Following on from Part 1 (Top 5 SEO’d Websites Part 1 - Loans Websites), posted 08/08/08. I have pleasure in providing the next installment of this multi-part blog: Top 5 SEO’d Websites: Financial Price Comparison Sites.

So in reverse order I give you my analysis of the Top 5 Financial Price Comparison websites:

5th Place ( 91 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found: 7.
• More than one primary heading tags ( 3 H1 tags found) have been found on the page. This is not a critical issue, but we suggest having a single primary heading per page.

C. Image Summary

• Total images found:11
• Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 11 images.
• It’s usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

ii. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Found

B. Google PageRank: 5

C. Google Indexed Pages: 653

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 18/08/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 0.06%

F. Inbound Links: 28,497

G. DMOZ Directory: Listing found

H. Yahoo! Directory: Listing found

I.Zoominfo: Listing found

iii. Blog

• No Blog found

iv. Social bookmarking

• 205 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 0 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• No RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

4th Place (92 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

• Meta description is too long
• The meta description should be no more than 150 characters, the current meta description is 105 characters.
• Meta Description is too long

• Your meta description should be no more than 150 characters, your current meta description is 188 characters.

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found:16

C. Image Summary

• Total images found:31
• 14 images don’t have ALT text
• Too many images found
• Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 31 images.
• It’s usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

i. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Not Found
• Search engines may think www.comparethemarket.com and comparethemarket.com are two different sites. A “301 redirect” between these sites should be set up and once this is done, the site will get full search engine credit for your work on these sites.
• www.comparethemarket.com seems to have 52,230 inbound links whereas comparethemarket.com has 52,360 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.

B. Google PageRank: 4

C. Google Indexed Pages: 465

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 16/08/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 0.29%

F. Inbound Links: 52,257

G. DMOZ Directory: No listing found

H. Yahoo! Directory: No listing found

I. Zoominfo: No listing found

iii. Blog

• No blog found

iv. Social bookmarking

• 34 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 0 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• no RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

3rd Place (97 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found: 13.

C. Image Summary

• Total images found: 12.

ii. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Found

B. Google PageRank: 6

C. Google Indexed Pages: 89,200

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 20/08/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 0.01%

F. Inbound Links: 1,492,270

G. DMOZ Directory: Listing found

H. Yahoo! Directory: Listing found

I. Zoominfo: Listing found

iii. Blog

• No blog found

iv. Social bookmarking

• 610 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 10 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• No RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

2nd Place (98 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found: 9
• More than one H1 tag found.
• More than one primary heading tags ( 8 H1 tags found) have been found on the page. This is not a critical issue, but it is suggested having a single primary heading per page.

C. Image Summary

• Total images found: 11

ii. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Not Found
• Search engines may think www.loan.co.uk and loan.co.uk are two different sites. A “301 redirect” between these sites should be set up and once this is done, the site will get full search engine credit for your work on these sites.
• www.loan.co.uk seems to have 891 inbound links whereas loan.co.uk has 878 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.

B. Google PageRank: 4

C. Google Indexed Pages: 2,440

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 19/08/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 0.06%

F. Inbound Links: 86,978

G. DMOZ Directory: No listing found H. Yahoo! Directory: Listing found I. Zoominfo: No listing found

iii. Blog

• Blog found

iv. Social bookmarking

• 41 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 1 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

1st Place (99 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

• Page Title is too long

• The maximum recommended length for page titles is 70 characters, your current page title is 93 characters.

• Meta Description is too long

• Your meta description should be no more than 150 characters, your current meta description is 152 characters

• No Meta Keywords Found

• There were no keywords detected in the metadata of the website.

• Though Google does not seem to place high relevance on meta keywords to determine the content of a website, other engines like Yahoo! may still look at these.

• Since it doesn’t hurt you to have metakeywords, we’d suggest going ahead and adding them to the page.

