Central Perk

joi, 29 septembrie 2011

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Seton Hall to lower tuition rate by $21K matching Rutgers; Cost of College Education will Crash; Moronic Educators Object to Lower Costs
Peter Oborne 'Idiot' Comments Prompts EU Spokesman To Storm Off Newsnight
China Loan Shark Market Crashes; Scores of Chinese Business Owners Unable to Pay Black Market Loans Commit Suicide or Disappear
Enron-i-sation of Europe; Is the Euro "Beyond Rescue"?

Seton Hall to lower tuition rate by $21K matching Rutgers; Cost of College Education will Crash; Moronic Educators Object to Lower Costs

Posted: 29 Sep 2011 04:23 PM PDT

I have been waiting for and expecting news headlines just like this one: Seton Hall will lower tuition rate by $21K to match Rutgers for some incoming freshmen

Getting good grades and high SAT scores could save some Seton Hall University freshmen more than $21,000 a year in tuition costs under an unusual new program that could pit the Catholic school against Rutgers University for some of the state's top students.

Starting next fall, Seton Hall will match Rutgers' tuition — which is currently $10,104 a year for most in-state undergraduates — if freshmen score at least 1,200 on the combined reading and math sections of their SAT tests and graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Other students on the South Orange campus will continue to pay Seton Hall's regular annual tuition rate, which is currently $31,440 before room, board and other fees are added.

Expect Plans to Spread

Drew University in Madison rejected the plan as a publicity stunt. However, I expect such plans to spread. I also expect more competition from online classes.

If Congress really wants to do something about the high cost of education, it would:

Cancel student loan programs
End support for the University of Phoenix and all for-profit universities
Accredit more online universities
End collective bargaining of public unions

Cost of College Education will Crash Within a Decade

The cost of college education would sink like a rock with those four structural improvements.

Interestingly, even with piss poor government policies, places like Seton Hal, prices have collapsed for some students. Right now the opening toss applies to 10% of the students. Next year it may be 25% of students and offered at more universities.

For those who have kids in grade school, I would not advise programs that lock in today's rates if paid in advance.

The cost of college education will crash within a decade, simply because it has to. Moreover, the free market would lower costs sooner and far more dramatically, if only given the chance. Wages are not supportive of current education costs.

Addendum:

I wrote the above quoting the New Jersey Start Ledger article written yesterday. I received two emails just now pointing to additional articles in the Wall Street Journal and New York Daily News.

Please consider the Journal Article Seton Hall Cuts Cost For High Achievers

Seton Hall University will radically restructure its tuition for next year, slashing costs by more than 60% for all incoming students who have achieved a set of academic standards in high school, officials announced on Wednesday.

Some national education experts expressed concerns that the plan could accelerate a national trend: a shift in the focus of financial aid toward merit-based scholarships rather than awards based on need.

"There's only so much money, and at the end of the day every college needs to make decisions about who they'll subsidize," said Patrick Callan, the president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

The proposal raised concerns among some education experts, who said that schools are moving further away from the original intent behind subsidizing higher education: to help people attend college who couldn't afford it otherwise.

"When you just flat out across the board knock the price down for high-achieving students, you're going to be subsidizing a lot of students who don't really need the money," said Mr. Callan.

This form of subsidization "tends to help the institution attract the freshman class that it wants to raise the academic profile, raise the U.S. News rating," he said. "It doesn't have much to do with providing opportunity to people who wouldn't have it."

"It becomes, from a budget point of view, a race to the bottom," said Jerome Sullivan, the executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "Someone else will do the same thing only they'll do it $50 better. And then someone else will do it $100 better."

The ultimate result, he said, is that "the budget gets ravished because revenue begins to disappear and in the end it's low-income families as well as the institution that lose out."

Failure of Subsidies

One of the reasons college education is so high is because union activists and socialists want to send everyone to college whether they are qualified or not. When that drove up costs, government "aid" programs were invented, not for the benefit of students, but rather for the benefit of educators. Students became debt slaves in the process.

The education mess has gotten bigger and more costly ever since programs were put in place to subsidize students, many of whom did not belong in college in the first place, but rather a trade school or apprentice program.

Moronic Thinking of Jerome Sullivan

Note the moronic thinking of Jerome Sullivan. He is actually complaining about costs of education dropping, complaining price wars will hurt low-income families.

