1 Halley Hill 303- Introduction to Web Publishing Search Engine Optimization Assignment Networking: I would like to network with

Corey! I. Five Key phrase Recommendations (Cr) a) The 5 Keywords/phrases I think will drive the most traffic: 1. San Francisco Coffee 2. Organic Tea 3. One Cup Coffee 4. Gourmet Coffee 5. Gourmet Coffee Gifts b) Explanation of my choices: 1. San Francisco Coffee: I have chosen San Francisco as a key phrase because it is one of the brands that gourmet-coffee.com sells. The Competition for this keyword is ranked as medium according to Google AdWords, so there is less competition for gourmet-coffee.com to have a high results landing on a SERP. 2. Organic Tea: Organic tea is another feature that gourmet-coffee.com sells that could really be utilized to drive a target audience to their website. The competition is high for the key word of Organic Tea, but it is searched often according to Google Trends. 3. One Cup Coffee: This keyword has become more popular within the past few years. Because gourmet-coffee.com offers many different brands of One Cup Coffee, it is vital that they try to utilize this key word when trying to drive traffic. It is also important because this is a brand generic keyword, and can bring up many related items that are not of the same brand, thus giving more opportunity to optimize for the site and landing more pages onto the search engine results page. 4. Gourmet Coffee: This is essentially what gourmet-coffee.com sells. The keyword, according to Google Trends, has gone down in the past few years, but is a good key phrase for Gourmet-Coffee.com to use as a keyword to optimize for. Gourmet Coffee is what their URL is advertising, and it would make sense to have this appear as a search result when looking for this type of search related term. 5. Gourmet Coffee Gifts: I have chosen the search phrase gourmet coffee gifts because although it is seasonably searched, it is a main category of sales for Gourmet-Coffee.com. They can utilize this to achieve higher sales and traffic for the holiday season, while also benefiting from it for other occasions as well. This keyword search should be utilized to show what the company has to offer for gifts.

II.

Content Analysis (Cq, Vt, Ce, Cf) a) Overall Quality (Cq): Gourmet-Coffee.com: 6 CoffeeForLess.com: 9 Explanation: After using Copyscape.com to analyze the same amount of information from every website on the Internet, Gourmet-Coffee.com had eight entries that copied what they had on their website on various levels. A few of these entries were old versions of their own website, while most of them were other websites that had the same description for a specific coffee that Gourmet-Coffee.com had on their homepage. In terms of search engine optimization, this looks bad when Google goes to rank Gourmet-Coffee.com. They do not have original or unique information to offer a visitor of their website. I ranked CoffeeForLess.com as a 9 because after entering it through copyscape.com, it only had 1 entry that had copied it, which was an old version of the website. I gave this a 9 instead of a 10 because it would still look bad to have an older version of your website still live. When copying and pasting the first paragraph under the How to Store Coffee page into Google to check if the content of the page was original, Google was able to find over 500 results that had the same exact wording or closely related words on other sites. This reflects poorly on Gourmet-Coffee.com because it shows that not everything on their site is original, or that there are other sites that have copied their

3 original work and there has been nothing done about it. This will make GourmetCoffee.com appear further down on a search results page. Many of the articles that appear on CoffeeForLess.coms website are in the form of a .pdf file and are creatively produced so that it is harder for other websites to obtain the information they are talking about. This gains points for CoffeeForLess.coms total overall score, because it is an efficient and more productive way to keep the website under control and away from other websites that would potentially steal their information. This also gives better quality because the webpages for the articles are visually interesting for the viewer to read. Spelling and Grammar are two important things that Google looks at when ranking a website. On Gourmet-Coffee.coms homepage, there is a grammatical error in one of their advertisements for coffee on the homepage. It states Our Cunninghams Special House Blend consist of 100% Arabica beans from around the world when it should say Our Cunninghams Special House Blend consists of 100% Arabica beans from around the world. This degrades their content quality in a way because they have failed to notice a mistake located on their homepage. The grammatical error shows is on the homepage of Gourmet-Coffee.coms website, located below the fold.