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found:5

C. Image Summary

• Total images found: 31
• Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 31 images.
• It’s usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

i. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Found

B. Google PageRank: 5

C. Google Indexed Pages: 19,400

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 20/08/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 0.16%

F. Inbound Links: 7,814,409

G. DMOZ Directory: No listing found

H. Yahoo! Directory: No listing found

I. Zoominfo: Listing found

iii. Blog

• Blog found

iv. Social bookmarking

• 112 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 1 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

Conclusion

The above scores show just why these sites achieve the level of traffic they do. Having sites that are so well SEO’d means they have good positions for a range of search terms. It isn’t easy to achieve these scores but it’s always good to have benchmark for any new budding price comparison sites wanting to crack the search engines.

Recently Dean Hunt has started a page rank exercise, on DeanHunt.com there is a list of webmasters who are sick of hearing about people discussing Google Pagerank, let’s not discuss this anymore and try to do something about by gaining lots of additional links.

If you would like to join in the fun and get your blog/site linked to by hundreds of other bloggers, then follow the instructions below:

* Step 1: Highlight the links below, right click, then click “View selection source”
* Step 2: Paste the “Say No To Pagerank” list into your blog or site
* Step 3: email Dean at: contact@deanhunt.com
* Step 4: Get a mention and link at DeanHunt.com and every other site that plays the game
* Step 5: Update your list daily to reflect the new websites and blogs that join in

***SAY NO TO PAGERANK, YES TO LIVE WEBMASTERS LIST***

Buzz Marketing Blog

Young Entrepreneurs Blog

No Nonsense Business Advice

Sell your blog

CS Developer

Aplliance Journal

Madkane Humor Blog

Find New Leads

PHPied

UK SEO Directory

Bikinifigur: Abnehmen ohne Hunger

Bob Meets World

BlueJar Webmasters Guide

All Sux Dot Com

CodingPad

The Next Post

Tech Blog

Reality Wired

Price Filter

a few loose screws

Clickon Web Design

Woody Maxim

Crystals Quest

What Simply Works

Affiliate profit center

Internet Marketing Blueprints

Cash 4 blogging

Hits USA

Wendy Haney

Sheterk Marketing

How To Build a website blog

The Block Party

Ezinet Global Marketing

Best Online Earning Strategies

Online Security Authority

1nf0rmat10n.com

Alternative Healing

That’s what i’m talking about

Web Urbanist Media and Art

Fundraising Ideas

Chatsquatch

Money Spinning

Blogging at Flixya

Blogging Tips

He Said What

Things That Are Fun

Wii Contests

Classic Rock News

Elee Marketing Guide

Viral and Buzz

Azzfan - Make Extra Money

Shadow Scope

The App

Travel Blog

Your favorite blogger

Master Resell Rights

Entrepreneur Wannabe

Adsense Track

TonNet

The Online Business Blog

Net Frontier Marketing

Jean Ghalo Blog

Dott Com

GadgetTastic

Design Creatology

Affiliate Master Tools

4mostTip

The Day of a Mum

MonoMom

InterSites

Homeschool Diva

CyberCa$hology

Conservatory TV

Get Ahead in business

Online eBiz

Hin’s Photo Blog

Hin’s Tech Blog

Cynthia D. Wilson Speaks

Gadget, Computer, and Electronic Blog

General Health Topics

MommyZabs.com

Life on the road

Paul Bradish

Skimbaco - The Lifestyle

4 fab moms

UC Web Host

Real Estate Investing Blog

What is this page about?

Well, in short, this page is all about building links from other web sites, this will help our web sites become more popular.

It has been a while since my last blog as things have been a little busy lately, never-the-less, I have decided to put together a multi-part blog to provide my opinion on what I consider to be top site designs for various industries/sectors.

The first part, as the title suggests, is on loan websites.

So in reverse order I give you my analysis of the Top 5 Loan websites:

5th Place (59 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

• Font Tags Found in HTML
• Some HTML font tags were found. While this is not a critical issue, you should use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to separate your website’s content from its appearance.

