So you have roughly 8,500 pages that are part of your customer experience and that you want customers to be able to navigate to from your site and presumably would like customers to find on Google.  (from Screaming Frog).

But only 7,500 only pages are in Google's index.  So best case, roughly 1,000 of your good pages (almost 12% of all the pages on your site) don't exist in organic search.  Worst case, is that some of those 7,500 pages in google are depreciated pages that aren't part of your active site, making the percentage of live pages in google even worse.

It's very possible that a portion of your google crawl budget is being consumed by pages that don't help you.  If you get those pages out of the index, you stand a better chance to get your 1000 good pages into the index.

By "orphaned" do you mean pages that are no longer linked to your site navigation taxonomy?

If you know the subject matter and/or URLs, you can easy show your boss that they are indexed:  Google "site:oursite.com orphaned topic" and show him all the pages in the google index.

If you can't find the pages, then do a complete crawl of your site with Screaming Frog and see how many pages it finds.  Now compare that number with how many pages Google has in your index in Google Webmaster Tools (under Health -> Index Status).  Google Count of Pages - Screaming Frog count of Pages = # of Orphaned Pages.

Now to see if those pages are hurting you, run them through Open Site Explorer to see if any of them have backlinks.  If so, they are diluting your SEO efforts.  Even if not, look at your crawl stats in Google Webmaster tools under Health and see how many pages you're getting crawled per day.  If it's a fraction of your total pages, then if you got rid of the orphaned pages, you could be getting your important pages crawled more regularly.

I hope that helps.

Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

Hi,

The SEOMoz beginner guide was a great place for you to start.  Before you start focusing on tactics around optimizing specific keywords, I'd start with some site wide fundamentals.

All 4000 of your products have some basic product information that was probably created by merchants, and flows through your e-commerce CMS to your category and product detail pages.  So I'd start with some block and tackling to make sure that the information you already have about each product is adding the maximum possible SEO value.  The advantage of this approach is then you can teach your merchants how to improve their product content, and those improvements will automatically flow to your SEO.

Step 1:  Start by making sure you don't have any site wide structural errors.  Do some basic audits of the technical SEO elements on your site.  Set up an SEOMoz campaign for your site, and let it do it's first crawl.   For now just focus on the crawl diagnostics, and see if you have any systemic problems, and what your options are to fix them.  I'd also claim your site in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, and see if you are getting any crawl errors, and what HTML improvements google suggests under Optimizations.  This step is going to help you find problems like duplicate content, missing Title tags, sitemap errors, etc...

Step 2:  Make sure your product content is being properly used on your product detail pages.  Use the SEOMoz OnPage Optimization Tool.  Pick a popular product detail page, and use the product name as the keyword.  See what you can do to improve your Product Detail Template to improve your score.  Remember, you aren't fixing this one page, you're fixing all the product detail pages on your site.  If you have more than one template, you'll have to do each one separately.  This step is going to help you make sure your templates for URL's, Title Tags, H1's, Meta Descriptions, and Image Tags have good defaults.

Step 3:  Now you are ready to teach whoever is creating product records on your site, how to be more SEO savvy.  Do your products have SEO friendly names?.   Is your product taxonomy SEO friendly?  I.E.  Do you have an "Apparel" category when most of your customer are searching for "Clothes".  Are you writing great, unique product descriptions for each product or are you just cutting a pasting the manufacturers description (the same one that appears on thousands of other e-commerce sites).  I recommend you tackle this step in two parts.

A.  Teach your merchants how to be SEO savvy, and make sure all new SKU's are created with great content.

B.  Identify your highest traffic categories or products, and start improving your content a few SKU's at a time.  See if you can get your merchant to enrich 20 SKU's a day.  That will mean you'll have 100% of your SKU's enriched in less than a year.  I'd focus on your highest traffic SKU's first, don't worry about if they have good conversion or not.  Remember, SEO is about helping people that want your products, find them on your site; not about making people want your products.

