• Practical eCommerce, Tuesday, August 12, 2008 1 PM

Jeff Meundel trains a search pro's eye on the Web site of Little Pixie Gifts, a baby-oriented gift retailer, and finds that when it comes to SEO, "Little Pixie has big SEO potential." He gives the site an overall score of B-.

Muendel says that the site scores points for its correct usage of a sitemap on the homepage--as well as the minimalistic design of said sitemap. "Littlepixiegifts.com.au not only has a link to their sitemap, but it also has an ideal sitemap design," he says. "Major categories and subcategories are listed logistically with textual links, but it doesn't go deeper than that level, the point at which a sitemap can start to get spammy."

Meanwhile, the site also scores above average marks for its depth of secondary page content, title tags and keyword density. Still, Muendel says Little Pixie Gifts could benefit from more focused attention in all three areas.

The areas where the site scores poorly (in the D and F range) are inbound links, indexation and URL structure. "If Little Pixie Gifts has an SEO weak point, it is in the URLs," Muendel says. "As search engines spider the URL addresses along with title tags and page content, each URL should reflect the keyword theme of the page. Instead, Little Pixie Gifts has URLs like http://www.littlepixiegifts.com.au/cart.php?target=category&category_id=62. While such a URL doesn't necessarily hurt things from a search engine perspective, it certainly doesn't help."

Read the whole story at Practical eCommerce »