The fact of the matter is the more prices drop, the more people can afford to go to college.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Peter Oborne 'Idiot' Comments Prompts EU Spokesman To Storm Off Newsnight

Posted: 29 Sep 2011 11:22 AM PDT

link if above video does not play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNq9MOc5CBY

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

China Loan Shark Market Crashes; Scores of Chinese Business Owners Unable to Pay Black Market Loans Commit Suicide or Disappear

Posted: 29 Sep 2011 09:30 AM PDT

Here is an interesting email from reader "Kevin" regarding the crashing loan-shark market in China.

Hello Mish

I am a long time reader and want to bring to your attention on a new development in China: private business owners are disappearing or jumping off buildings because they can no longer pay off black market shark loans.

According to national new paper Economics Information (part of state media Xinhua), on 9/22, Hu Fulin, owner of the biggest eyeglass manufacture of the city of Wenzhou disappeared, leaving behind 2 billion RMB debt.

On 9/25, 3 more business owners in Wenzhou disappeared (owners of copper, steel and shoe manufacture).

On 9/27, owner of "Zhengdeli", a shoe manufacture jumped off of a 22 story building and killed himself.

Since April this year 29 private business owners have disappeared, all of them had over 100 million RMB businesses. 11 of the 29 owned shoe manufacturing businesses.

An analyst from China Investment (China's Sovereign investment fund) pointed out that it's because they are squeezed by a rapid increase of component and labor costs. A rising RMB is also a reason why many export oriented companies are hit. In August, Zhou Dewen, President of Wenzhou Small-Medium Business Development Association said the profit margin of Small-Medium businesses in Wenzhou has dropped to under 5% and absent of policy changes, 40% of businesses in Wenzhou will go out of business by next Spring Festival (late Jan 2012)

The complete article is here (in Chinese): http://www.jjckb.cn/2011-09/29/content_334954.htm.

Another article http://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/20110929/005910558780.shtml (titled: China's Shark Loans Crashing; "Grey Finance" Brewing the Chinese Crisis) states that most of those owners have borrowed "private" loans (typically 70% of all loans), with MONTHLY interest rate ranging from 3% to 10%.

About 89% of families/individuals and 59% of companies in Wenzhou participated in such "private loan" schemes. In Erdos (the ghost city you blogged many times), such "private loans" are more than 200 billion RMB with annual interest rate over 60%. Now they are crashing, causing rampant unfinished real estate projects in Erdos.

Note that Wenzhou is one of riches cities in China (No. 3 in disposable income per capita), and is considered the "Birthplace of China's Private Economy". Wenzhou people are among the first that got in trades, manufacturing, export, and in recent years real estate investment/speculation. The Wenzhou economy is considered the "weathercock" of Chinese economy.

Loan Shark Credit Crisis Brewing

Courtesy of Google Translate please consider Gray Chinese-style financial credit crisis brewing area

"Economic Information Daily" correspondent from the multi-confirmed the day before and then there were two causes of Wenzhou City, inability to repay loan sharks and jumping events. According to informed sources, the two business owners are the local shoe factory owner, debt of millions.

Since April this year, Wenzhou, missing more than 80 business owners, the company closed, the event staff pay talks, since September alone, there are up to 25 cases. A local lender told reporters, "At present, only the flight of capital Longwan area estimated to have 100 million or more, many SMEs liabilities, the banks accounted for 30%, accounting for 70% civil usury."

Crazy expansion of private lending market chaos

Some sharks can reach up to 180% per annum. ... "many companies debt snowball, private lending market has not been given attention now has about 25% local to 30% of companies in trouble, some in the suspension or semi-shutdown state, but by the end of this class companies are more likely accounted for 40% to 50%. "

Financial Earthquake Triggered by Loan Shark Business

Also courtesy of Google Translate, please consider loan-sharking business owners who jumped to escape

September 22, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Jiang Xintai largest optical company chairman Hu Fulin liabilities 2 billion fled, triggering a major earthquake Wenzhou business. Wenzhou Zhou German SME Development Association president, said Hu Fulin liabilities involving nearly ten thousand people, dozens of companies, including upstream and downstream Nobuyasu and creditors, the incident is still fermenting, the impact will be further expanded.

Hu Fulin fled after the September 25 Wenzhou enterprises have three big boss fled; afternoon of September 27, Wenzhou shoe boss is profit because of debt problems from Wenzhou Shun Building, 22 Floor, Jin jumped to death.

The translations are choppy, but the ideas very easy to spot.

