Web Review: www.benbridge.com
October 17, 04
By Gil Galanti
The number of Fortune 100 companies with effective search engine optimization (SEO) techniques has tripled since 2002, according to OneUpWeb, a leading internet marketing company, but only nine companies had definitive, optimization campaigns, indicating that the rest may be missing out on a valuable market share: The online market share.
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Ben Bridge Jeweler is not a fortune 500 company, but it is certainly a highly respected and well-known chain store with over 70 stores in the western
A dignified and appealing “look and feel” and a simple and straight-forward navigation system offer an advanced electronic store next to well-made complimentary educational resources. Except for a proper search mechanism, this site has almost everything one can expect. Furthermore, its graphic design has obviously been done by a talented professional. The interactive store distribution map, for example, is more than just a web gimmick. It can actually support customer purchase decision. Clearly, a lot of time, effort and dollars money have been invested in this online venture. That’s why I expect such a website to maintain a prominent search engine presence.
As we know, search engine ranking is largely influenced by the number of referring links pointing to a web page. Benbridge.com has 530 links identified by MSN and 714 identified by Yahoo!, but despite these impressive numbers, its ranking is quite poor, due to ineffective SEO implementation.
The homepage title and description tags for example, “Ben Bridge Jeweler - Welcome To Ben Bridge Jeweler”, do not include the most obvious keywords, such as “Jewelry”, “Diamond Ring”, “Men’s jewelry” etc. As a result it isn’t listed in the top 100 Yahoo results for those searches, where there is strong competition.
Worse, Google, the world’s most popular search engine, graded benbridge.com with ‘zero’ ranking and excludes it from its first 100 results for “diamonds” or “jewelry”, and from narrower search results. Amazingly, benbridge.com is not even included in the first 100 results for “Ben Bridge Signature Diamonds” which has been properly trade marked in the offline world. Because of these mistakes, I believe it’s losing a lot of valuable online market share. %
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