Web Review: www.servicemerchandise.com

By Gil Galanti

Until 2002, Service Merchandise was a bricks and mortar home-and-jewelry specialty chain that closed its doors due to financial problems.

Today, led by Raymond Zimmerman, the founder’s son, ServiceMerchandise.com is a medium-size website in terms of traffic volume, offering the same product categories with an emphasis on a wide variety of jewelry items under the slogan “For Jewelry, Gifts and Home”.

 

Most of the homepage body consists of promotion pitches offering selected products from the store: from ruby jewelry deals through certified diamonds, pearls, watches and “trendsetting” jewelry items. The homepage’s right-hand column offers more deal teasers and, in line with what is clearly a hard-sale strategy, the site offers free shipping for jewelry costing more than $98.86.

Google’s PageRank system uses the vast link structure of the Internet as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Having 333 links currently pointing at it, ServiceMerchandise.com’s homepage now earns a 5 out of 10 “grade” from Google, which is considered to be quite impressive. Ironically, however, the site is not included in Google’s first 100 results for Jewelry, Diamonds, Bracelets or Earrings. The reason for this is poor search engine optimization methods, or none at all.

The website title, for example, at the top of the browser window, promotes the company name - a typical internet marketing mistake - instead of its products, such as “diamonds”, “loose diamonds”, “engagement rings” and so on. Another typical mistake is the use of a programming method that prevents search engines from identifying the necessary keywords in the body of the homepage. As a result, the engine thinks that there is no match between the meta-info and the viewable text of the page and the website is ranked as less relevant.

If I were working in Service Merchandise’s marketing department, I would certainly refer my programming manager to a friendly search engine resource such as instantposition.com and make some changes to achieve a better position in both Google and Yahoo.

IDEX Website Review is an objective evaluation, expressing clear and balanced opinions on retail diamond and jewelry websites. All articles published in this review are solely under IDEX’s editorial control and are not commercially influenced.

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