Step 4:  Now, you can start picking small clusters of SKU's (or sub-categories) and do all the keyword research, manual optimization, and off-site link building that you've been reading about for those SKU's.  You can build an editorial schedule where you focus on a different product category every week.  You may already have a promotional schedule for your website, and you might target improving the SEO in advance of the promotional activities.  Say you're a hardware store, and are going to be promoting BBQ's in early summer.  You might invest a week in improving your BBQ category now.  Do some keyword research on BBQ (you might discover that you need to optimize your pages for Grill, BBQ, Barbecue, Outdoor Kitchen, etc...).  That might prompt you to re-write some product descriptions   Perhaps you pull a list of people that bought grills in the past year, and send them an e-mail asking how it's working out and if they would be willing to write a review on your product detail page.   You might think about sites, blogs, and editorial sources might be writing about grills, and earn some off-site links.  Perhaps you can offer a discounts on grills to a local BBQ Contest, that will include include a link your your BBQ category page on their site, etc...  Use SEOMoz to see what good links your competitors have for their BBQ pages and see if you can earn the same links.  Create some custom landing pages "Summer is the Perfect Time for Grilling" with great content and links to your most popular grills.

You may find that a weekly schedule is too short to make progress.  In some cases you may want to invest a few weeks or even a month on each category.  Perhaps you can recruit your merchants to help you.  "If we're going to carry your product, you should include a link to our site on your webpage".

By the time you get to Step 4, you'll be well on your way to having a great optimized site.  Don't be overwhelmed by your 4,000 SKU's.  A journey of a thousand miles, starts with a single step!

Good luck,

Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

The debate about subdomains vs. subdirectories has been going on for a long time.  You have to be careful about reading old stuff, because the best answer has changed over time based on changes to search algorithms.

I.E.  There was a time when "link-juice" was treated separately on each sub-domain, so subdomains could dilute your effort.  There was also an era, when Google would allow a max of two results per sub-domain on a SERP, and so people would use multiple sub-domains to get the potential for more links on a SERP.

At the moment, they appear to be roughly equivalent   And so the decision usually comes down to other convenience issues rather than SEO benefit   In your case, since you're already on a sub-domain I probably wouldn't bother to move them and do all the re-directs, ect...

I'm basing this advice, largely on Matt Cutts video answer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_MswMYk05tk

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_MswMYk05tk

It depends on what you mean by "Good".

IBM is used by more of the Top 25 e-commerce Sites (sites doing more than about $1B/year in sales) and has scaled larger than any other e-commerce platform you can buy, so in that sense it's certainly "Good."

I say "you can buy" because amongst the Top 25 sites, the most popular solution is actually to build your own solution.   That should give you a good idea of how Top 25 sites operate, they have large teams of developers that build features on top of the "platform".  They think of their product as a "platform" they develop on, rather than a turn-key "solution" they use.

In the Top 25, you mostly see In-House, IBM, Oracle, and hybris.  hybris actually only has 1 site in this group, but that's largely because it takes these firms a LONG time to adopt a new platform, and hybris has so much momentum in the marketplace, that I include them in the top tier.

If you look at a broader group like the top 275 sites (sites above $50M/year in revenue), you still see a lot of in-house, IBM, Oracle, and hybris, but you also see GSI, Fry, and DemandWare.  Many of these sites will still do a lot of development, but you'll start to find some sites trying to use the product as an out of the box solution, or sites that outsource their development to third parties.

Another challenge with these top end systems, is that (because there are so many extensions and customizations) it's very difficult to upgrade to newer versions.  I tend to call them "Re-Implementations" rather than "Upgrades", so even when the vendor improves the features of the platform, it takes a long time before the clients get around to upgrading (if ever).

Specifically with your IBM site, if it's older than about 2 years (older than WCS V7 FeP 2), then you have almost no business user tooling for SEO.  All changes need to be made to the Java Server Page files by programers.  If you have V7 FeP2 or later, you have tools to set the default templates for URLs and Meta Data (Title Tag and Meta Description), and you have good business user tooling to over-ridding those defaults on a page by page basis.  But if you need to do any structured markup, site-map generation, canonicalization, etc... you'll still have to do it via developers not business users.  Also keep in mind that depending on what else is in your stack and how it's implemented, such as a third party search engine (very likely if your still on WCS 6) or a content management system, IBM may not even control all the SEO elements for all your pages.

