Search and post jobs for the Multichannel Merchant. Including jobs for brand & agency marketers, e-commerce, catalog marketers, ops & fulfillment, direct marketing and more.
As long as the online catalog content is locked up within PDFs in a framed, cookies-requiring viewer, there's little point in me critiquing the HTML templates, design, CSS, or other SEO elements. Without content, these are a moot point. People looking for the kinds of products that PTS carries won't find them in the search engines.
For example, “countersinks” is a category for PTS (as one can see on page 123 of the PDF-based catalog), yet this mildly competitive search term does not present PTS anywhere in the results. Even if the PDF of page 123 were in Google's index, it wouldn't rank highly. That's because it does not have the same capacity to convey contextual clues to the engines that HTML does through semantic markup (e.g., through H1 tags).
It's even hard to find PTS by name in Google. A Google query for “production tool supply” yields a confusing array of results in the top five, above the fold — all of which have the title of “production tool supply.”
It's hard to know which is the official site. Turns out the first two listings lead to the home page of the official site, the next two listings lead to other companies. Why is the PTS home page repeated in the first two listings?
Google has a duplicate copy of the PTS site — under the ptsxpress.com domain — because of the lack of a permanent (301) redirect from ptsxpress.com to pts-tools.com. Only eight pages of ptsxpress.com exist in Google, and all of them have snippetless and titleless listings.
Speaking of redirects, requests for www.pts-tools.com receive a temporary (302) redirect to https://www.pts-tools.com/home/home.asp. That is the wrong kind of redirect, as a 302 redirect does not pass PageRank. Also, it's not a good idea to host your entire public Website under a secure (HTTPS) URL. Instead save HTTPS for your checkout process and for your customer extranet.
Looking at the home page, from a search engine optimization standpoint it is practically content-free. There's nothing for the spiders to sink their teeth into. The home page text consists of fewer than 30 words, none of which are important keywords.
The major categories of the PTS catalog (abrasives, carbide, fluids, cutting tools, hand tools, etc.) are not represented, either as text or as links, and ideally they should be both. The title tag on the home page doesn't contain any keywords either, only the company name. It was a shame to waste these prime opportunities. In the eyes of the search engines, the title tag is the most important element on the page, and the home page is the most important page of the site.
The PTS site is also weak on inbound links. Also known as “back links” or “inlinks,” these play a pivotal role in search engine rankings. Without a healthy amount of high quality, relevant, important (highly PageRank endowed) links, a Website will wallow at the bottom of the search results.
This would need to go well beyond directory submissions and into blog marketing, “link baiting” (developing content that is irresistible for bloggers to link to) and “social media marketing” (creating viral marketing campaigns and seeding those campaigns into social networks such as Digg, del.icio.us, Netscape.com, and YouTube).
Putting the 301 redirect in place from ptsxpress.com to pts-tools.com will also help, by aggregating the link popularity that is spread across the two domains.