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found: 4

C. Image Summary

• Total images found: 10

ii. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Not Found
• Search engines may think www.loan.co.uk and loan.co.uk are two different sites. A “301 redirect” between these sites should be set up and once this is done, the site will get full search engine credit for your work on these sites.
• www.loan.co.uk seems to have 891 inbound links whereas loan.co.uk has 878 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.

B. Google PageRank: 3

C. Google Indexed Pages: 80

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 29/07/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 9.61%

F. Inbound Links: 894

G. DMOZ Directory: listing found

H. Yahoo! Directory: listing found

I. Zoominfo: listing found

iii. Blog

• No Blog found

iv. Social bookmarking

• 0 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 0 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• No RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

4th Place (73 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found: 9.

C. Image Summary

• Total images found: 15.
  
• 2 images don’t have ALT text.
• Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 15 images.
• It’s usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

ii. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Found

B. Google PageRank: 3

C. Google Indexed Pages: 323

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 07/08/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 6.52%

F. Inbound Links: 231,005

G. DMOZ Directory: no listing found

H. Yahoo! Directory: listing found

I. Zoominfo: no listing found

iii. Blog

• No blog found

iv. Social bookmarking

• 0 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 0 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

3rd Place (74 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found: 4.
• More than one primary heading tags ( 4 H1 tags found) have been found on homepage. This issue is not critical, but it suggested having a single primary heading per page.

C. Image Summary

• Total images found: 36
• Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page.This web page has 36 images.
• It’s usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

ii. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Not Found
• Search engines may think www.loans.co.uk and loans.co.uk are two different sites. A “301 redirect” between these sites should be set up and once this is done, the site will get full search engine credit for your work on these sites.
• www.loans.co.uk seems to have 1,058 inbound links whereas loans.co.uk has 1,142 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.

B. Google PageRank: 5

C. Google Indexed Pages: 106

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 05/08/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 2.66%

F. Inbound Links: 1,095

G. DMOZ Directory: listing found

H. Yahoo! Directory: listing found

I. Zoominfo: listing found

iii. Blog

• No Blog found

iv. Social bookmarking

• 0 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 0 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• No RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

2nd Place (81 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

• Meta description is too long
  
• The meta description should be no more than 150 characters, the current meta description is 245 characters.

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found:10

C. Image Summary

• Total images found:56
• 15 images don’t have ALT text
• Too many images found
• Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 56 images.
• It’s usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

i. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Found

B. Google PageRank: 4

C. Google Indexed Pages: 483

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 08/08/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 3.4%

F. Inbound Links: 101,125

G. DMOZ Directory: listing found

H. Yahoo! Directory: listing found

I. Zoominfo: listing found

iii. Blog

• No blog found

iv. Social bookmarking

• 0 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 0 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• no RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

1st Place (88 out of 100)

i. On-Page SEO

A. Meta Data:

• All meta data is optimised.

B. Heading Summary

• Total headings found:9

C. Image Summary

• Total images found: 37
• 3 images don’t have ALT text
• Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 37 images.
• It’s usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

i. Off-Page SEO

A. Domain Info

• Permanent Redirect Found

B. Google PageRank: 1

C. Google Indexed Pages: 242

D. Last Google Crawl Date: 29/07/08

E. Traffic Rank: Top 2.03%

F. Inbound Links: 3,075

G. DMOZ Directory: no listing found

H. Yahoo! Directory: listing found

I. Zoominfo: listing found

iii. Blog

• Blog found
• http://www.cheaploans.co.uk/news

iv. Social bookmarking

• 0 del.icio.us bookmarks found
• 0 Digg.com submissions found

v. Converting visitors

• RRS feed found
• Conversion form found

Conclusion

What this shows is that with a little tweaking of some very minor detail, you could boost your site ranking and SEO score quite considerably.

I hope you find this first part useful. I will continue to add to this multi-part blog with my analysis of sites from other industries/sectors. If anyone has suggestions of sectors they would like analysed please leave me a comment.