So at the end of the day, IBM, Oracle, and hybris are all "good" systems for very large sites.  hybris is more modern/younger, so it is more user friendly.  DemandWare is a SaaS solution and can be pretty turn-key if you want.  But none of these platforms are as user friendly for business users as the solutions for small sites like Magento or Shopify.

If I were running a $1B site, I could do it with IBM, Oracle, or hybris and my SEO team would be handing specs to developers to implement   The deciding factor between those 3 platforms, would not be SEO features, it would be things like total cost of ownership, native mobile support, speed, search, content management, merchandising features, and the ability to hire subject mater experts.  Frankly, the implementation team would be more important than the platform.

But if I were running a $20M site, I wouldn't want to do it on any of those platforms.  Note: Most $20M/year sites, want to be $200M sites, so it's still very common to see IBM and Oracle used on small sites, but they often struggle.

I hope that gives you some food for thought.  If you're willing to share more details about your site and your challenges here, I'd be happy to give more specific advice.

Cheers,

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

Small changes **CAN **have a big affect on e-commerce checkout, but in your case, I'd suspect one of two possibiliteis:

1.  Your customers are using the Google Checkout option, which isn't showing up in your analytics.  If you log into your google wallet dashboard, do you see any completed transactions?  If so, then you just need to make sure your clickstream analytics package is configured on your google checkout pages.  Are you using Google Analytics or another package?  Assuming you have Google Analytics with E-Commerce tracking enabled, you need to make sure that google analytics is enabled; so whichever javascript method you're using (ga.js, ga.js Asynchronous Tracking,
urchin.js, or the brand new analytics.js) needs to be added to your google checkout pages, per these instructions: https://developers.google.com/checkout/developer/checkout_analytics_integration#Overview

2.  You have a flaw in your Google Checkout implementation that is keeping people from checking out.  Ask some friends or family (who aren't too familiar with your webdite) to buy something and checkout.  Get someone to try using the Google Checkout option, and another person to bypass the Google Checkout and use your legacy payment path.  Are both test users able to checkout?  Do your analytics see both success checkouts?

It is possible that your analytics are working perfectly, that you Google Checkout is functioning fine, and that just the extra "cognitive load" of having two payment options is enough to drive abandonment, but I doubt it.  You could use Google Analytics (or another A/B testing tool) to run a marketing experiment with and without google checkout to confirm that the new option is your problem.

Good luck,

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

Hey David,

TripAdvisor doesn't use JavaScript to decide if you get the mobile version or note.  The server detects your useragent and then sends you the proper version of the site (on the same URL as you noted).

Remember, JavaScript executes on your client.  So the JavaScript would have to be sent to your browser and then execute before it could figure out what kind of device you were on and then render the rest of the page.  That's basically how responsive design works, except that most commonly a CSS @Media Queries is used to determine the width of your viewport, and then the page is optimized for that width.

What TripAdvisor does, is what Google calles a Dynamic website.  Basically the server handshakes with the browser before the page is sent, the server learns the useragent, and then sends different source code to the browser that is specific to that type of device/browser.

You can read about the google definitions, I'm referencing here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

You can read a bit more about the SEO implications of the three approaches in this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-a-responsive-site-kill-seo

I prefer to use Dynamic websites when the user tasks are likely to be different on different devices.  (i.e. Trip Advisor has a "Near Me Now" on smartphones, but not on the desktop).

I prefer Responsive Design, when my content and user tasks are going to be the same on all devices, and only the formatting/presentation is going to be the same.  (such as reading a blog)

I prefer separate URLs when the Information Architecture is going to be dramatically different on different devices, and it's unlikely that a single user is going to share URLs across multiple devices.  (Such as displaying a mobile boarding pass on a mobile phone, that I'd never offer on a desktop device, or scanning barcodes in a store).

In many cases, you can combine all three.  I.E.  detect different devices on server to send different images and menus (Dynamic).  Use @media queries to optimize my content for the exact width of my current viewport (Responsive), and have a separate m.URL for mobile only pages, like that mobile boarding pass.  The cool buzzword for combining responsive and dynamic is called Responsive Design with Server Side Components or RESS (I have no idea what happened to the W or C in that acronym).

I hope that helps!

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg.

That variable image shouldn't cause you any SEO trouble.  You should consider changing the meta data for the image (Alt Tag, etc...) with the image.

