The SEO Girl

You already know how much I love SEO, and believe me, I have a lot of love to go around. While you’re feeling the love this Valentine’s Day, do your part to help the Geeks With Heart movement!

Geek Girls Network™ & Geeky Clean have created a fundraiser to support the Haiti Relief called Geeks With Heart.

Through Mercy Corp, Geeks With Heart has a fundraising goal of $2500 and there’s no minimum for donations. If you can spare just one special cup of coffee, an iTunes download, or a crispy chicken sandwich, donate to Haiti instead. Show Haiti why geeks have heart!

As extra incentive, and not that you need any, once Geeks With Heart reaches $2500, all who donated will have the chance to win a prize from an amazing grab bag of geek prizes!

So donate, tweet it up, put a badge on your website, and tell all your friends and family. Thanks!

Geeks With Heart: http://www.mercycorps.org/fundraising/geekgirls

If you’ve met me in real life, you’ve probably seen me whip out a tube of berry Yes To Carrots lip balm (several hundred times) or heard me talk about their sister brand, Yes To Tomatoes, and how much I love it. I’ve been to the Yes To Carrots website, Twitter, and Facebook, many many times, and like any SEO worth her salt, there’s some things we notice a bit differently about a website. Yes To Carrots has an exceptional social marketing campaign and overall brand personality, and they’re definitely a brand to keep an eye on! (Fellow SEO girls – you must check out their body butter, so wonderful.)

Homepage Image: The first thing you’ll notice about the site is the very attractive homepage. The second thing: it’s all an image, oh no! A search engine is basically glossing over this page as they can’t read images. Ideally, the page should be balanced with an adequate amount of SEO-friendly text and images. Plus, visitors utilizing screen-readers to access the page will be able to identify what’s actually on the Yes To Carrots page.

The homepage does include image alt tags, which is great, but be sure they’re in a consistent format. Some read “Body Butter”, while others read “hand_and_elbow_cream”. A very small point, but great for consistency and having a clean website.

Page Title: Check out my previous post, “Ask The SEO Girl: Should My Page Title Include My Website’s Name?”, about adding your brand name to each page title on your website, along with a keyword phrase you’d like to rank for. Their homepage page title includes the Yes To Carrots brand name, but their interior pages lack it. Go for consistency and branding and add that brand name in!

Twitter.com/YesToCarrots: This is an example of a company Twitter page done so right. They’ve identified a brand personality of embracing a refreshing, healthy lifestyle, with an optimistic outlook. From their own tweets to the posts they decide to retweet, their Twitter posts reflect this personality. They don’t just tweet to tweet – they do it with a purpose, and they do it well.

Facebook.com/YesToCarrots: They convey that same vibrant personality on Facebook. We’d like to see them have different posts on Twitter and Facebook, but we applaud them for keeping their page updated, posting new status messages, adding photos, and posting new discussion topics. Their loyal fan base has responded back by embracing how active they are on social platforms and interacting with them.

Yes To Carrots is an exciting brand with products that meet and way exceed what’s said in their marketing messages. They can benefit from some SEO improvements, but their social media campaign sets the bar, and sets it high, for what a successful social campaign should be. Now time to re-apply my berry lip balm and get started on more SEO copy!

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!

I’m all about change and constantly looking to the future, and I firmly believe in the quote “Change is the only constant”. You’ll start to see a few new recurring features at The SEO Girl blog:

• Ask The SEO Girl – I often get emails from readers with SEO and social media questions. I’m still always available at theseogirl@gmail.com to answer questions, but will now be sharing some questions and answers right on the blog. Email your SEO or social media question to theseogirl@gmail.com with “Ask The SEO Girl” in the subject line!

• The SEO Girl To The Rescue – I’m always wondering around online, and as a happy SEO geek, often spot ways to improve a site’s SEO. I’ll be randomly choosing a web site to review and making a few SEO and social media suggestions for the site. Sure, I may annoy a webmaster or two, but constructive criticism should always be welcome. Want your site reviewed? Email theseogirl@gmail.com with “The SEO Girl To The Rescue” in the subject line.

• SEO For Your Industry – I believe there is no “one box” style to SEO, and although the core SEO strategies are relatively constant, there are different SEO and social media techniques for every industry. I’ll be chatting about SEO/SMO tactics for different industries in this feature.

Have any features you’d like to see? Leave a comment and let me know!