Optimization Review of SeoChat.com

Who is number one for “SEO” in Google?

Rank Without Optimization

When you search google for “Search Engine Optimization” usually the first website other than wikipedia.org to be number #1 is www.seochat.com. Click here to see Google Results.

Optimization Flaws

Interesting enough the site has several obvious optimization flaws. The site design is obsolete. The code has a high amount of errors. The site is slow and plagued with loading errors.

Proof  That Back Links Rule

There are so many problems with the site that it confirms our belief that practically the only factor that is important for optimization is the quality and quantity of back links.

Copy of the results Google returned for the site.

Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization – SEO Chat

Perhaps you’re new to the game, and don’t even know what SEO is. …. While it still has a few bugs, the service’s SEO impact should spread well beyond this …
www.seochat.com/ – 80k –

Metadata mistakes that get your listings truncated

As you can see there are several “….” truncations that cut the text up and interrupt the flow of the reader. This problem is caused by the fact that they have the same meta title as the meta description.

Metadata tags allow you to decide what appears in search results for your website. This allows you to design the appearance of your search results in a way that entices viewers to click your listing over the next competitors.

Metadata for SeoChat.com

Page Title: Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization – SEO Chat
Meta Description: Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization – SEO Chat
Meta Keywords: Search, Engine, Optimization, Google, Optimization, -, SEO, Chat

Duplicate content in meta data hurts your site

As you can see Google took their page title straight from the meta title of the page. Google knows users do not like repetitive data so they did not use the meta description as it amounts to duplicate content of the page title. This seems to be a very basic elementary error.

Positive optimization of seochat.com

Inbound Links: 536,071

There are a significant amount of other sites linking to seochat.com. This is the most important factor in their optimization for the most competative keyword phrase on the net: “Search Engine Optimization.”

Google Page Rank: 4

For a site with so many back links it is abnormal for the page rank to be so low. Likely links are not the only thing that contributes to Google’s ranking scores.

Google Indexed Pages: 4,450

The more pages you have indexed in google the more traffic and back links you will get.

Alexa Traffic Rank: 43,552

The lower your alexa.com ranking the higher your site is rated traffic wise in comparison to all other websites.

Digg Submissions: 43
Digg Votes: 120

Digg.com is the leading news blog agrigator. The more digg votes you get the more traffic and back links your site will get as well. This number is lower than expected for a top ranking site.

Technorati Blog Rank: 3,623

Technorati.com is the search engine of blogs. A lower rank means you rank higher with readers.

del.icio.us Bookmarks: 947

del.icio.us is one of the leading social bookmarking sites. The number of bookmarks your site receives is generall believed to factor into your ranking as a popularity vote. SeoChat.com has significant amount of bookmarks.

Image optimization errors

There are 97 images on the home page. This results in a dial up download time of 95.26 seconds. By industry standards this is far from optimized. It takes too long for pages to load and generally it is believed that your page should download in less than 20 seconds on dial up before you start losing visitors who click away because they don’t want to wait.

Alternative text for images missing

They have 6 images that do not have alternative text in the code. That means if the images don’t appear then it shows text that explains what image is supposed to be there. This is very important for special needs programs like the brail type of screen readers for the blind.

HTML and code optimization errors

There are numerous html errors. HTML Check for seochat.com. Site Report Card reports:

Total Warnings: 290

Total Errors: 58

Total Warnings: 348

Lack of design optimization

The site is tables based. This is quite shocking since it is generally believed that tables became obsolete over 10 years ago. The site is practically non-compliant with all usability standards. There is even a broken link on their home page.

Domain optimization errors

Another SEO guideline they are not following is the time to expiration of the domain name. SeoChat has a time to expire of 2 months 4 days from the creation date of this post. It is generally held that you expiration date should be over two years for the main domain name of the site.