If you want to be extra safe, and avoid any cache problems with your geolocation feature, you will want to use a HTTP Vary header with "*" on the pages that have the GeoLocation personalization.

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

Hi James,

SEOMoz is a great tool to help you demonstrate subject matter expertise and give clients or perspective clients good advise.

• You can set up Campaigns for your target companies, and then use the Crawl diagnostics to tell companies about potential problems with their sites.   You could also use the OnPage Report card for this.
• You can compare their backlink profiles vs. their competitors, and identify opportunities for your clients to improve their SEO profiles.  The labs competitive link tool would be good for this as well.
• You can track their keyword rankings and notify them about significant changes in their rankings via campaigns or the rank tracker.
• You can use the new Fresh Web Mentions to find very recent news about your clients properties or keywords, and share those timely articles with clients.
• Lastly, you could use FollowerWonk to evaluate their twitter accounts.  You could recommend the best times for them to tweet.  Influential people they should be engaging in, etc...

It's a great toolset for your application!

Good luck,

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

Hi Steve,

At this point I wouldn't say responsive design is fundamentally better or worse than other options from an SEO perspective.  But there are a number of SEO pitfalls you'd want to avoid when moving from some other structure, to a responsive design.

First a Quick Set of Definitions:

"Responsive Design" means different things to different people.  If you ask 5 people to define it, you'll get 8 different definitions.

Most people (including Google and the W3C) would say that "responsive design" is primarily using media queries and proportional layouts to adapt a webpage to different viewport widths on the client.

Detecting UserAgents is actually a server side technique that would commonly be used for an alternative approach to responsive design, that google calls "Dynamic Design".

Many people mistakenly call both Serve Side Adaption and Client Side Adaption "Responsive Design" when in fact there are important distinctions for SEO.

Changes in URLS can hurt SEO

In either case, if you're moving from having separate URL's for your desktop (www.mysite.com) and mobile (m.mysite.com) to a new design based on responsive or dynamic design, then you are going to be changing some URL's in the process.  Any time you change your URL's you run the risk of hurting your SEO.  The best practice is to 301 redirect all the m.mysite.com pages to their new www.mysite.com responsive design equivalents   If you happen to be changing the main desktop URL's at the same time, it's even more important that you use 301's to preserve the equity in your old URLs.

Responsive vs. Dynamic

Google loves client side responsive design (it's the easiest/cheapest for Google to crawl), so it's actually their first choice, and you don't have to do anything special for responsive design SEO.

If however, you are doing "Dynamic Design" such as detecting user agents on the server to adapt pages for different devices, then you need to tell Google that the page will look different for different user agents.  This is done using the Vary HTTP  header.

Content Differences

Responsive Design means that you basically have the same content on your desktop and mobile version of your site.  That can mean that you don't have keywords which are popular on mobile devices, such as "download mobile app" which can obviously hurt SEO for those keywords.  Having a dynamic site (with different content for mobile and desktop) or even having separate URL's for mobile and desktop can sometimes give you a better chance to optimize your keywords for mobile searches.

Speed

Most Responsive Designs are slower than Dynamic designs or separate URLs.  It doesn't have to be that way, as their are work-arounds for Responsive Design speed challenges.  But fundamentally, responsive design means downloading more variations and code to the client, than a well behaved dynamic site, which means it's usually slower.  Too often, lazy designers use the same images for all devices on a responsive design page, and then it's quite a bit slower.

Pagespeed is an SEO ranking factor so, it can hurt your SEO.  If you choose Responsive Design, make sure you are only downloading properly optimized images for each device, and that you have highly optimized the pageload of your responsive design.  Your users and your search engines will thank you for having fast pages.

Conclusion

Responsive Design doesn't have to be bad for SEO, and in many cases it is better for SEO than other options.   The search engines have given us good options to have optimal SEO with any of the three major techniques for addressing device diversity, so I would't let SEO drive my architecture decision.

I'd choose separate URLs, Dynamic Server Adaption, Responsive Design Client Adaption, or mixes of the last two (Responsive Design with Server Side Components  or RESS) based on my user base, the tasks my users are going to want to complete on each device, and my development resources, rather than any concerns over SEO.

All the best.

