I’ve decided to take part in the Tuesday Push when I can. A lot of the other people write reviews, but instead I am going to look at the companies’ websites from a SEO & Usability point of view. So here is the first look at Dine To Read. They are a book club with a difference, they meet up, have dinner and discuss a book.
So generally when I look at the website the first thing I do is I check out the source to see what engine it runs on. And I am happy to see that Dine To Read has the latest version of wordpress (2.7.1). Looking further into the website there is an easy to use navigation bar at the top, and links throughout the website have a nice structure (using the permalinks feature on wordpress), and they offer all the relevant information, such as a privacy policy, contact form, etc. One change I would make to the contact form is to also have a physical address available on that page also. It’s also good to see that they are hosted in Ireland (with Blacknight).
There error page returs the right HTTP status code (namely a 404). But I would offer more infomation than:
The page you have requested does not exist. You might be able to find what you’re looking for from our home page.
Rather I would suggest they include a search bar (wordpress has an easy search function) and include links to some of their more popular parts of the website.
Getting back to the topic of search, this is something that is missing on their pages. Having a method where people can search through your site (especially if it is a dynamic site that changes often) is very important. This can be both good for existing users who remember a certain helpful page, say on the forum, but can’t find it anymore, as well as for new visitors so they can find what they want fast.
The titles of the pages should be improved. Title text helps users aswell as search engines. By tweaking your title text to make it more attractive. The main page for example “Dine to Read – A book club with a difference” really doesn’t use the title tag to it’s full effect. One thing with wordpress is that it lists the name of the website before the title of the page. This means that every single title will have Dine to Read at the start. Generally you will try to have the keywords you want indexed at the start of title. An example of what would be better wouuld be ::
- Irish book club with a difference – Dine to Read
- Book club that discusses books over dinner – Dine to Read – A book club with a difference
- etc
There is a great plugin call All in One SEO pack which will help you change titles of the pages, and it will also allow you to specify META keywords and META description tags on a per post/page basis. The META description is something that is used when displaying your search result, and when optimised (along with title tags) it can greatly increase you click through ratio in the SERPs. This would help pages in the News section to rank higher.
This will also help avoid content showing up multiple times. Wordpress is particularly bad at having more than one place where you can see the content of blog post. For example you can see the post about World Book Day : here, here, here and here, and if you had categories you would be able to see it in more places ! These should have the noindex attribute to them, and this plugin will make sure of that for you. This would be another reason why the news section pages are not really being indexed by google right now.
So wrapping up my 45 minute analysis , I would say that over all dinetoread.ie , is a solild site, but it there are still a few tweaks that can make it more sound.
Other things that are missing that could be added easily:
- a robots.txt file, currently this displays the main page and could cause problems. It doesn’t even give a 404 code, it says what is displayed on your robots.txt is an actual page.
- a sitemap.xml file to tell the search engines what pages on your website are more important than others, and should effect the order of such queries. Currently the forums are figuring higher than the main page for example.
*note : as this is a new site, there are not many inlinks, and therefore not easy to analyse this part of the website.
Because of the fact that I am never 100% happy with my testing results, I decided to run a new test on some new domains. Last year I posted about the fact that it is pretty easy to get your domain in googles index, but now recently I have seen some changes. For the sake of clarity I will label them domain A and domain B.
Details on Domain A :
- a previously registered .COM domain
- has google analytics code on the page
- has google adsense on the page
- only one page, this page in the google index.
- plain HTML site
- no previous versions of the site listed on www.archive.org
- registered in January 2009
- sitemap not submitted to google
Details on Domain B
- a new .IE domain
- doesn’t have google analytics installed
- doesn’t have google adsense installed.
- multiple pages, 3 in the google index
- wordpress based site
- registered in January 2009
- sitemap not submitted to google
Because domain A is a dropped domain, it is likely that thare are some links to this site. These could be from websites that list dropping domain names, or links to the domain before it dropped. In the past I have seen that google has discounted these, and often won’t list them completely. Google is very good at cleaning the slate for domains when they drop.
In the past getting a dropped domain to be indexed, was harder than getting a new domain to be indexed. Buying old domains, and recycling links was something Blackhat SEOs did in the past, and as expected Google has gotten a smarter over time. So I was suprised when I saw that the site:domainA.com operator on google was showing this domain
And for domain B with zero links, and hasn’t been submitted to search engines, it is indeed baffling why it would start to be listed in the SERPS.
