Gerard Doyle
Founder of Zippy.com.au Pty Ltd

www.zippy.com.au – Insurance Comparison Site

The aim of this review is not to comment and raise issues with the site theme or content, but is to give a creative and critical opinion on the sites Optimization features for search engine placement. The domain was created on September 5Th 2008 and at the time of writing therefore is around 2 weeks old. As one would expect it has not yet been indexed by Google:Google Site Index Records.

There are several key factors on the coding of the site that will effect placement.

Firstly any site should open in the browser with the world wide web ‘www.’ or without the www. showing. This site opens using both addresses. The effect of that will be to split the number of future inbound links pointing to the site, as search engines see both the www. and the none www. as 2 entirely separate sites. The result of this denigrates the link values pointing to the sites by 50% and seriously effects the resulting placement. This issue is easily corrected in hosting or using mod_rewrite to tell the search engine tools to index only the www. option.

Next on to site Meta tags. There is a page title coded in the Meta tags, in this case just the word ‘Welcome’. This is often the case with free template designs, however there are at the very least 3 basic requirements for meta page construction missing here and all pages should be treated completely separately.

Page Title – The page title is what the search engines display when yielding results, this tag should therefore be a tag which represents the content of the page and is attractive for a visitor to click on. Each page should contain a different 5 to 6 word phrase which encapsulates the page with keyword rich words.

Page Description – In this case missing from the site, Meta tag content description is ideally a 160 character keyword rich description of the individual page. Very often it is this phrase or part of it that forms the second line of content on search engine results pages. So it should be well written, keyword rich and reflect the actual content of the page on which it sits.

Page Meta Keywords – Also missing from the site. The site content meta tags keywords are used by the search engines to give your view of the pages key content. There should be no more than 5 or 6 comma separated words, researched for content, relevant to the page content and individual to that particular page.
The next point is that most of the content has been coded in HTML, with no Flash and just a few additional scripted links which have been duplicated with hard coded links on other sections of the page. This all helps, however the bulk of the sites contextual text is well below the fold and much of the first half of the code of the page is scripted layout. This should be rectified using CSS to style the page and allow the real page content, the paragraphs of content, to be both physically and virtually moved up the page.

The rest of the site contain a mass of keyword rich and attracted content embedded in tables and forms, and once indexed should prove a useful tools to generate good search placement.

With the above issues corrected, the next stage would be to launch a link building campaign and increase the online profile using social media sites. Search engines find web sites by following links from other web sites. Web sites which have high authority or credibility are visited by search engines more regularly. Thus they send search indexing tools to pages they link to more regularly. Your goal therefore is to generate some good quality text links from pages of both authority and relevance, pointing to your site. This is best done through link buying, however Google especially has stated on a number of occasions that it is not happy about sites blatantly attempting to enhance there placement using huge link buying campaigns. The art therefore is to purchase a few, regular and relevant links so as to resemble an organic growth of the links to your site. These links can be research and acquired via various link trading forums.

Next, my personal view would be to add a Wordpress blog to a sub-domain of this site. See the article Using Wordpress to crack open niche markets elsewhere on this site. Adding links both to the main pages and the blog pages in both directions. This will enable the site owner to add copious amounts of relevant content whilst not disturbing the look and feel of the sales pages. The addition of a Wordpress blog also allows for self promotion of the site articles on countless social media sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Furl. Many of these sites will suit the theme of the target domain and have the effect of not only increasing the site visitors but giving an instant improvement in the level of search engine activity to the site.

There is no doubt that the young age of this site will present short term delays in high search placement, but with a little effort and some self promotional activities, the visitor level and hopefully, sales from site will soon be showing a market improvement.

Do you want your site reviewed by our experienced SEO’s? For an impartial and objective review of your site please use the contact form to post us your site URL.

Todd Gallinger

Gallinger Law

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Chetas Patel

MobilePlace.co.uk