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

If you have relavent, compelling content for a high volume google query then by all means optimize for it.  But remember that 20% of the queries Google receives each day are ones they haven't seen in at least 90 days (http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497828?hl=en) so don't be afraid to anticipate a future audience, even if the traffic isn't already in Google Keyword Tool.

Obviously, there are industries (news and trend based) that are perpetually in the cycle of creating, anticipating, or quickly reacting to new keyword spikes.

Either approach is valid, but I suggest you let your content and your passion for your audience be your guide.  If you produce great content, and you are confident their is an audience that wants to consume it, then don't let the lack of keyword traffic stop you.  The world just doesn't know they need your keyword yet!

Good luck,

-Jason

Hey Dana,

Smooshing images is always a best practice, but in your case, I tool a peek at your homepage and your images aren't that poorly optimized.  In your case image optimization is going to save you 30K of 176K in images on your homepage.  (I still wouldn't discourage you from setting up automated image optimization such as smoosh).

Your bigger performance problems are that you aren't using gzip on your CSS or JS files.  Turning on GZip for your .css and .js files would save you 110K out of 236K in text files.

By far the biggest thing you could do to speed up your user experience would be to set a reasonable browser cache for all your static assets.  You're website has many assets that are used on every page the visitsor sees (like all the stuff in your header, footer, and nav).  The browswer should download those files the first time the visitor hists and pages, and then when they go to every other page, the browser should know it's OK to use the local copy rather than going back to the server to see if their is a newer version.  But because their is no browser cache set, the browser is obligated to check with the server every time.  In most cases the browser will get an error 304 error when it asks for the same file again (error 304 means the asset hasn't changed since the last time you ask), so the browser uses the local copy, but all that hand-shaking takes time that you could save if you set browser cache times for all your asset.

GZip is #3 on the SEO Tips article you found, Browser Caching is #1, and those are the two things that are costing your particular homepage the most page performance issues.

-Jason

Hi James,

SEOMoz is a great tool to help you demonstrate subject matter expertise and give clients or perspective clients good advise.

• You can set up Campaigns for your target companies, and then use the Crawl diagnostics to tell companies about potential problems with their sites.   You could also use the OnPage Report card for this.
• You can compare their backlink profiles vs. their competitors, and identify opportunities for your clients to improve their SEO profiles.  The labs competitive link tool would be good for this as well.
• You can track their keyword rankings and notify them about significant changes in their rankings via campaigns or the rank tracker.
• You can use the new Fresh Web Mentions to find very recent news about your clients properties or keywords, and share those timely articles with clients.
• Lastly, you could use FollowerWonk to evaluate their twitter accounts.  You could recommend the best times for them to tweet.  Influential people they should be engaging in, etc...

It's a great toolset for your application!

Good luck,

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

Hi Steve,

At this point I wouldn't say responsive design is fundamentally better or worse than other options from an SEO perspective.  But there are a number of SEO pitfalls you'd want to avoid when moving from some other structure, to a responsive design.

First a Quick Set of Definitions:

"Responsive Design" means different things to different people.  If you ask 5 people to define it, you'll get 8 different definitions.

Most people (including Google and the W3C) would say that "responsive design" is primarily using media queries and proportional layouts to adapt a webpage to different viewport widths on the client.

Detecting UserAgents is actually a server side technique that would commonly be used for an alternative approach to responsive design, that google calls "Dynamic Design".

Many people mistakenly call both Serve Side Adaption and Client Side Adaption "Responsive Design" when in fact there are important distinctions for SEO.

Changes in URLS can hurt SEO

In either case, if you're moving from having separate URL's for your desktop (www.mysite.com) and mobile (m.mysite.com) to a new design based on responsive or dynamic design, then you are going to be changing some URL's in the process.  Any time you change your URL's you run the risk of hurting your SEO.  The best practice is to 301 redirect all the m.mysite.com pages to their new www.mysite.com responsive design equivalents   If you happen to be changing the main desktop URL's at the same time, it's even more important that you use 301's to preserve the equity in your old URLs.

Responsive vs. Dynamic

Google loves client side responsive design (it's the easiest/cheapest for Google to crawl), so it's actually their first choice, and you don't have to do anything special for responsive design SEO.