Yahoo & Google Listing Differences
When I compare what yahoo and google lists for these domains, there is also a big difference. Yahoo doesn’t have any listings for either domain, and for all intensive purposes, it doesn’t exist in their eyes, and on the other hand Google is fully aware of these sites, and is listing Domain B for certain keywords. This would lead me to the conclusion that it is something on google’s side, and the only obvious advantage for Google is that I have browsed both sites with Google’s internet browser Google Chrome . After a bit of searching I wasn’t able to find any mention that Gogole Chrome can get your domain listed, but I do know that from their privacy terms it is possible that what you type into the browser is sent back to them. Google Chrome Privacy Info
“When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for.”
So this might be yet another way to make sure that your domain gets indexed by google.
Yesterday Damien’s SEO contest came to an end and google has been very nice to my entry mybluejumper.com . The basic rules of the competition were to:
- rank highest for the term [geansai gorm] on google.ie
- domain name had to be new
- .IE domains were not allowed
- no keywords allowed in the domain name
And here are the results:
Hats off to the other guys who but in some great efforts. I counted around 15 entries, all though I am not sure if some of them were created by the same person.
A longer post will be following in a few days hopefully. Where I will be outlining some approaches I took to things (obviously some things I won’t be discussing). As I am a great fan of stats, here are some:
- Overall I had unique visitors 788 to the website.
- The resulted in almost 6, 000 page views.
- The busiest day (besides December 1st) was November 16th where 73 visitors came and looked at my entry.
- 531 people visited via the keyword “geansai gorm”
- strangest keywords were “photosesion dublin” and “gigs in kerry”
- google delivered 601 visitors
- windows live gave 40 visitors
- yahoo sent 20 visitors
- 2 people came via MSN search
- 17 blog posts were created
- google indexed 36 individual pages.
- 232MB of bandwidth was used by visitors
- 7MB of bandwidth was used by googlebot
Daily search positions of the entries can be seen here.
Stay tuned or subscribe to my RSS feed for updates.
Recently I was searching for a list of all the regional google domains, and my searching failed. I was interested in seeing just how many regional versions of google, do they offer. Plus it would allow me to update my Google Global Firefox extension with a few more domains. Most people are aware that the version of the Irish Google is located at www.google.ie and that in Germany you can use www.google.de . But what about in Turkmenistan or Rwanda or Jamaica ? Searching a bit more I came across Google’s Langauage Tools page. This is the basis of their translation engine, their listing of what languages you can make google search appear in, and right down the end, a listing of all the Google regional domains.
Ranking on Regional Domains
The regional domains give preference to websites that are related to that region. Things that can influence your standing here include:
- Business address listing in Google and on your webpages.
- Domain name from that specific TLD. i.e. for google.de , using a .DE domain.
- Domain targeting on your Google Webmaster panel.
- Frequency of other locally related links.
- Server location, based on IP address targeting.
Also it is possible that language of a website and keywords in the domain have some lesser effects too.
While most people are aware of Google.com, there are also significant numbers of people using their local version of search. In fact Google will often redirect users to their local version of the search, as they know that the results which appear on regional search is typically more suited to searchers.
The net effect of having regional rankings, is that there can be different results in the SERPS for each version. Logically this makes sense, when someone searches google.ie for mortgages, it’s clear they are only looking for companies related to the Irish market, and the same is true on google.co.uk, etc. And the sensitivity tothe Irish market can be cranked up even more by selecting the “pages from Ireland” option.
For users this is great, but for a SEOs it can mean that we need to check multiple versions of google, to see the regional differences. But of course the positive side is that the competition to rank locally is a lot less 
Listing of Regional Domains
As the format that google provides is rather awkward to use, I decided to put together an excel list, maybe this will be easier for people to use. In all there are 162 regional google domains, which took about 15 minutes to organise into a nice formula. The list can be downloaded from google docs and I will updated it if google adds some more regional sites.
It is also notable that google doesn’t show versions on all it’s domains, i.e. google.us redirects to google.com. And there are even some domains that they don’t own , namely Google.by and Google.cm.
EDIT : Seeing as someone emailed me and pointed out that the google docs version isn’t that easy to use, here is a CSV version of the regional google domains. I hope this works for people a bit better.