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So in a nutshell this is how I list out products at present but I don't group size just colours, we then have related items linking through to there sizes.
Egyptian Bath Towels (15 colours) Alt tags all contain colour as well.
Egyptian Bath Sheets (15 colours)
A lot of food for thought there. For me, the key is to find the one person who can write the content hit that sweet spot. The search continues!
Egol, thanks for all your advice.
Hi Egol,
Many thanks for your answers, really helpful.
The trouble with our products is that primarily they are the same things with a size, colour or quality change so you end up with the same old description re-written several times over to avoid duplicate content.....not engaging, dynamic or enticing in anyway.
I would be interested to scan a site you work on if possible, more from do you have a url? I appreciate this is a bit cheeky so tell me where to go if so 
The trick is finding a good copywriter in our domain. The company owners know the products well but like myself lack the ability to put these into good quality content.
Thanks for your help
Craig
We always talk about great engaging content being the way forwards for sites. As a small business this is an expensive commodity to outsource when you have probably in the region of 250 pages that could probably all use some work.
To that end I have some questions.
I am sure this has all been asked before but what the general consensus right now?
Theres me being all organised and giving each advert a header!
Thanks for the pointer!
This came back in my on page grade for this url.
http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/blog/choosing-the-right-towels.aspx
Avoid Multiple Page Title Elements
Web pages are meant to have a single title, and for both accessibility and search engine optimization reasons, we strongly recommend following this practice.
Recommendation: Remove all but a single page title element.
I can't see it, can you?
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your input, invaluable!
Well its going to be a warm weekend on the coast so enjoy the lovely sunshine and birthday!
Regards
Craig
Thanks for the answer. I'll take a closer look at this.
Regards
Craig
Thanks Dan, a good answer.
We already have products reviews, however we have had problems with integrating these so they are passing on seo value as the are provided by a 3rd party, Feefo. A bit of java script supplies the reviews at present.
What's your thought on categories? As I suggested or otherwise?
Appreciate your input.
Craig
I want to keep our site up to date and fresh with content. How often should I update categories and products pages with content? What angel should I take with categories (new products/services etc.)
Thanks Craig
Thanks chaps. The other issue it also flags up is duplicate data as now no canonicalisation is in place. double whammy. I'll get the web company to allow us to update these for the future.
This is a interesting one I think.
I have recently taken down some product list pages from our website www.towelsrus.co.uk. These have canonicalisation in place to deal with pages where a query string is generated depending on the search criteria.
When I put a 301 redirect in place the target page redirects fine, however webmaster tools then errors with 404 on all canonicalised pages.
Is this correct behaviour and how do we get over this?
Hi,
Thanks for the video, a novelty to say the least. Again I think your response just further justifies the changes i am going to make to the primary nav.
Thanks again.
Regards
Craig
Hi Lucas,
Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Really appreciated.
In response to the URL structure, this is auto generated by the website, we do not have any control over the URL at all other than it taking the category or product name into account. Unfortunate as it would be nice to have shorter URL's across the site.
Any way, thanks again
Our eCommerce site www.towelsrus.co.uk employees a primary navigation system which we can enable to as many categories or not as we link. If all categories are enabled it adds roughly another 50 to 60 followed links per page giving all pages roughly 150 followed links (Google suggests no more than 100 per page). If I enable just top level navigation then this reduces them all considerably.
Personally from the customer experience I think its better for them all to be visible, however from an SEO perspective and link juice perhaps not.
Thought and opinions much appreciated here.
Thanks
Craig
Thanks tom for all your help.
Regards
Craig
Hi Tom,
That more than explains it and gives me the answers. If I put 301 redirects in place what will happen if any of these external links are bad, will it harm our site? Its taken me many months to deal with duplicate content issues, canonicalisation of the site and much more. It was a complete mess and I don;t want to harm any good that come of all this.
Our webmaster tools continues to return anywhere upwards of 750 pages that have 404 errors. These are from pages of a previous site no longer used.
However this was over 1 year ago these pages were dropped along with the 301 re-directs. Why is Google not clearing these from webmaster tools but re-listing them again after 3 month cycle? Is it because external sites have links to these pages?
If so should I put a 301 in place (most of these site are forums and potentially dodgy directories etc from previous poor link building programs) or ask for a manual removal?
This was my concern to be honest. Probably best to leave as is.
Thanks
Craig
We are seeing Google Analytic's drop transaction on our site so therefore all the figures are skewed.
Is there a way I can manually add transactions to GA to cover the missing one?
Hi Matt,
Thanks for advice, much appreciated. I'll do a bit of digging and see what turns up.
Thanks
Craig
I have over 750 URL's returning 404 errors. The majority of these pages have back links from sites, however the credibility of these pages from what I can see is somewhat dubious, mainly forums and sites with low DA & PA.
