Site Clinic - Website Review : Gadget Box (Part 1 - The Site)

Time for our second site review and this site is one right in my niche, gadgets. This is going to be a 2 part review, in the second part we’ll go into the shopping experience and affiliate scheme.

Site: Gadget Box
Description: Welcome to The Gadget Box - gadgets, gizmos, boys toys, gift ideas Shop
Page rank: 4
Server IP location: United Kingdom
Pages indexed in Google: 1,690
Yahoo inbound links : 2,834
Website age: Approx 3 years

Brief Overview
I do have an affinity with gadget sites and find myself visiting a fair few on a daily basis, my friend Arran owns and runs Gadget Box. He sources the gadgets himself and has a very impressive inventory of products. The site has excellent back links and is of a nice age.

Aaran is also opening a bricks and mortar gadget shop next month which I’m looking forward to visit.

Image Scaling
A lot of the product images on the site look very jagged, this is due to the images being scaled in the browser. A simple solution to this would be to create thumbnail images, not only would this improve the appearance of the site it would also drastically reduce the file size of some pages, for example the size of images on the homepage is over a megabyte, goodbye dial-up customers.

Scaled in the browser       Resized image
Image scaled in browser Image scaled before uploading


Images already have relevant alt text which is good for SEO.

Page titles
Every page has an identical title of:

Welcome to The Gadget Box - gadgets, gizmos, boys toys, gift ideas Shop

For both an SEO and generally usability each page title should reflect what is on the page, so product pages should use the product name in the title, e.g.
Suggested title:1GB USB Pen Drive Pen and Laser Pointer on Gadget Box
Suggested title:Delusion MP4 MP3 Player 1GB on Gadget Box

H1, H2 tags etc.
At the moment the heading tag H1 is not used, this is a good way of telling search engines what the page is all about, so again with product pages have the product name as a heading.

New Products Page and RSS
Having a “What’s new page” is a great way to introduce your regular shopper to new products. It would also be worth adding an RSS feed to enable shopper and gadget bloggers to be conveniently notified when new gadgets are available to buy of blog about.

WWW or Not WWW
Currently you can access the site at gadget-box.com and www.gadget-box.com, to Google this is two different pages so you should choose one way of accessing the site and then 301 redirect all relevant pages.

Site Map
A sitemap would also aid indexing in the engines.

Blog
Adding a blog to a site like this would be a great way of generating extra traffic, you can write about new products, any special promotions that you’re offering and other gadgets and tech news that you’ve come across on your travels.

If you have any comments or suggestions please let us know and if you’d like us to review your site get in touch.

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. Great review Sir Al, learned some kind of SEO tricks there. One thing I got confused about is this one:

    WWW or Not WWW
    Currently you can access the site at gadget-box.com and http://www.gadget-box.com, to Google this is two different pages so you should choose one way of accessing the site and then 301 redirect all relevant pages.

    Heard of 301 redirects but never thought that they would really be of great impact, so how do you do it?

  2. The title of the page is so powerful in the Google algorithm.

    I’ve experimented with changing the title of my homepage on one of my blogs and immediately started seeing different keywords in my stats.

    The same title on all pages can actually flag the pages as duplicate content.

  3. Hey Al. Nice review but there are some other aspects there too. Like Link rewriting (permalinks). He should take care of that too.

    Also, i don’t like the fact that the site is built exclusively with tables, although the sites looks ok on the important browsers. And there’s a lot of javascript in there… 🙂

  4. Arran,
    don’t feel too bad. These issues are common to about 90% of the websites I analyze! Just make sure you fix them, you’ll be happy you did.

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