If however, you are doing "Dynamic Design" such as detecting user agents on the server to adapt pages for different devices, then you need to tell Google that the page will look different for different user agents.  This is done using the Vary HTTP  header.

Content Differences

Responsive Design means that you basically have the same content on your desktop and mobile version of your site.  That can mean that you don't have keywords which are popular on mobile devices, such as "download mobile app" which can obviously hurt SEO for those keywords.  Having a dynamic site (with different content for mobile and desktop) or even having separate URL's for mobile and desktop can sometimes give you a better chance to optimize your keywords for mobile searches.

Speed

Most Responsive Designs are slower than Dynamic designs or separate URLs.  It doesn't have to be that way, as their are work-arounds for Responsive Design speed challenges.  But fundamentally, responsive design means downloading more variations and code to the client, than a well behaved dynamic site, which means it's usually slower.  Too often, lazy designers use the same images for all devices on a responsive design page, and then it's quite a bit slower.

Pagespeed is an SEO ranking factor so, it can hurt your SEO.  If you choose Responsive Design, make sure you are only downloading properly optimized images for each device, and that you have highly optimized the pageload of your responsive design.  Your users and your search engines will thank you for having fast pages.

Conclusion

Responsive Design doesn't have to be bad for SEO, and in many cases it is better for SEO than other options.   The search engines have given us good options to have optimal SEO with any of the three major techniques for addressing device diversity, so I would't let SEO drive my architecture decision.

I'd choose separate URLs, Dynamic Server Adaption, Responsive Design Client Adaption, or mixes of the last two (Responsive Design with Server Side Components  or RESS) based on my user base, the tasks my users are going to want to complete on each device, and my development resources, rather than any concerns over SEO.

All the best.

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

Hi,

The SEOMoz beginner guide was a great place for you to start.  Before you start focusing on tactics around optimizing specific keywords, I'd start with some site wide fundamentals.

All 4000 of your products have some basic product information that was probably created by merchants, and flows through your e-commerce CMS to your category and product detail pages.  So I'd start with some block and tackling to make sure that the information you already have about each product is adding the maximum possible SEO value.  The advantage of this approach is then you can teach your merchants how to improve their product content, and those improvements will automatically flow to your SEO.

Step 1:  Start by making sure you don't have any site wide structural errors.  Do some basic audits of the technical SEO elements on your site.  Set up an SEOMoz campaign for your site, and let it do it's first crawl.   For now just focus on the crawl diagnostics, and see if you have any systemic problems, and what your options are to fix them.  I'd also claim your site in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, and see if you are getting any crawl errors, and what HTML improvements google suggests under Optimizations.  This step is going to help you find problems like duplicate content, missing Title tags, sitemap errors, etc...

Step 2:  Make sure your product content is being properly used on your product detail pages.  Use the SEOMoz OnPage Optimization Tool.  Pick a popular product detail page, and use the product name as the keyword.  See what you can do to improve your Product Detail Template to improve your score.  Remember, you aren't fixing this one page, you're fixing all the product detail pages on your site.  If you have more than one template, you'll have to do each one separately.  This step is going to help you make sure your templates for URL's, Title Tags, H1's, Meta Descriptions, and Image Tags have good defaults.

Step 3:  Now you are ready to teach whoever is creating product records on your site, how to be more SEO savvy.  Do your products have SEO friendly names?.   Is your product taxonomy SEO friendly?  I.E.  Do you have an "Apparel" category when most of your customer are searching for "Clothes".  Are you writing great, unique product descriptions for each product or are you just cutting a pasting the manufacturers description (the same one that appears on thousands of other e-commerce sites).  I recommend you tackle this step in two parts.

A.  Teach your merchants how to be SEO savvy, and make sure all new SKU's are created with great content.

B.  Identify your highest traffic categories or products, and start improving your content a few SKU's at a time.  See if you can get your merchant to enrich 20 SKU's a day.  That will mean you'll have 100% of your SKU's enriched in less than a year.  I'd focus on your highest traffic SKU's first, don't worry about if they have good conversion or not.  Remember, SEO is about helping people that want your products, find them on your site; not about making people want your products.