Gourmet-Coffee.com does have added quality because the content on the website is very timely. Since it is close to the holiday season, the site has been updated to include holiday specials, holiday-related coffees and teas, and other holiday type objects. This is important because it will let Google know that the site is up to date and taken care of. b) Value (Cq, Vt) Gourmet-Coffee.com: 5 CoffeeForLess.com: 9 Explanation: CoffeeForLess.com offered a Q&A section on their product pages, a user generated reviews section, as well as a video that described the products. GourtmetCoffee.com offered videos that showed a viewer how to use the different coffees. This is why I ranked CoffeeForLess.com higher. While they both offered the videos to viewers, CoffeeForLess.com offered so much more for their viewer to look at when

4 choosing their product. CoffeeForLess.com also has unique value in that when searching for different products, you can search by multiple things including price level, brand, and other specific specifications. This allows a user the unique opportunity to specifically designate the exact type of product they are looking for without having to scroll through every result for that category. c) Engaging (Ce,Sr,SS): Gourmet-Coffee.com: 4 CoffeeForLess.com: 8 Explanation: CoffeeForLess.com offers customer reviews and the Q&A section that is user generated. After looking on socialmention.com, Gourmet-Coffee.com was only mentioned once in the past few weeks. This shows that the site does not have much of an audience engagement factor to it. CoffeeForLess.com is able to engage their audience through social media by offering more than just their products. The company tweets about their blog and recipes that relate to their products. While CoffeeForLess.com does have more followers on Twitter, this could be because they also follow more than those are following them. This shows that the company purposely reaches out for people to follow them, instead of allowing followers to come to them naturally and having followers that really want to read what they have to say. Facebook page Statistics Gourmet-Coffee.com CoffeeForLess.com Twitter Statistics Following Gourmet-Coffee.com 4,717 CoffeeForLess.com 11,849 III. Followers 6,574 10,745 Likes 12,261 34,675 Talking about 701 1,751

HTML: Current Keyword Location Analysis (Ht,Hd,Hh) a. Title Tags <title></title>: -Home Page: <title>Gourmet Coffee Beans | Best Coffee Brands | Buy Coffee Online</title> This title tag for the home page doesnt include anything about tea, or the other products the company offers to its customers. There are also too many coffee keywords in the title page, this will make Google believe that the company is over stuffing keywords into their titles to make them rank higher in SERP, which in turn makes them rank lower. The word Best isnt going to help drive traffic because it is too general, and not unique to the idea of coffee. Buy and Online are not words that will help you drive traffic, and wont help Google rank your site any higher. Obviously, this site is a commerce site that is on the Internet, so these two word choices do nothing to help drive traffic to the website. Nine words is a little long for a title tag, but they are

5 somewhat descriptive enough to be okay. It could have better descriptive words to drive specific traffic to the website.

Organic Coffee sub category Page: <title>Organic Coffee | Organic Coffee Beans | Best Organic Coffee</title> In this title tag for the organic coffee sub category of the website, there are too many organic and Coffee descriptors in the tag. To Google, it will look like the company is stuffing their title tag for this specific page with keywords, which will ultimately make this page lose hierarchy in rankings. Google takes this as an order of the words and thinks the most important word would be Organic. This page does not show specific Organic Coffee Company brand in the title tag like it should that is what this page is specifically featuring and what would most likely drive the most traffic to the page itself. Organic Coffee Product Results Page: <title>Organic Coffee Brand | Organic Coffee Blends | Best Organic Coffee Brands</title> For this page, there is no differentiation between a results page and the categorical page. This, in Googles eyes, would rank these pages further down because they do not specifically categorize to what each page is about. The word organic is used three times, and should not be overdone when it is a third of the words in the descriptor. The word brand does not give any sort of distinction between what is being shown on this page, and what could be shown on others on this website. According to Googles SEO Starter guide, to create better optimization for the site, a title tag should include more descriptions of the results shown on the page. Organic Coffee Product Page: <title>Organic Dark Espresso Beans | Dark Roast Coffee</title> For the product page of this specific coffee, the title tag is not as bad as the others. This title gives specific and descriptive keywords for this certain type of coffee, but it could include the name of the coffee, or the coffee brand. The word dark is used twice, but it is used to describe the coffee that is being shown. Google would also see that two different keyword descriptions were used for this page. This would help GourmetCoffee.com to show up higher in a search engine results page for their product pages.

