Fused Nation – UK SEO Blog

Well I’ve been busy for a few weeks so haven’t had a chance to post much lately and on top of this I’ve had three submissions for SEO reviews over the past couple of weeks (yeh, posted back in December and no response and now there’s three of em in a short period – typical! ).

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