Step 4:  Now, you can start picking small clusters of SKU's (or sub-categories) and do all the keyword research, manual optimization, and off-site link building that you've been reading about for those SKU's.  You can build an editorial schedule where you focus on a different product category every week.  You may already have a promotional schedule for your website, and you might target improving the SEO in advance of the promotional activities.  Say you're a hardware store, and are going to be promoting BBQ's in early summer.  You might invest a week in improving your BBQ category now.  Do some keyword research on BBQ (you might discover that you need to optimize your pages for Grill, BBQ, Barbecue, Outdoor Kitchen, etc...).  That might prompt you to re-write some product descriptions   Perhaps you pull a list of people that bought grills in the past year, and send them an e-mail asking how it's working out and if they would be willing to write a review on your product detail page.   You might think about sites, blogs, and editorial sources might be writing about grills, and earn some off-site links.  Perhaps you can offer a discounts on grills to a local BBQ Contest, that will include include a link your your BBQ category page on their site, etc...  Use SEOMoz to see what good links your competitors have for their BBQ pages and see if you can earn the same links.  Create some custom landing pages "Summer is the Perfect Time for Grilling" with great content and links to your most popular grills.

You may find that a weekly schedule is too short to make progress.  In some cases you may want to invest a few weeks or even a month on each category.  Perhaps you can recruit your merchants to help you.  "If we're going to carry your product, you should include a link to our site on your webpage".

By the time you get to Step 4, you'll be well on your way to having a great optimized site.  Don't be overwhelmed by your 4,000 SKU's.  A journey of a thousand miles, starts with a single step!

Good luck,

Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

That variable image shouldn't cause you any SEO trouble.  You should consider changing the meta data for the image (Alt Tag, etc...) with the image.

If you want to be extra safe, and avoid any cache problems with your geolocation feature, you will want to use a HTTP Vary header with "*" on the pages that have the GeoLocation personalization.

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

Hi,

Congratulations on recognizing that you aren't the best judge of how useable your own site is to visitors.  Many site owners fail to realize that we are totally biased by our own pre-conceived understanding of what we intended when we build the site.  Here are a few notes to get you started:

Make the purpose of your site obvious:

One of the first things I like to ask myself is  what is the purpose of my website?  Is that purpose obvious to new visitors?  In your case, I think you are selling a variety of certification classes related to ecologically friendly occupations.  Do I have that right?  Honestly, it took me a bit of time to even formulate that guess.  Is their are way you could make your purpose more obvious?

You have a large carousel at the top of your site.  Most evidence suggests that Carousels are really bad for usability.  In your case, the strongest message in each panel doesn't  help me understand what you do:

Get into Solar -  Cool are you selling Solar power to me?
Become an Energy Auditor - Nice are you hiring?
Join the Clean Energy Workforce - Great, your going to help me find a job?

None of those 3 headlines, tell me that you offer classes.  Much less, why I'd want the class.  Are you expecting that I already have a green energy job, and I need a class to get a raise?  Get a new job?  Get my first job?  Do I need the classes to get some special accreditation that I need to keep or get a job?

What about these classes... Do you teach them yourself?  Are you an aggregator of other peoples classes?  If they are your classes, what are you qualifications?  What accreditation do you have to teach the classes?  How will my life be better if I take them?  Which one should I take?

All the titles in your top Nav, and the menu items that drop down are not self-explanatory.  What would a new visitor expect to see under "Corporate Solutions"?  What the heck is a BPI Building Analyst + Envelope?

It seems like you site is tailored to people that have a lot of familiarity with your industry and understand your business before they ever get to your site.  Is that your intention?

Some great tools to judge how useable your site is:

Do a FiveSecond test on your site using http://www.fivesecondtest.com/ or http://verifyapp.com/. Recruit some strangers to perform the test.  You'll probably find that the value proposition of your site is not clear enough to come through in 5 seconds.

**Make your conversion goal more obvious. **

Exactly what is it you want me to do on your site?  I'm assuming it's signing up for a class, but the Select a City button (for the find a class near you) is the closest thing to a call to action you have on the page, and it's very close to the bottom of the page.  I may never scroll that far down your site.

Be clear about who your audience is.

It feels like your site caters to people that already know they need to take a class, and already know that's what you do.  If so, you may be fine.  But if people are finding your site who don't know they need a class, or don't know that's what you offer, then you might want to rethink your messaging.