It has been suggested placing 301 redirects from these pages, a nice easy solution, however I am concerned that we could do more harm than good to our sites credibility and link building strategy going into 2013. I don't want to redirect these pages if its going to cause a panda/penguin problem.
Could I request manual removal or something of this nature?
Thoughts appreciated.
Hi John,
Many thanks for the answer. I thought it had to be something similar to that which you have detailed. A great Help and thanks again.
I am playing with Adwords and want to use the broad match modifier, however I see some examples always using the + in front of every keyword and some with with it on just the secondary keyword or more e.g.
personalised +towels
+personalised +towels
Does this give different results? And which is best practice
I think you are right here, however the pages have links from sites we now probably don;t want from a link build perspective. I am concerned that these links (mainly low PR sites, forums etc) may do more harm than good so to funnel any link juice they have may be more damaging.
Any other suggestions here?
I have noticed a lot of pages which have fallen out of webmaster tools crawl error log that had bee 404'ing are reappearing again
Any suggestions as to why this might be the case? How can I make sure they don't reappear again?
And of course, build up your own authority on G+ and links from your posts are followed. 
No problem.
I believe FeeFo moderate the feedback. We have had a good result when responding to any negative feedback.
Hi Carols,
I know that for us that is work in progress but can happen. We are using there base system without any direct integration to our site (cost more than anything at the present time)
If you speak with them I am pretty confident they would be able to achieve exactly what you are after.
I have used both Trustpilot, not that hot and now we are using FeeFo which seems to be working well. We have feedback at both service and product level, take a look on www.towelsrus.co.uk.
There technical team are working on a nice solution so as to allow both SEO benefits from reviews and also as we do currently receive back links from there site on reviews, so a double whammy.
There tech team are really helpful and very responsive so a good all round reviews solution.
Hi Simon,
Understood. These pages are category list pages so when a new category is product the template pull that data in. So the majority of page we are using to rank end with this catlist (70/80 categories). URLS are auto generated based on the category titles and product titles.
I am finding that our homepage and other pages are being ranked higher against keywords that we have optimised other pages for.
e.g Keyword: Luxury Towels
Google Ranks our homepage http://www.towelsrus.co.uk at 20 for this and the page I am trying to rank for it is nowhere to be seen http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/sport-spa/luxury-towels/catlist_fnct498.htm
Why is this and is this why our position for certain keywords fluctuates? How do I remedy this problem?
Hi Marcus,
OK I can tell you what I know as I only got involved on this the summer, some 12 months after the SEO contract finished with the old web provider, nothing actually happened thereafter.
I don't think we are working off a penalty, however we did have a lot of problems when the new site was launched last november with duplicate data 1000's of 301 redirects, 2500 pages 404'ing etc. This has only resolved it's self int he last 4 to 6 weeks after a lot of heart ache and dropped revenue. 404's are at 840ish and dropping daily now, duplicate content is down to 28 urls and dropping too. All because of bad advice hence why we are now looking after things in house.
Competition are your Amazons, Marks & Spencer, towels.co.uk, Christie Towels, Linens limited. I think we can better some of these for sure.
In terms of link build previously I have no idea how this was done. There was no blog, no social media (still none but looking at this) so I guess normal linking building routes.
There link profiles are massive in comparison to ours and i wonder how many we have lost because of all these bad 404 pages etc. So i would like to capture and re-direct anything that got value before the fall away for good.
I have tried signing up to link detective but they are not send a authorisation email so can;t gain access frustratingly.
Any more info i can provide let me know.
Thanks Craig
Thanks Irving you comment are much appreciated.
We have just taken the steps to start building links to www.towelsrus.co.uk, I am concerned about the state of external links to the site created by previous companies, i.e are they OK, or doing us harm, could I get more out f whats already in place or should we focus purely on getting new links?
We also have about 25 pages that have 302 errors and contain external links to the site. What should i do with these. try and get them re-directed to our site with appropriate anchor text or simply put a 301 re-direct in place?
In essence where I start, We want to build and increase traffic in particular for towels, bathrobes, dressing gowns and bolster our position as our positions are fluctuating a little but steadier than they have been.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks Matthew, that's a real help. Lots more to look at and as you say social is the way forwards. Its bookmarked here, we just need to set some time aside to get cracking with it.
Hi Oleg
Sorry I did not respond sooner. I missed your reply!
Those site are really useful. We are going to get some nice articles written up that we can post to out blog and link a plenty back through to our main site so I will see how that goes.
Social media is something we are yet to touch and know how important is to get on with it. It will come once we have some more of the main site optimised and ranking better than it currently is.
We recently relaunched our blog.towelsrus.co.uk and this is personally a new venture for me
Are there site i should be telling we have new content (yet to publish any but close to). As it's a wordpress blog are there any plugins that do this automatically?
