SEO Review of Laptop-Notebook-Review.com
This SEO Review on Laptop-Notebook-Review.com is a review based on our own experiences with our own sites & on occasion the experiences of some very knowledgeable friends.
Although this review is given in an advisory capacity, please do remember that anything we advise has already been implemented & tested on our own sites, including this one.
Having said that, this review will focus on not how pretty the site is or what the content is, (that is not really our concern).
It will focus solely on the various Search Engine Optimization techniques in order to help this website achieve better ranking not just for the home page, but also for the individual articles & posts.
Use Of Heading / Title Tags
Laptop-Notebook-Review.com
1. There is no H1 title tag to your index / home page although for some reason there appears to be a H2 tag on your “Home” button / link which should not be there.
2. Multiple use of H1 tag on the page, this is bad practice these days as multiple use of the H1 tag has been associated with spammers.
3. Use of H3 tag in sidebars, whilst this is not actually an error, it is usually better to use H4 as your heading tag in the sidebar & then use H3 throughout your articles.
4.You only use one title or heading to your articles & many of these are quite lengthy & get tagged onto your URL to form the permalink to your article. A much better way to do this is to use 2 to 4 strong keywords for your permalink title, with the strongest keywords to the far left (it does not need to be human readable as this is for search engines only). Then use a H3 tag at the very top of your article to create a more lengthy & human readable title / heading. When you finish writing your article, make sure to use All In One SEO and use your H3 title in the title box provided. Also make sure that the keywords used in your permalink title are also used in your H3 title & again in the first sentence of your article, also bold these keywords in your first sentence, but not the entire sentence as you will dilute the effect.
Example:
Note that the only H1 is the website title as it should be, also all permalinks are now H2 with H3 as the actual title to the articles & H4 is used in the sidebar. The H2 & H3 heading tags have a very similar weighting factor, yet both are seen as far more important than a H1 tag these days.
One other thing you should give some thought to is moving your top nav bar down and place it above the categories menu bar or do away with it completely & use a page widget in your sidebar to access those pages. (see following images to see why)!
SEO Text Browser View Of Your Page
Example:
A Comparison..?
As you can see, this is how the search engines will read your page, whatever is at the top left of the page is read 1st & in your case it is Home, Contact, About…
In the example it is My Blog Review in a H1 tag, followed by the WordPress tag line, which is just a short description. Nevertheless this is an important aspect of getting your site ranked well & one that is very often over looked. Always remember that search engines give more weight to what is at the top left of any page & this is the reason why you should always place sidebars on the far right.
Meta Details Of Site
Although some say that the meta tag details of a page are no longer relevant & therefore do not matter, this is not strictly true. A good title and description with 5 to 10 strong keywords / key phrases, will help to confirm to the search engines exactly what your website is all about.
Your Meta Tag Details
Your title tag is far too long as you appear to have combined part of a description with it. Remember the more words you use in your title, the more you dilute the value of each one in terms of keyword weight & value granted by the search engines. Try Laptop & Notebook Reviews and I am sure you will score far higher than 66%.
Also your description need a little attention, there is no need of hyphens or .com & would be much better starting with “Laptop & Notebook Reviews”
As for your choice of keywords, you are not going to gain any ranking value for the words you have chosen because they are far too competitive for such a young site. Ideally you need to create 5 long tail keywords / phrases that can be used regularly throughout your various articles & pages, something along the lines of “My Notebook Reviews”, “Independent Laptop Reviews”, “ Latest Laptop & Notebook Review 2010” etc etc
Whilst these terms may not have the monthly search potential of your current keywords, they are likely to have far less competition and therefore it becomes possible for you to rank well for them. The trick with keywords is to be able to strike a balance between monthly search potential & competition, for a site the age of yours, I would recommend staying below a 50% competition threshold until the site has gained some authority and in excess of 2 to 3000 unique visitors per month, then at this point gradually increase the competition factor and choose higher value keywords.
Keyword Density
Although not as critical as it once was, it is still worthwhile keeping a check on from time to time..?
Keyword Density Of Laptop-Netbook-Review.com
Ok as you can see in the image above, there are numerous occurrences of various dates..? I am assuming that these are due to the byline tag in your theme & not actually related to the article as such. If this is so then it is a fairly easy task to remove these date words / numbers & thereby increase your keyword density slightly. After all there is not much point in diluting down keywords & highly relevant phrases with what amounts to useless rubbish.