$SSEC - Shanghai Exchange -Daily Chart

click on chart for sharper image

China is down another 1% (not reflected in the above chart), to 2368 as of 2:00 AM Thursday. It closed at 2365.

click on chart for sharper image

The Shanghai stock market depicts a credit bubble that collapsed in 2008, partially rebounded, and is sinking once again.

China did not decouple from the global economy, nor is there any reason to believe it will, or should. China's debt bubble, housing bubble, and copper Ponzi financing schemes are collapsing.

Copper Ponzi Scheme: See Ponzi Financing Involving Copper Trade Gone Wild In China for details of a copper financing scheme now gone bust.

Shark Loans: See Ponzi "Shark Loans" Fuel China's Housing Bubble; Home Sales Plunge 44% in Xiamen; Bubble Busts in Tianjin for details on how loan shark operations fueled China's real estate bubble.

Ghost Cities: I have done many stories on China's ghost cities, most recently World's Biggest Property Bubble: China's Ghost Cities Revisited; 64 Million Vacant Properties

Property Loans Halted: Property Loans Halted in China's 2nd and 3rd-Tier Cities; Is China's Spectacular Real Estate Bubble About to Pop?

All of these schemes are starting to unravel in a major way.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Enron-i-sation of Europe; Is the Euro "Beyond Rescue"?

Posted: 29 Sep 2011 01:21 AM PDT

Steen Steen Jakobsen, chief economist for Saxo bank in Denmark discusses the Enron-i-sation of Europe in an Email "Macro Brief"

The Enron-i-sation of Europe: Finding solutions through SPV's speak for themselves. Apart from the inability to being implemented (if German constitutional court is heard) it's also a slippery road towards permanent aid. Hiding debt in more and more obscure vehicles is similar to Enron having 1000s of SPV hiding the "real issue". Debt is debt. It needs to be paid back or someone needs to take a loss!

New financial tax: This is major game changer – this is in my opinion the beginning of the end for Europe – the "new new" in this scenario is that G-20/EU seems to have found an academic documentation that the tax may not need be applied "universally" – they mention domestic taxes in India(not freely trading market) and UK.

The suggested (not confirmed) level of taxes are 0.1 pc on shares and bonds (1 mio. EUR equals "tax" of 1.000 EUR) and 0.01 on derivatives or 1.4 pips on each side of EURUSD! This is MASSIVE tax……. And as such shows that my Maximum Intervention concept is now operating a top speed.

Banks are now meeting around Europe to move their operation outside the EU.

We are no longer doing two steps forward, three steps back, but one step forward and ten back. Furthermore the so called "Plan" for saving Europe is not reality.

All my sources confirm, again and again, this is a desperate attempt to find the right path through this mess. The people in the know, realize there are no longer any good solutions only pain. The pain from here is either 2-5 years of recession or 10-15 years. Enron-i-sation & tax makes this week the new low in solidarity, rationality and solution seeking.

Cash is king – and cash in UK, Switzerland, Singapore, and US even more King-ish. I remain EXTREMELY bearish on this.

Notes on SPVs

Investopedia describes the Special Purpose Vehicle/Entity - SPV/SPE

What Does Special Purpose Vehicle/Entity - SPV/SPE Mean?

1. Also referred to as a "bankruptcy-remote entity" whose operations are limited to the acquisition and financing of specific assets. The SPV is usually a subsidiary company with an asset/liability structure and legal status that makes its obligations secure even if the parent company goes bankrupt.

2. A subsidiary corporation designed to serve as a counterparty for swaps and other credit sensitive derivative instruments. Also called a "derivatives product company."

Thanks to Enron, SPVs/SPEs are household words.

Euro is "Practically Dead, Beyond Rescue"

Bloomberg reports Euro Is Beyond Rescue in Debt Crisis, Szalay-Berzeviczy Says

The euro is "practically dead" and Europe faces a financial earthquake from a Greek default, according to Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, global head of securities services at Italy's biggest lender UniCredit SpA. (UCG)

"The euro is beyond rescue," Szalay-Berzeviczy said in an opinion piece for index.hu., a Hungarian news portal, which he signed as former chairman of the Budapest Stock Exchange. "The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece's spirits."

"It's one scenario among many, one which may lead to the breakup of the euro area via a banking crisis," he said in the interview. "This can still be averted. It primarily depends on the Germans, and secondly on European citizens, especially on how much the Greek population can tolerate."

Szalay-Berzeviczy's "are his own personal view and do not reflect the position of the company," Claudia Bresgen, a spokeswoman at UniCredit in Munich, Germany, said by e-mail.