Hi Oleg
Thanks you for your response, a great help.
The difficulty i have is finding places where i can guest post relevant content to help this. Towels aren't something that are discussed a great deal from what i have found online.
What would you do?
We have recently setup a Wordpress focused blog (blog.towelsrus.co.uk) which is very much work in progress.
Because of financial constraints we had to host this on a separate sub domain.
I need to get to grips with blogs is new to me (only been doing SEO this for 3 months now) and have have read may posts on the forums here that this is one of the best ways to build links and engage the audience.
How do I go about getting people to read my blog, and should I use this to pull in traffic on keywords we cannot through the main site or should i use this to re-enforce and build traction on those keywords we are trying to rank for on the main site?
Hi,
Really appreciate all the info, a great help.
I have looked hard at Google Analytics and cannot see any referrals from these links or organic search results. Also having checked Webmaster tools there are no impression for these pages so it's i am clueless as to where they are coming from. One URL has had a least 30 to 40 visitors to the site this month with 100% bounce rate.
An odd one I think.
Hi,
Thanks for your help, just what i was after. Interesting the first landing page i selected show no keywords set and traffic was direct, so I can only assume that there is a link on some website/blog that people are using to enter our site via that url. What do you think?
Digging through analytics today an noticed that our sites top landing pages are for pages that were part of the old www.towelsrus.co.uk website taken down almost 12 months ago. All these pages had the 301 re-directs which were removed a few months back but still have not dropped out of Googles crawl error logs.
I can't understand why this is happening but almost certainly the bounce rate on these pages (100%) mean we are loosing potential conversions.
How can I identify what keywords and links people are using to land on these pages?
Hi Mat.
OK I had optimized this page for "Turkish cotton bath towels" and "Turkish bath Towels". That said, it still had 47 instances of the keyword in alt tags and a further 16 instances on the page. I can see why and where the extra instances are being generated unnecessarily which can be addressed when the product page is redesigned. As for the lat tags this is beyond me as to why its generating these so many times.
BTW, your helps really been useful. This is relatively new to me (2 months working on this site actively) and so much has come to light that you just wouldn't ever ask unless you get "hands on".
Hi Mat
Thanks for the response. I have run all pages being optimsed through the on page checker and am getting A results for those pages optimised.
In regards to keyword stuffing, the issue I have is a lot of the keywords are dynamically generated by the system we use which is frustrating, I will be discussing this with them as I will regarding alt tags (40 instances of our keyword on 1 page in alt tags seems strange). We are about to have the product page redesigned to remove all tabs and have a 1 page affair so all the information is right in front of the customer without them having to click all over the place for more information.
Any further comments greatly appreciated.
At present most of our products are listed in the singular form.
http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-bath-towels/aztex/turkish-cotton-bath-towel_ct473bd182pd2744.htm
However we are optimising for the plural form after carrying out keyword research
The question is should I update the product title to reflect this change? This would then change the URL of the page, H1 tag, H2 tag (both auto generated from the product title)
My concern here is that these pages will then become "new pages" and will need to index and rank, albeit they don't rank well as they have never been optimised until now. I could put 301 re-directs in place on the old URL's or i could just let the return a 404.
What do people think?
I am trying to understand why the on page reporter shows so many occurrences of alt tags containing my keywords. Can anyone shed any light?
This is the URL that's in question.
http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-hand-towels/aztex/turkish-cotton-hand-towel_ct472bd182pd2745.htm
At present at a category level, our site does not incorporate images specific to the category you are in and therefore we do not have appropriate alt tags to suffice SEO requirements.It only covers categories you are navigating too.
e.g. http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/catlist_fnct561.htm (no image placement available on page for that category, it only shows sub categories
Does anyone have any suggestions how we get over this? How big a deal is it to not have image with appropriate keyword driven alt tag? Can you put more than 1 keyword phrase in a alt tag?
Thank you Justin. These things are sometime so obvious and blinker you when you stare at the site all day.
Thanks again for the help.
I am struggling to locate on our website www.towelsrus.co.uk a self cannibalizing keyword. Can anyone help?
Easy fix
<dl>
<dt>Cannibalizing link</dt>
<dd>"Luxury Bath Pillows With Suction Cups, 4 Embroidered Designs"</dd>
<dt>Explanation</dt>
<dd>It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is sometimes fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine).</dd>
<dt>Recommendation</dt>
<dd>Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match.</dd>
</dl>
Hi Marcus.
That sounds like a good Strategy. I am going to look at different structure on our dev site and see what works best overall from both technical and more importantly the customers point of view.
I'll definitely have a look at he apps you mentioned. They seem really interesting.
Once again, many thanks for your advise. Really helpful indeed
Regards
Craig