Following the success of our last seminar, Essential Marketer are pleased to annouce our lastest online marketing seminar at our office on 17th June 08, from 10am - 12pm. Our online marketing seminar will cover Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) & Affiliate Marketing, with emphasis on Affiliate Marketing.

Paid on results marketing explained

When it comes to onilne marketing, most companies are aware of SEO and PPC, however there is an online marketing chennel where you only pay on results.

The focus of our latest seminar will be on affiliate marketing, we will explain how it works and the huge returns and benefits it can provide.

We will show the fundamentals of affiliate marketing and how you can implement it into your marketing mix. Our seminar will explain how you can reap the benefits from this demand driven - paid on results marketing channel.

Places are limited so if you would like to attend please register your interested with John Anderson:

By Phone: 0845 508 5008 / 01527 557 292

By Email: john@essentialmarketer.com

Online: www.essentialmarketer.com/contact

Steve and I visited the Online Marketing & Media Show 08 yesterday and I have to say I found it most enjoyable.

The highlights of the show included:

• Affiiate Window’s ‘Revolutionising your Affiliate Marketing’ - this hour long presentation gave great insight into what’s hot in affiliate marketing at the moment, including ‘Bin the Banner’ as networks, merchants and affiliates move away from traditional banners and more towards product feeds and plug-in/widgets. We say ‘about time!’ - this method of providing merchant offerings has much better conversion rates and customer interaction.
• Google University - after queing for 1/2 (as we didn’t pre-book [Doh!]), we happily nestled into our seat to listen to a great presentation on Google Analytics and Website Optimiser. Now, these Google products aren’t new to us but the way in which the additional features were shown were great. Taking away a little more knowledge will have great benefits for our customers.
• Stickyeyes top 12 SEO tips - This presentation was probably the best of the day. Gary Beals presentation style was great and had the crowd in stiches. As an agency who provides SEO services, hearing our peers opinions and ideas was great and the guys at Stickyeyes have some innovative ideas.

We are organising a get together for all affiliates based in the Midlands.

The event will be an informal meet, where we can get to know each other a bit better and share ideas, etc…

If you are interested, please check out the thread or visit our community on A4U.

We are pleased to announce the latest merchant to work with Essential Marketer. Midas Financial Planning have chosen Essential Marketer to manage their affiliate marketing programme.

Midas are an Independant Financial Advisor (IFA) based in the Midlands. Midas have chosen affiliate marketing to increase their online lead volume and drive sales. They are focussed on generating mortgage and IVA leads.

We are currently recruiting afiliates onto the programme so if you have a website in the mortgage, or IVA market, etc, then please contact us to find out more regarding this new and exciting programme.

We are pleased to announce the latest merchant to work with Essential Marketer. Laserpics have chosen Essential Marketer to manage their affiliate marketing programme.

Laserpics are the UK’s foremost crystal engraving specialists, providing crystal engraving for a diverse range of occassions, from weddings and christenings to graduations and pets birthdays.

We are currently recruiting afiliates onto the programme so if you have a website in the gift market, or specialise in weddings, pets, etc, then please contact us to find out more regarding this new and exciting programme.

Essential Marketer would like to thank everyone who attended and was involved in last night’s hugely successful event.

Our most recent event proved to be a smash with local businesses and we hope to provide a further selection of events covering a range of topics later this year and beyond.

Anybody who missed out on the event and would like information should contact John Anderson who will happily send out relevant info on the event.

Once again, thanks to everyone who took part.

Google have launched their own product comparison function to add to their continously expanding list of services.

News of this new service will not sit well with the well established price comparison sites in the UK, the likes of MoneySupermarket & BeatThatQuote, et al.

Their comparison service is integrated with their search platform, allowing Google users to compare loan prices without leaving Google.

Users fill in the minimum required data and their details are fired off to the particular lender selected.

This move is likely to cause quite a stir within the price comparison industry with expected concern among the bigger price comparison sites due to the huge sums they currently pay in advertising spend on Google.

With this move, it is highly likely that Google will move into other price comparison areas, such as insurance, mortgages, credit cards, savings….

More info on Google Merchant.