The Use Of Bold Text
Extract of Source Code From Laptop-Netbook-Review.com
On viewing the source code from your home / index page, it appears there is not any use of the bold / strong tags. Both the bold / strong tags & the italic / em tags actually carry more value than a H1 tag these days & therefore they should be used to add weight to the page by highlighting words or phrases of particular importance. A good example of this is the phrase I have underlined in red above, that phrase is the start of your article & as I mentioned earlier, it is always of value to bold your keywords or key phrase in your 1st sentence.
The reason I labour the point about the 1st sentence is that this theme uses a character limit to form excerpts and therefore using bold further down the page is not going to be of value to the home / index page, although they will still be of value in ranking the actual article.
Many of the measures mentioned here may seem trivial & insignificant, but I can assure you that by implementing these small measures, you will notice very quickly an improvement in your site & article ranking. It is also an unfortunate fact of life that many theme designers do not place enough emphasis on SEO for whatever reason & as such tend to build themes based purely on aesthetics, which is not always the best practice unfortunately.
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Jun 17 2010. Filed under Blog Review.
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Hi Bucee,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, but as you can see we have been very busy changing themes etc.
Anyway back to your sidebar..? Depending on what theme your using, it can be fairly simple to do or a complete nightmare, so the best I can suggest is if your using a free theme from WordPress, let me know which one it is & I’ll download the theme and checkout the code sheets to see what is involved. Probably be best to let me know what width sidebar you want adding also, then if it’s fairly easy to do I will do it for you and simply post a link here so you can download the new code sheets for your theme.
Cheers Steve (Admin)
Thank you very much for the great info. I follow everything and now everything is SEO optimized. After a day my Alexa rank got better without new posts.
Now I’m trying to add an extra full sidht sidebar, but it is not working for me.
Haven’t you got any idea how to do that?
Big THX for everything
Hi Gordon,
Yes the correct use of heading tags is very important, the H1 should really only be used as the title to your blog & then headings to articles as H2 & sub headings within articles as H3. This is the correct heading structure & helps tell the search engines what order of importance to place on the various content found on your blog.
If your in any doubt as to the relevance of correct usage of heading tags, simply read Fredrik’s comments above, I did an SEO review of his site & in a very short period of time he has doubled his traffic & dropped his Alexa ranking by a huge amount.
hi can i add H1 tag here in header.php? something like this:
does it have an effect? a positive one?
Hi,
Here’s another update….
My Alexa rank has gone from around 870 000 when we started down to 653 972.
This is very good and although you do not earn more money or get more visitors just by getting a better Alexa rank, I have also seen an increase in traffic.
I have also changed my link strukture for new posts that I put up. I used to let the automated link be as it was automatically created, but now I change it.
An example:
before:
sitename.com/asus-ul-30vt-13-3-inch-ultra-portable-laptop-review
Now:
sitename.com/asus-ul-30vt-review
Like Steve pointed out to me was something that I have read about before and just “stored” in the back of my head, for “later use”….
The link strukture is not for humans, it’s for the search engines and if you say that link to a post is 100%, if you use 10 words in the link like I did in my first example, every word is worth about 10%. In my other example I use 4 words and this means that each word is worth about 25%.
Have I seen any changes in traffic when it comes to the link strukture…. Although there are many factors to consider when it comes to traffic, I can tell you that one of my posts has gotten a lot of traffic, and when I check what keyword they are using it is the same as I use for my link so in short “yes, it helps you get traffic”.
If you have read this post and gotten some good advice that you have implemented on your site. Leave a comment!
Thanks
Fredrik
(just another thing…. If you get a lower Alexa Rank and you have ad-space on your site, you can normally charge more if you got a low Alexa Rank…
)
Hi,
here comes another update about the changes that I’ve made to my site and how they have effected my traffic.
Although the Alexa rank went down about 1000 over the last 24 hours this is not why I am writing this.
The number of visitors coming from a search engine has doubled! And like I stated earlier…. This is free traffic so an increase here is very good.
So how about the total number of visitors? This is what is truly great. I have gotten a lot of posts/reviews done over the last days (about 14) and sure that always helps but I had around 80 visitors per day on thursday and friday and that is ok since I have seen a “dip” in traffic on thursdays and fridays over the whole time the site has been live. But the thing that is really amazing is that yesterday I had according to google analytics 169 unique visitors. THIS IS GREAT!!!
Final words…..
You should go through your site and make sure that it is SEO Optimized. This is something that if you do not have a great SEO Optimized theme will take some time but once done you do not have to think about it unless there are some big changes in how you should format your sites headers, text etc. It is kind of a do and forget…… But you will not forget because you will be reminded everyday that you check your sites stats.