6 b. Meta Tags Home page: <Meta name="description" content="GOURMET COFFEE BEANS roasted by Rogers Gourmet Coffee. BUY the BEST COFFEE ONLINE and gourmet coffee gift baskets, organic coffee beans, flavored coffee, decaf coffee. Free shipping!"> According to Googles SEO Starter Guide, this description Meta Tag would provide enough information to be used as the snippet under their headline for a search result. The Meta Tag is important because it can be used for the description of the website underneath its title in a search engine results page if nothing else is found on the website that provides a good description of what the website is about. The Meta Tag for Gourmet-Coffee.coms home page includes what they offer, who owns the company, as well as the fact that they offer free shipping. This would be appealing for a user who was looking for a coffee website, and would therefore drive traffic. This Meta tag is used as their descriptor when on the search engine results page for gourmet coffee when searched from Google as seen below.

The only negative aspect to this META tag is that it is stuffed with the word coffee. The web programmer should find a different way to say coffee so that Google does not think the META tag is being filled with keywords. c. IMG Names <img src=/images/nameofimage.jpg> On the homepage, there are numerous images labeled wrong. The IMG tag is important because it tells Google what the images on the page show, and since Google cannot see pictures, this is how you will be ranked when it comes to images. The logo for the homepage is named skin1/images/site-logo-feb.jpg. This is not a good thing because it gives no description as to what type of logo it is. It should be named something that includes the title of the company, or what is included in the logo, such as Roger Family Company Coffee and Tea Market logo. It also should not include a month, this signifies to Google that the website is not kept up on a regular basis. Another IMG name that stands out on the home page is the shopping cart name. It is labeled as /skin1/images/cart_empty.jpg, which accurately describes the picture it is named for. This is good, because Google will be able to correctly identify what the image stands for. The biggest image on the homepage that is above the fold is named skin1/images/front-banner/free-mug-special.jpg, which makes sense because this is their main feature of their front page, which is shown above the fold. This name description correctly describes what the picture displays, and will help Google decode what the picture is advertising. d. ALT tag <img.. at=keywords>: Most of the ALT tags on the home page are left empty, and do not give a description like they are meant to. This looks bad when Google is trying to rank the website in

7 search engine optimization. When there is nothing in the alt tag, Google doesnt have anything to look at regarding what your picture would be if it does not show up. This creates a problem if an image is unable to load on a page and there is not a description filler to replace what the image would be promoting. This also creates a problem for a user using a screen reader to help them navigate a site. Without an ALT tag, many pictures, if not loaded correctly or at all, can affect your site in a negative outcome. e. Bold/Strong/Headers <h> or <strong> or <h1> On the homepage of Gourmet-Coffee.com there are no bold, strong or h1 html codes used. Instead of using h1, the main sections of the page are published in a <h2> code, which is a little smaller than a normal headline. The words that are in the <h2> format are the titles that appear in the navigation. This makes sense, because Google will look at this to see how organized the website is, and if it is categorically correct. IV. Architecture: Speed (As) Gourmet-Coffee.com Score: 5

8 CoffeeForLess.com: 7

Explanation: Gourmet-Coffee.com took around 8 seconds to fully load in my Chrome Browser. This is in part due to the .jpg background and the social media widgets located on the homepage. This is not as good as CoffeeForLess.com, which took a little over 6 seconds for the first loading time in my chrome browser. The objects that loaded the slowest were the JavaScript items on the homepage. The images also took the most time to load, but loaded quicker than Gourmet-Coffee.coms page. V. Architecture: URLs (Au) Gourmet-Coffee.com Score: 4 Explanation: Many of the pages of Gourmet-Coffee.com have computer-generated URLs, and are only half of actual words. This does not come across well when Google looks at the page to rank it. The URL is not short, and research shows that it would be less likely to be clicked upon by a user in a result because of it. This does not help drive traffic, and would hinder their search results. It is a good thing that the URL includes the word domain, which is one of the keywords to optimize their website for. Some of the pages not written correctly include the One Cup coffee category of the website, which shows up as the picture below. This is not written well because it does not tell Google a single thing about the page, and would not be clicked on by a user.

Although there are some URLs that are not fully written correctly, the main page of the website is written well. They outline what is on that specific page, and are clean and easy to read. The home page and flavored coffee categories are good examples of how the URLs should be. The Flavored Coffee category page also includes a dash in its URL to keep the URL looking clean and easy to read.

