BodyC.com is owned by Body Central, a women’s clothing company specializing in affordable trendy clothes, what I like to call “Friday and Saturday night wear”. I receive their catalog on my doorstep ever few months and I’ve actually ordered a few dresses from them in the past. Their web site has come a long way, and although design-wise it can benefit from some updating, it is pretty easy to navigate. It definitely can use some SEO love, so here comes The SEO Girl to the rescue!

SEO Copy – You’ll notice that the homepage and category pages lack text, and are predominantly images. Search engines can sadly not read images (only their alt tags), so it is important to balance out an image heavy site with SEO copy. Body Central can use a paragraph of SEO copy on their homepage describing their trendy women’s clothing, excellent customer service, etc. Same goes for the category pages – I’d like to see one to two paragraphs on each category page talking about the specific type of clothes on that category page, why they’re so great for every body type, what fashion magazines they’ve been shown in, etc.

SEO Friendly URL’s - Click around the different categories on the site, and take a look at the url’s. They’re quite lengthy and contain a bunch of random letters and numbers. SEO friendly url’s are typically shorter and include a keyword phrase in the url, such as http://bodyc.com/women’s-tops/halter-tops.html . Search engines do often give a site prominence for keywords when those keywords are in the url. The hyphen (”-”) between each word tells search engines that there is a space.

Category Names - Take a look at the top navigation categories: “New Arrivals”, “Tops”, “Bottoms”, “Dresses”, “Shoes”, “Accessories”, “Sale”. These are essentially telling search engines your site should be ranked for “tops” or “bottoms”, which are of course very general keywords that don’t at all describe your product line. Better category names would be “Women’s Tops”, “Women’s Bottoms”, “Women’s Dresses”, and etc. These more specific category names more accurately describe what Body Central is about, and the site is much more likely to rank well for “women’s tops” and “women’s bottoms”.

Facebook - There is a Body Central Facebook Business Page, but it’s barely updated. The site could be adding say, 3 products from their “Sale” section each week as photos to the business page to get people coming to their site and buying the sale items. Facebook Fan-only promotions and coupon codes would also be great for their social media presence and site. There should also be a link on their homepage to their Facebook Business Page. Take a look at the Wet Seal Facebook page – they do a great job of adding product photos and creating a community of over 7,000 members.

Just a few quick tips for the site, but they really can go a long way to making BodyC.com more SEO friendly and better able to take on their competition. The women’s clothing industry is such a competitive industry and I’d really like to see Body Central thrive.

Want The SEO Girl to review your site? Email theseogirl@gmail.com!