It’s taken a while for us to do this follow-up as the majority of of our previous suggestions haven’t been implemented but as somebody commented asking about it I thought it could still be a useful exercise.

I’ve been a member of the Gadget Box affiliate program for a fair while and have sent over 60,000 targeted visitors their way which has resulted in not one single sale. To me this says there is a very serious conversion problem or their affiliate tracking system is broken. I’ve done a test purchase today so should be able to rule one of those areas out.

After adding the test item to my cart (I went for the Mind Trainer Toilet Roll) I then proceeded to check out by clicking the appropriate link, this then resulted in 3 options.

Returning Customer
Here I just have enter me email address and password

Proceed Directly to Checkout
This is an odd option and IMO totally pointless, it asks for the same information as the New Customer option expect it doesn’t require a password, thus saving you visitor a few seconds on this visit but doesn’t encourage them to come back, I’d lose the “Proceed Directly to Checkout” and just have Returning Customer and New Customer.

New Customer

This is the option that I went for, I filled in my address details, and once accepted got a thank you “Your Account Has Been Created!” message. After clicking continue I’m taken back to the home page which shows that I am logged in but my shopping basket is empty. However when I start searching for the test product I intend to buy I find that it has been automagically added to my cart, which is confusing to say the least.

The next step is for me to try and pay for the goods and check out. There’s an image on the page showing that they take Amex (my preferred card as I’m collecting airmiles) however when specifying the card type there is no Amex or American Express option (just Visa, Mastercard, Switch and Maestro) so I’ll have to use my debit card instead. The image is for Google Check Out, when I tested checking out that way there was no Amex option, so again a bit confusing.

The obvious suggestion here is to ideally accept American Express and Amex but if not at least don’t display the image indicating that you do.

After creating my account and checking out I received an order confirmation email with a link back to view my order (nice touch)

Overall I’d say the order process is pretty good, I’d remove the surplus option and review accepting other cards but there’s not much else wrong with it as far as I can see. So this doesn’t really explain the appalling conversion rate (if you can call zero a rate). When testing the Google Checkout option I noticed that they do not ship to the US (where a lot of my traffic is from) but I would still expect to make the odd sale as I do with a fair few other UK stores. I’ll report back on Friday whether I’ve now got something else to do in the bathroom and also whether I’ve been credited with my first Gadget Box sale.

If you have any ideas on how the checkout and conversion process could be improved I’d love to hear them, as donating 60K visitors for free isn’t something I’m proud of . Also if you’d like a site review get in touch.

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

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.

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.

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.