"Beyond Rescue" and "This can still be averted" are logical opposites.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see such blunt comments from high places at major lenders, even if those comments "do not reflect the position of the company".

For more on the twisted mess in Europe, please consider these recent posts

Growing Isolation in Germany as Merkel's Allies Abandon Her; Polls Show 75% of Germans Oppose More Bailouts; Clock Ran Out of Time

Merkel Prepares Market for Bigger Haircuts; Split opens Over Greek Bail-Out Terms; Needs vs. Fantasies

Europe Plans to Tax Stock and Bond Transactions .1%, Derivatives .01% Despite US Objections; Expect More Crashes Should it Pass

European Stocks Climb Most in 16 Months; Pimco's El-Erian Says "Europe Finally Gets It"; El-Erian is Wrong in Multiple Ways

Germany's Top Judge Throws Major Monkey Wrench Into Leveraged EFSF Machinery, Demands New Constitution and Popular Referendum for Further Powers

I struggle to see how the Eurozone can survive intact. No currency union without a fiscal union has ever survived and the German court ruled out a fiscal union without a new constitution and popular referendum. Good luck with that given 75% of Germans oppose more bailouts. See the above articles for details.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand

Posted: 28 Sep 2011 01:42 PM PDT

Posted by iPullRank

Before I even start saying anything about keyword research I want to take my hat off to Richard Baxter because the tools and methodologies he shared at MozCon make me feel silly for even thinking about bringing something to the Keyword Research table. Now with that said, I have a few ideas about using data sources outside of those that the Search Engines provide to get a sense of what needs people are looking to fulfill right now. Consider this the first in a series.

Correlation Between Social Media & Search Volume

The biggest problem with the Search Engine-provided keyword research tools is the lag time in data. The web is inherently a real-time channel and in order to capitalize upon that you need to be able to leverage any advantage you can in order to get ahead of the search demand. Although Google Trends will give you data when there are huge breakouts on keywords around current events there is a three-day delay with Google Insights and AdWords only gives you monthly numbers!

However there is often a very strong correlation between the number of people talking about a given subject or keyword in Social Media and the amount of search volume for that topic. Compare the trend of tweets posted containing the keyword “Michael Jackson” with search volume for the last 90 days.

"Michael Jackson" Tweets

"Michael Jackson" Search Volume

The graphs are pretty close to identical with a huge spike on August 29^th which is Michael Jackson’s (and my) birthday. The problem is that given the limitations of tools like Google Trends and Google Insights you may not be able to find this out until September 1^st for many keywords and beyond that you may not be able to find complementary long tail terms with search volume.

The insight here is that subjects people are tweeting about are ultimately keywords that people are searching for. The added benefit of using social listening for keyword research that you can also get a good sense of the searcher’s intent to better fulfill their needs.

Due to this correlation social Listening allows you to uncover what topics and keywords will have search demand and what topics are going have a spike in search demand –in real-time.

N-grams

Before we get to the methodology for doing this I have to explain one basic concept –N-grams. An N-gram is a subset of a sequence of length N. In the case of search engines the N is the number of words in a search query. For example (I'm so terrible with gradients):

is a 5-gram. The majority of search queries fall between 2 and 5-grams anything beyond a 5-gram is most likely a long tail keyword that doesn’t have a large enough search volume to warrant content creation.

If this is still unclear check out the Google Books Ngram viewer ; it’s a pretty cool way to get a good idea of what Ngrams are. Also you should check out John Doherty’s Google Analytics Advanced Segments post where talks about how to segment N-grams using RegEx.

Real-Time Keyword Research Methodology

Now that we’ve got the small vocabulary update out of the way let’s talk about how you can do keyword research in real-time. The following methodology was developed by my friend Ron Sansone with some small revisions from me in order to port it into code.

1. Pull all the tweets containing your keyword from Twitter Search within the last hour. This part is pretty straightforward; you want to pull down the most recent portion of the conversation right now in order to extract patterns. Use Topsy for this. If you’re not using Topsy, pulling the last 200 tweets via Twitter is also a good sized data set to use.

2. Identify the top 10 most repeated N-grams ignoring stop words. Here you identify the keywords with the highest (ugh) density. In other words the keywords that are tweeted the most are the ones you are considering for optimization. Be sure to keep this between 2 and 5 N-grams beyond that you most likely not dealing with a large enough search volume to make your efforts worthwhile. Also be sure to exclude stop words so you don’t end up with n-grams like “jackson the” or “has Michael.” Here’s a list of English stop words and Textalyser has an adequate tool for breaking a block of text into N-grams.

