Page HTML great for humans, but seems to be very bad for bots?
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We recently switched platforms and use Joomla for our website. Our product page underwent a huge transformation and it seems to be user friendly for a human, but when you look at one of our product pages in SEOBrowser it seems that we are doing a horrible job optimizing the page and our html almost makes us look spammy.
Here is an example or a product page on our site:
http://urbanitystudios.com/custom-invitations-and-announcements/shop-by-event/cocktail/beer-mug
And, if you take a look in something like SEObrowser, it makes us look not so good.
For example, all of our footer and header links show up. Our color picker is a bunch of pngs (over 60 to be exact), our tabs are the same (except for product description and reviews) on every single product page...
In thinking about the bots:
1-How do we handle all of the links from footer, header and the same content in the tabs
2-How do we signal to them that all that is important on the page is the description of the product?
3-We installed schema for price and product image, etc but can we take it further?
4-How do we handle the "attribute" section (i.e. our color picker, our text input, etc).
Any clarification I need to provide, please let me know.
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out of curiosity, what did you think this page was for? thanks for your insight.
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Just being honest....
I had absolutely no idea that this was a page for designing an invitation. None at all - until I read your reply.
If this was my site I would not allow a cool color picker or a coding challenge or whatever to compromise my success by pushing the description down under. I would find a way to make it work because I bet this will kill the conversion rate.
It's easier to double your income from current traffic that it is to double your traffic.
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Hi EGOL,
Completely agree on beefing up the content as well as making the product name more relevant. We have run into cannibalization issues before so we have made our product names less competitive with our category pages and are working on making the page titles incredibly relevant (so we haven't done this yet, but Beer Mug Party Invitation) would be an example of what we'll change the page title to.
We struggle with bringing product description above the fold because the call to action is to play with the colors and see how customizable, flexible our products really are. We don't want folks to miss that by first seeing the product description.
As far as our HTML of the page, however, what are your thoughts on that. You'll see that the color picker (for example) pulls 66 pngs right in a row with a bunch of random numbers...tells the bot nothing of the page. However, that is how the code is built to make the interface work.
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First I would try to serve visitors by getting the product description up above the fold and immediately visible by the people who visit the website.
Second, I would expand the title tag because "Beer Mug" puts you into generic competition when you want to compete for easier SERPs such as "custom printed beer mug" (or appropriate language for your product).
Third, your description is really really short. I honestly believe that it has a very good chance of being filtered for trivial content. So, I would take my most important product first and start beefing up the description. As you do that you will add more relevant words to the page so in addition to making your content above trivial you will be qalifying for long tail traffic. Another benefit is that it adds sales appeal and reduces the number of questions that come in by email and phone.
At my office we spend lots of time improving trival content. I spend a hundred hours a month on that. Taking twenty word pages with one image and improving them to 200 word pages with four images. That is for retail pages. Informative pages go up to over a thousand words eight images and a video. (those numbers are just examples - we don't have word count goals). The payback in traffic can be very high if you are in a busy niche and have a site with a little authority.
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