Random Acts of SEO
Helping charity and non-profit websites reach more visitors through SEO, user experience and strategy.
Today's broadcast:
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Website details: Bank of the Poor
Hangout Notes by Alistair Lattimore from Convergent Media
Website Details: http://bankofthepoor.org/
URL Canonicalisation
The domain you asked for review on was bankofthepoor.org, however they want to be using bankofthepoor.com. This is evident throughout the internal pages of the site that carry rel="canonical" tags reflecting bankofthepoor.com. Incorrectly configuring their rel="canonical" tags has resulted in the home page being indexed under bankofthepoor.org, while all internal pages are indexed under bankofthepoor.com.
Recommend:
- Site wide HTTP 301 redirect from www/non-www bankofthepoor.org to bankofthepoor.com
- Site wide HTTP 301 redirect from www.bankofthepoor.com to bankofthepoor.com
- Fix WordPress template to include rel="canonical" tag on home page
Errors - 404
I got a lot of 404 errors while crawling their site, primarily:
- query string variations that errored
- invalid URLs within CSS files
Recommend:
- Fix the invalid URLs within CSS files, they are slowing the site load time down and could be making the site visually look incomplete
- Fix the internal links with invalid/missing query string values to avoid users stumbling into a 404 error while exploring the site
<title> tags
Found half a dozen URLs with no <title> tag at all.
They don't look like high visibility pages, so likely won't effect anything.
Recommend:
- Check URLs for traffic, adjust if appropriate
<h1> tags
Lots of URLs don't have an <h1> tag but use <h2> instead, probably isn't going to effect their rankings.
Recommend:
- Fix WordPress template when fixing rel="canonical" issue above
meta description
Meta description tag was missing from over 100 URLs, many were important.
Recommend:
- Add custom meta descriptions to all high traffic URLs
Invalid HTML
I found lots of invalid HTML throughout the site, isn't going to effect search efforts but if less tolerant browsers it could cause content to look malformed.
Recommend:
- Review HTML on high value pages to correct any rendering issues if present
Missing <img> alt attribute
Lots of images that are missing alt text, could be a missed opportunity.
Recommend:
- Add descriptive alt attribute to all editorial images
Non-descriptive Link Text
Found a few 'click here' style link text scattered through the site.
Recommend:
- Rework content to use a more descriptive link text
Sign Up
Signing into bankofthepoor using facebook results in a programming error, which is going to be effecting the volume of donations they are receiving.
After filling out the sign up form & submitting it, no account was created. I didn't receive an error stating that the form had an error, no email was sent asking me to confirm my account. The form reloaded and was blank, so I'd need to fill it out again if I wanted to proceed with registration.
Sign up process requires to much personal information, which they don't need to know. Instead they should streamline the registration process to email & password, then ask for other information after they've made their initial donation to remove friction/effort.
HTTPS
They are asking to donate money but I couldn't access their site using HTTPS. It's possible they use a third party payment system or a sub-domain for payments, which makes the comment less relevant. However given that they are asking for money, I think it is important that they have HTTPS available even if they aren't taking the money themselves - so users know they take their security seriously.
Performance
Multiple references to the same script with different URLs
No gzip compression
No CSS sprites
No merging of script resources
No HTTP caching headers for static resources
Serving large images scaled in HTML
...
Recommend:
- Install W3 Total Cache as a starting point
- Remove duplicate references to the same resources
- Generate CSS sprites where appropriate
- Tune additional items with .htaccess where possible
Mobile
It is growing like a weed, they need to have a responsive design.
Website Details: http://bankofthepoor.org/
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