3. Check to see if there is already search volume in the Adwords Keyword tool or Google Insights. This process is not just about identifying breakout keywords that aren’t being shown yet in Google Insights but it’s also about identifying keywords with existing search volume that are about to get boost. Therefore you’ll want to check the Search Engine tools to see if any search volume exists in order to prioritize opportunities.

4. Pull the Klout scores of all the users tweeting them. Yeah, yeah I know Klout is a completely arbitrary calculation but you want to know that the people tweeting the keywords have some sort of influence. If you find that a given N-gram has been used many times by a bunch of spammy Twitter profiles then that N-gram is absolutely not useful. Also if you create content around the given term, you’ll know exactly who to send it to.

Methodology Expanded

I expanded on Ron’s methodology by introducing another data source. If you were at SMX East you might have heard me express the love that low budget hustlers (such as myself) have for SocialMention. Using SocialMention allows you pull data from up to 100+ social media properties and news sources. Unlike Topsy or Twitter there is an easy CSV/Excel File export and they give you the top 1-grams being used in posts related to that topic. Be sure to exclude images, audio and video from your search results as they are not useful.

"Michael Jackson" Social Mention

One quick note: The CSV export will only give you a list of URLs, sources, page titles and main ideas. You will still have to extract the data manually or with some of the ImportXML magic that Tom Critchlow debuted earlier this year.

So What's the Point?

So what does all of this get me? Well today it got me "michael jackson trial," "jackson trial," "south park" and "heard today." So if I was looking to do some content around Michael Jackson I'd find out what news came to light in court, illustrate the trial and the news in a blog post using South Park characters and fire it off to all the influencers that tweeted about it. Need I say more? You can now easily figure out what type of content would make viral link bait in real-time.

GoFish

So this sounds like a lot of work to get the jump on a few keywords, doesn’t it?

Well I can definitely relate and especially since I am a programmer it’s quite painful for me to do any repetitive task. Seriously am I really going to sit in Excel and remove stop words? No I’m not and neither should you. Whenever a methodology like this pops up the first thing I think is how to automate it. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to the legendary GoFish real-time keyword research tool.

I built this from Ron’s methodology and it uses the Topsy, Repustate and SEMRush APIs. When I get some extra time I will include the SocialMention API and hopefully Google will cut the lights back on for my Adwords API as well.

I seriously doubt it will handle the load that comes with being on the front page of SEOmoz as it is only built on 10 proxies and each of these APIs has substantial rate limitations (Topsy – 33k/day, Repustate 50k/month, SEMRush-I’m still not sure) but here it is nonetheless. If anyone wants to donate some AWS instances or a bigger proxy network to me I’ll gladly make this weapons grade. Shout out to John Murch for letting me borrow some of his secret stash of proxies and shout out to Pete Sena at Digital Surgeons for making me all-purpose GUI for my tools.

Anyway all you have to is put in your keyword, press the button, wait for a time and voila you get output that looks like this:

The output is the top 10 N-grams, the combined Klout scores of the all users that tweeted the given N-gram vs the highest combined Klout score possible, all of the users in the data set that tweeted them and the search volume if available.

So that's GoFish. Think of it as a work in progress but let me know what features will help you get more out of it.

Until Next Time…

That’s all I’ve got for this week folks. I’ll be back soon with another real-time keyword research tactic and tool. if you haven’t checked out my keyword-level demographics post yet, please do! In the meantime look for me in the chatroom for Richard Baxter's Actionable Keyword Research for Motivated Marketers Webinar.

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President Obama to Students: "Set Your Sights High"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011

President Obama to Students: "Set Your Sights High"

Yesterday, President Obama spoke directly to students across the country in his third annual Back-to-School speech. The President encouraged America's students to use their time in school to try new things, discover new passions and hone their skills to prepare themselves for the kind of profession they want in the future.

Watch the video.

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan talk in a hold area before the President delivers his third annual back-to-school speech at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Washington, D.C. Sept. 28, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

SEOptimise

Top 10 Retail SEO Mistakes UK Brands Are Still Making

Posted: 28 Sep 2011 04:39 AM PDT

Last week I asked on Twitter to see what common SEO mistakes were still being made by retail websites. This received a great response, so I thought I’d share the top replies with our readers.