Once again…. Thanks Steve!
Take care!
Fredrik
Hi Steve!
Yes! I do love when a plan comes together!
Here is the code that I changed to make the logo into text so the search spiders have something more to “love”….
In the header.php I changed the div logo into this
[div class="logo"]
[a href="[?php bloginfo('siteurl'); ?]“][/a]
[h1][a href="[?php bloginfo('url'); ?]“]
[span id="h1"]Laptop & Notebook Reviews[/span][/a][/h1]
[span id="tagline"]
[?php bloginfo('description'); ?][/span]
[/div]
[!--end: logo--]
and in the style.css I added this:
And that removed the logo image and changed it into what it is now.
Ps. an update on my Alexa rank… I have put up about 7 posts in the last days and the Alexa rank has gone from about 870000 down to 704641… sure the posts has helped but much of the climb I give credit to what Steve has helped me to do on my site.
Thanks
Fredrik
Hi Fredrik,
Nice to hear a positive note !
Hey and don’t you just love it when a plan comes together..?
Keep us posted on how things progress ok
Regards Steve
Hi,
Here comes an update about what we have done on my site.
We went through all of the sub-pages that shows on the index page and did the changes mentioned above.
I added and changed some text in my main stylesheet for H3 and H4 so that it is the size that I want and looked like I wanted it to (bold for example).
We also changed my logo into text and also added a “description” line under that telling what my site is about. We also had to add some text in the style.css sheet so that the new “logo text” and the description line looked good.
I then went through all of my posts and changed every H4 that I could find into H3….. yes, it took some time but it looks like its worth it.
Ok, have I seen some results?
Well yes I have!
First off… my Alexa rank was before we started around 870000 and after the changes were made it dropped 50000. I had not written anything new or build more backlinks so I think this is mostly due to the SEO tweaking that we did.
I have now posted about 5 new reviews and one thing that I have noticed is that I actually got a boost in visitors. The number of visitors sure can jump up and down but I do not think this is just a coincident. It has jumped up an average of 20-25 visitors / day according to google analytics.
My visitors that arrives from a search engine has also gone up by almost 7% and this is “free” traffic so an increase here is very good.
I will post all the code that I can find of the changes that we have made in this thread so that you also can implement these changes to your site.
oh, one last thing….. THANKS STEVE FOR ALL THE HELP!
Cheers
Fredrik
Wow somebody is keen to get this sorted !
Ok mate, go to your admin panel again & this time you need all the code sheets named “content top”, “content left”, “content right” & “content bottom”
Go through each in turn and change as follows;
CONTENT TOP change any h1 tags to h2
CONTENT LEFT change any h1 tags to h4
CONTENT RIGHT change any h1 tags to h4
CONTENT BOTTOM change any h1 tags to h4
I know you may think this a bit strange, but at present your h1 tags are just the labels for each box ie. a category, your h2′s already exist and are the permalink title.
The h3 you set manually when you right an article, just type your title at the top of the page and then highlight it and set to h3 using the big wide button in the editor that is usually showing either paragraph or format. Once that is completed then go again to your style sheet and change the h1 to h2 under “featured” (which is content top), then with content left, content right & content bottom (bottom box), you need to change all h1′s to h4′s.
That should be your h1′s all sorted !
Hi again,
ok so I went through the function.php and then I went to the style.css and in there I just changed the H3 into H4…. only one change in the style.css…..
So, how do I go about to change the H1,H2 and H3….
Thanks
Fredrik
High Fredrik,
Your very welcome & I’m glad your happy with it !
Ok lets deal with sidebar first, if you login to your wp admin panel & then select theme editor, it will open on your style sheet, but look to the right at the other files & select “Theme Functions” – functions.php When it opens you need to scroll down through this sheet looking for BEFORE TITLE & AFTER TITLE simply change all h3 to h4. Then save & close this code sheet. Next you need to open sidebar.php and do the same again. Finally open style.css scroll about 2/3rds down to where you get sidebar entries, find the start of sidebar entries then scroll through it changing all h3 to h4, then save & close.
That’s it done mate as easy as that
Steve steve steve….!
This is great work! Thank you so much for taking your time looking at my site and giving me this useful feedback.
So now lets get down to applying all this good advice to my site.
First off I would like to know where do I change the h1-h4 tags? In what documents do I do this?
I thought I would break it down so I won’t give you to many questions at once….
Once again…. Thanks!
Best Regards
Fredrik