Essential Marketer

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.