Is your bounce rate high (and your engagement low) because you are getting the right audience and they aren't getting the right message?  Or because you are getting a different audience than you expect? You have Google Analytics installed on your site, so go to the traffic sources report, and look at the summary page.  Is your traffic coming from PPC, Referrals  Search, or Direct?  If it's Search or Paid, what are the keywords that are sending people to your site.  Do the keywords match who you think your audience is?  If it's referrals what sites are sending people to you, and do they match who you think your audience is?

Is it easy for visitors to convert?

Assuming you are getting the right traffic, and (unlike me) the right traffic can easily figure out what you do and why they need it.  Then the next question is can those visitors easily do what you want?  This is where usertesting.com is a terrific tool.  Write a few of tasks that you think are the most common things you want visitors to do on your site.  Pick your top 3 and make sure they shouldn't take more than about 10 minutes for a user to complete.  Spend $200 to get 5 tests.  $50 of that goes to the test subjects, and $150 is very reasonable for what you get.

Whats the videos and prepared to be horrified by how non-obvious things are to average users (that will be totally obvious to you).

Get a free trial account from http://www.clicktale.com/ or http://www.crazyegg.com/ and record some user sessions.  Are people clicking where you expect?

Eventually there are tactics like A/B Testing, you'll want to include in your bag of tricks eventually.  But for now I'd stay more general.

That should get you started.  You might consider investing in a book, and if so I'd go for something general like:

http://www.amazon.com/Conversion-Optimization-Converting-Prospects-Customers/dp/1449377564/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8  <-- good blend of being generally enough and relatively recent.

http://www.amazon.com/You-Should-Test-That-Optimization/dp/1118301307/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363235488&sr=1-1  <-- the most recent title, but a bit too testing specific for you right now.

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363235512&sr=1-1  <--- a bit old, but the best/broadest overview on usability.

That should be plenty to get you started.  You've executed a lot of tactics on your site very well, so I'm guessing once you get a little bit of usability theory under your belt you're going to be in great shape!  Good luck!

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

The debate about subdomains vs. subdirectories has been going on for a long time.  You have to be careful about reading old stuff, because the best answer has changed over time based on changes to search algorithms.

I.E.  There was a time when "link-juice" was treated separately on each sub-domain, so subdomains could dilute your effort.  There was also an era, when Google would allow a max of two results per sub-domain on a SERP, and so people would use multiple sub-domains to get the potential for more links on a SERP.

At the moment, they appear to be roughly equivalent   And so the decision usually comes down to other convenience issues rather than SEO benefit   In your case, since you're already on a sub-domain I probably wouldn't bother to move them and do all the re-directs, ect...

I'm basing this advice, largely on Matt Cutts video answer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_MswMYk05tk

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_MswMYk05tk

Create a short vanity URL to put in the magazine (i.e. Life Magazine).

www.mysite.com/Life

Then set up a redirect for that URL that redirect to a landing page with a campaign code:

http://www.mysite.com/landing?utm_source=Life&utm_medium=Magazine&utm_campaign=Great

Now you have a campaign in GA you can track.

Alternatively, (as others have suggested) you can use a URL shortener:

bit.ly/adsf72 -> http://www.mysite.com/landing?utm_source=Life&utm_medium=Magazine&utm_campaign=Great

The shortener gives you a short url and an extra layer of tracking, but the short url will be less meaningful or memorable (unless you do a completely custom one).

If you want to go with a QRCode, do it in addition to (not instead of) printing, the short URL.

Use the shortest URL possible in the QRCode because short URL's = lower density QR Codes that are easier to scan.

So you have roughly 8,500 pages that are part of your customer experience and that you want customers to be able to navigate to from your site and presumably would like customers to find on Google.  (from Screaming Frog).

But only 7,500 only pages are in Google's index.  So best case, roughly 1,000 of your good pages (almost 12% of all the pages on your site) don't exist in organic search.  Worst case, is that some of those 7,500 pages in google are depreciated pages that aren't part of your active site, making the percentage of live pages in google even worse.

It's very possible that a portion of your google crawl budget is being consumed by pages that don't help you.  If you get those pages out of the index, you stand a better chance to get your 1000 good pages into the index.