Site Clinic - Website Review : Tattooed Chicks

Tattooed Chicks

Today is a site review day whereby we get a URL and some info and have a quick look over a site to see what can be improved upon and then throw the door open to you guys as well if there is anything you wanted to add.

Site: Tattooed Chicks
Description: Tattooed Chicks, A Place For Beautiful Tattooed Ladies
Page rank: 1
Server IP location: USA
Pages indexed in Google: 355
Yahoo inbound links : 125
Website age: Approx 6 months

Brief overview
I like this site idea, again taking a subject matter which is popular like tattoos and putting a different spin on it by offering a site for women by women which makes it more personal and still covers  a huge market.

The interviews are a great idea and offer more of a personal touch, merchandise is available and a forum and stories so the concept and execution is all very well done, most of the problems I see with this site holding it back are SEO related and on site so making a few small tweaks would really let this site build up it’s organic serps and traffic albeit I think it has done very well considering it is only 6 months old.

Improvements & Recommendations

Title & Descriptions
Each page needs to have unique <title> and <description> meta tags, having the same title & description is losing possible free traffic. Doing a site command in Google shows the uniform Title of “Tattooed Chicks” for every page.

 tc.jpg

The Title & Description can either be manually changed on each page or if the site uses a template then a coder could probably offer a dynamic update so that you could manually add unique titles and descriptions pretty cheaply. Takes a bit of time to go back and do but well worth the effort.

Image Alt Description tag
With the titles & description offering better unique content to the engines the next change would be adding ‘Alt tags’ to the images in the gallery and the interviews. The gallery has alt tags like ‘pic 1’ ‘pic 2’ so a way of making these more relevant is needed.

This lets the search engines know what each image is about and can aid things like on page relevance and Google images from which you can derive a lot of traffic. Google images accounts for around 6000 visitors per day through some of my sites so again well worth adding in.

The more descriptive you can be with your alt tags the better but there is no need to spam them full of keywords, accurate and informative will do.

The forum
By far the biggest thing holding this site back is the closed forum, with 63 thousand posts in there that could bring in a serious amount of search engine traffic if the search engines were allowed to spider the posts so the forum really needs to be opened up. On a hobby site I have the forum accounts for 40% of where visitors arrive into the site showing that a good forum can attract a fair amount of free traffic.

I realise it is most likely setup like this for a reason or privacy but there is always a middle ground and I would suggest that the forum is opened up and then in the forum you can create areas that are more private that only registered users can see and use and post in, the more you can open this up - the more you can give the engines unique content and they can in return feed you more visitors so I am sure a balance between privacy can be achieved.

Other smaller changes (optional)
Personally for the site especially with it’s indexing problems to date I may look to add a sitemap once the title/descriptions were sorted and the alt tags added to make sure all those pages are distinct and found.

For the homepage I would look to introduce a few good keywords either in the title or on the actual page. Tattooed Chicks is fine for the site name but words like ‘tattooed women’ would be far more likely to be searched for so should be incorporated in the text.Implement all those changes and the traffic is sure to go up.

Remember if you have a website that could do with a lift and you feel is a good solid idea that needs an impartial review then  contact us. All we ask if a follow post from yourself once the changes are implemented to see how things go.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Theres 2 suggestions I’d make:

    1) The gallery is painful, the thumbnails are not really thumbnails and just rescaled on the fly which makes the pages load really slow.
    I also don’t like the next/prev only option on the gallery, it would be nice to be able to skip to any page within the gallery, even nicer would be to categorise it so I can skip to categories of tattoos. And when on the category pages use some heading tags (h1’s) to specify the category, ie. within your h1 tag have “Womens Back Tattoos”, this should really help with your SERPs.

    So using thumbnails to make the pages load faster, add in categories and let me jump to any page would make the gallery 1000 times nicer.

    2) Get an interview with Kat Von D, OK, so mostly this is because I think she is stunning, but also I would imagine her name gets searched for quite a bit, so getting that onto the site could help bring in some more search traffic.