VI.

Link Popularity (Ln,Lq) Link Number Gourmet-Coffee.com No. of Referring Domains: 522 CoffeeForLess.com No. of Referring Domains: 1970 Link Quality Gourmet-Coffee.com No. of Referring Domains: 8 CoffeeForLess.com No. of Referring Domains: 8 Explanation: The top ten domains for CoffeeForLess.com were from .net, .com, and blogs. These are not the best referring domains, but one of the most popular both sites is the blog for the companies website. Many of the top ten domains for Gourmet-Coffee.com referring domains were also from .net and. coms. These are not necessarily bad, and the second domain is also from the companys blog.

VII.

Keyword Performance on SERPs for Recommended Keywords Ranking of Recommended Keywords on Gourmet-Coffee.com

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Ranking of Recommended Keywords on CoffeeForLess.com

Explanation: Gourmet-Coffee.coms competitor CoffeeForLess.com does not show up in any of the recommended search results for Googles SERP. This is in GourmetCoffee.coms benefit because it is one less competition for those results. GourmetCoffee.coms website is already ranking second for the keyword Gourmet Coffee. This shows that the website has already optimized for this keyword to an extent. For Yahoo and Bing, Gourmet-Coffee.com ranks well for the key phrase gourmet coffee gifts, this shows that the website is somewhat close to being optimized for Google. This is a keyword that should be easier to optimize for because it is close to the key phrase gourmet coffee. The most difficult to optimize for will be the key phrases one cup coffee, organic tea, and San Francisco Coffee. These do not rank well in either of the search engines. VIII. Current Traffic Gourmet-Coffee.com Monthly Unique Visitors: 18,150 CoffeeForLess.com Monthly Unique Visitors: 178, 860 Explanation: CoffeeForLess.com receives nearly ten times the amount of traffic as Gourmet-Coffee.com does each month. This could be due to several things. Gourmet-Coffee.com only seems to be optimized for a few key words while CoffeeForLess.com has a much better optimized site for coffee related key word searches. While CoffeeForLess.com does have more unique visitors each month, the chart below shows that every month there is only a slight variation of visitors for the site. This differs from Gourmet-Coffee.com, which sees a bigger dip in between months and unique visitors, which could be attributed to seasonal holidays or gift giving.

11 Gourmet-Coffee.coms unique visitors October, 2012 October 2013.

CoffeeForLess.coms unique visitors for October 2012October 2013.

VIII.

Conclusions & Recommendations There are many things that Gourmet-Coffee.com can do to better optimize their site for search engine results pages. One of the biggest things that the website could do better would be to better utilize their title tags. According to the SEO periodic table, this element is worth a +3, and although on some pages the title tags are doing okay, others are stuffed with keywords and dont apply the necessary words to drive traffic to those pages. Title tags are important in search engine optimization, and making sure that the tags are properly labeled and not overstuffed with keywords or phrases is essential to surviving the results page. Another issue with the website that needs to be addressed is properly labeling their URLs so that they arent all computer generated. This problem would eliminate users from not clicking on the link because of the thought that it is not a reliable website. This would also create more structure within the website and would make the website easier to navigate from a programming perspective. Although this is only ranked as a +1 in terms of the SEO Periodic table, it is a vital part of keeping the website organized and together. Gourmet-Coffee.com should also utilize their bold texts, ALT tags, and META tags. Many of the ALT tags for the homepage were left empty, which would not help Google in

12 determining what the image is trying to relay to the user. If the company were to make more of their text bold and not pictures, it might help Google understand how the website is structured. This is ranked as a +2 in the SEO Periodic Table and fixing the empty ALT tags could really revamp the website in the search engine results page. The last recommendation I would make to better optimize Gourmet-Coffee.coms website would be to keep the loading time to a minimum. Users do not want to sit to wait for a website to load, and using less images may help the website in that aspect. Overall, Gourmet-Coffee.com has some strong areas of strength where they are doing what they can to optimize their site, such as having a presence in social media, linking sites to their website, and having a solid META tag. The room for improvement comes with some of the HTML and originality of the work on the website, but would be an easy fix for great results.