s only so much you can write about a tie pin!).

Overall you are certainly on the right track though – you’ve got some rankings for decent keywords and worth capitalising on those – I just think the main thing needed is to tighten up some of the keyword targeting, and perhaps create a few more pages to target other keywords as necessary.

Obviously link building is a key area that’s going to help you out – directories and articles are a good start, but perhaps think about a more qualitative approach – maybe you could get features in men’s magazines or a regular column on a fashion site?

Feel free to post back with any questions – happy to get a discussion going on this.

Cheers

MG

I think this would be a great way to show some practical examples of how search engine optimisation can help businesses.  I’ve been thinking about ways of posting about SEO topics lately, and to be honest I’m struggling to come up with some decent stuff because there’s so much to cover.

I had considered doing a guide to SEO, but really the web doesn’t need another one – so some real life examples would work just as well (perhaps even better in some cases).

This blog is mostly read by SEOs so I don’t expect a lot of submissions from readers just now – I’d appreciate it if anyone knows a business that might be interested if they could give them a quick nod.   And as always, I’m more than happy for any comments on the reviews, even ones that bitch slap the stuff I’ve been saying.  

SEO can be great for small businesses but decent SEO services can be expensive and well outwith the budget of many businesses – hopefully this way, a few might get some benefit.

I’m also interested in doing a few reviews of sites that have been hit by spam penalties or bans – this is a trap that many small businesses fall into – either through low quality SEO or by attemtping it themselves.  I’ve done a lot of spam fixing in my time, and maybe, just maybe I could give Matt a run for his money on that one.

- Scott