I’ve picked some UK high street retail examples to help display the issues raised, but please note that we have no connection with any of these websites – so this is an outside perspective. There may be logical reasons for the examples which we are unaware of, but these have been used in order to highlight where SEO mistakes are commonly made.

Non-descriptive URL structure

Ideally you want to keep your URLs concise and keyword descriptive. So automatically generated, ID-based URLs aren’t going to help your SEO, unless you’re aiming to rank for g474502s2 - in which case Next.co.uk have dominated market share!

Long and messy URLs generated by CMS

Some content management systems really make a mess of URLs. From an SEO perspective you want to have full control over re-writing category-level URLs such as this one on Argos:

Linking to multiple homepage URLs

This is a common mistake – which is getting better across many sites, but if you click the logo or homepage link on some sites, you’ll find that rather than getting sent back to the root domain, you’re taken to a duplicate copy of the page on a new URL. See this example on House of Fraser:

Poor title tags/meta descriptions

I’ve worked with a CMS before that didn’t allow you to edit title tags at all – that was a bit of a problem! Hopefully your site won’t be quite that bad, but too often people just think about SEO for generating rankings – what about click through rates and conversions though?

Crafting an enticing title tag and meta description should be as important as writing a high CTR, converting AdWords ad – notice the difference between these two listings for Marks and Spencer – surely M&S would prefer you click on the natural free listing given the choice!

No user-generated content/reviews

For conversion rates alone, having reviews and user-generated content is an excellent way to boost your site’s performance. See this case study on how onlineshoes.com increased sales by 119% due to user reviews. But it’s also a great way of adding extra content to your products – giving the search engines that extra 200-300 words of unique and what should be well-optimised copy (because it’s about the product) could well be enough to make a significant increase in search rankings.

It could certainly be worth testing at the very least for a lot of brands, for example Ted Baker:

Forgetting about branded product search

One of the first things I check with our e-commerce and retail clients is branded search results. It’s often just taken for granted that you will be ranking for your branded keywords, so it’s assumed that non-branded search and first-time visitors is the main target. However, this isn’t always the case and it definitely shouldn’t just be assumed – these are almost certainly going to be your top converting keywords, so a small amount of effort here can easily pay off to ensure that you’re generating the majority of traffic – which let’s face it you deserve, it’s your product after all!

It’s amazing how many brands don’t rank for their own products though – check out these results for Sony W510 12MP which are dominated by Argos and Amazon:

Lack of static on-page content

Many websites struggle when it comes to having good, optimised content deeper in the site. For example, product pages which have very little descriptive text written about them could be much better optimised for search. See this example from Monsoon, which showcases the product reasonably well, but does little towards telling users and the search engines about it:

Pulling search results in as category pages

As above, sometimes category pages are very weak on content and often these are just search results which are being pulled into a page. Yes it may do a job for the user – but surely a bit more text here would help to give the search engines a bit more to go on. It doesn’t even have to be too detailed – a quick description underneath “Mens Hats, Gloves & Scarves” on the Debenhams site here would be a big improvement to optimise for the phrase “Mens Hats”, which they currently bid on using PPC, yet fail to rank in the top 50 positions in Google organically for:

Webpages & content too image-based

From the websites I’ve reviewed today, I’ve actually been quite impressed that most of these have now moved away from having content which is too image or flash-based. This is a clear SEO issue to avoid, as you want your site’s content to be as well optimised as possible – which means it should be text-rich. Topman is an example of a site which hasn’t quite got there yet – the only text currently on their homepage is navigational:

Duplicate content – same product, multiple categories

I’ve seen several retail sites in the past where they have caused duplicate content issues by having category-level subfolders within the product URL. Here’s one example from Blacks, where they have a product which is listed under two different categories, so they’ve ended up with two URLs for what is exactly the same product:

Because they sit under both categories, the URLs are duplicated – so ideally it’s normally best to avoid using category-level subfolders in product pages – see Amazon for an example of this. Also, canonical tags are there to help get around this issue if it exists – but ideally you’ll want to have each product page in a single location. Hope that makes sense, but Dan’s written a much more detailed post on product URLs causing duplicate content issues – so you should read that one if it doesn’t!

So those are the top SEO mistakes we’ve found retail websites are still making – a big thanks to Malcolm Slade, Rishi Lakhani, Paul Rogers, Stuart Turner, Ashley Hayward, Daniel Bianchini, Ian Galpin and Edwin Hayward who contributed via Twitter. And if you have any questions or comments on what you’ve found to be the biggest challenges, it would be great to hear about this in the comments.