    Apart from that, nice site.

  2. Thanks for such an excellent and useful post

    nice work scott

    and thanks for all the great advice

  3. Tattooed Chicks says:

    Carl

    Thanks for the input with the galleries, we have been thinking of altering them at some point, it was made like that, and with categories

    Originally there was not enough photos to warrant sections, hence the mouse over gallery

    2) Interview with Kat, I have tried and tried!! But to no avail, we are in touch with her PR bloke, but still waiting!

    Thanks for your comments on the site, much appreciated

    Braidy

  4. I’d also lose the hearts from the title tag and put the page name first and then the site name.

    As Carl said, try and use h1, h2, h3 tags in your content rather than just using bold tags around the headings. Helps a little with SEO and gives the page a bit more structure.

    And counters at the bottom of the page are a little 80’s 🙂

  5. interview fixed and counter removed 🙂

    Hearts are there to stay, it is a girls site after all lol

    H1, H2 etc… will be looked into later on

    Cheers

    • I think the hearts are OK, especially now you’ve added in different title tags for every page. Theres only so much you should give to the search engines, sites should still have their own bit of personality.

      Shame about the Kat interview.

  6. Yeah Kats a hard one to get!

    The interviews we have and the ones coming up are well known in the industry, so its not all bad.

  7. 1. On a slightly expanded note, aside from just making use of the alt tags for the images, naming your images appropriately will substantially help by making it easier for Google to find the images on your web site, and help a great deal on the SEO side if done appropriately as well.

    2. The ‘Home’ link points to /index.php rather than just the domain, which is not going to help SEO.

  8. Hey humphrey, it points to index.php because two domains are used for the site, .co.uk and .net 🙂

    Yeah I have named the alts accurately, i usually leave them blank or a few letters (lazy i know!)

    • With have the 2 domains, you could just make the link a simple “/” rather than using “/index.php”…..

      • with the two domains, will they both show up as duplicate content, or does one domain get redirected to the other when anyone views a page. Meaning if you use the .net as your main domain, do any requests to the .co.uk get redirected to the .net page.

        If you can see the same pages under the .net and .co.uk then you might get penalised for having duplicate content on the site.

        I think there’s a fairly simple htaccess command for redirecting one domain to another, but I can’t remember it off the top of my head right now.

  9. Originally it was the .co.uk domain, but we had a few emails about it being “uk only” so we got the .net domain too.

    The two domains are pointing to the same place and the forum is using the .co.uk

    Didnt think of that Humphrey lol cheers!

  10. I think I pretty much agree with all points raised here, all very valid and with the best of intentions to achieve more SE traffic so a big thanks to Paul for putting his site forward in the spotlight and a great response from the community offering added value and great pointers to further what is already a very good website.

  11. One thing that I would do is to research themed (LSI) keywords for tatoos and add them on the home page.

    Show Google that you know what you are talking about.

  12. Great Idea for a site could be huge!

    I did the basic check b4 even clicking through to the main post & saw the meta problem I see two areas apart from what has been mentioned the home page is dull drab
    particuarly as this is a graphic related site lots of color & tatos are needed in mho

    The store on cafepress is not indexed these cp stores take a few inbound links to get indexed & or upgrade from basic then each page is your own that you can add backlinks back to your site then I would create the store/product pages on your site with just the buyitnow button linking back to cp & obviously add lotssss more products.

    Good Luck 🙂

  13. Nice tattoo niche website. But too niche isn’t so good. Should broaden it by covering girls for every country instead of British girls only. Just my two cents opinion.

  14. Great info. It’s been really helpful. I’ve used.

    Aleks@tattoo pictures gallery’s last blog post..Japanese tattoo art

  15. Not too much of a fan of girls with tattoos to be honest.

    Tattoo niche is an interesting topic though, there’s always people trying to push the boat out with new tattoo designs and techniques.

  16. Dave Tattoo says:

    The new owners have ruined it, it used to be women only and looked a good site, its now called tattoo-people and it sucks!

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