Site overview: www.b4tv.co.uk; Board game site
I like this board game site. There are several reasons why this site is good. Let’s go through the analysis step by step.
Firstly, the site has a PageRank of 5. The PageRank is the reason why this site’s potential is great. b4tv.co.uk was registered 6 years ago (on 18/Mar/2000) and is the reason why there are more than 430 unique domains which point to it. Dmoz.org also lists this site, even if the anchor text isn’t chosen the best way in that there is an empty space about the links. I think that more links from free directories would be a plus. Of course, the anchor text must contain the main keywords. For example, ‘Board Games’ or something similar. What I know is that b4tv.co.uk was focusing on ‘carrom’ as a keyword. Unfortunately, I don’t see how to include this keyword in the link name. Of course, ‘carrom’ isn’t the most competitve keyword, but the site is ranked on the 7-th page in Google for this phrase, so I wouldn’t stay away from it. A small SEO campaign should result in a few links containing ‘carrom’ in their names pointing to the main page. This could be done in several ways:
- 1) Establish some blogs which will interlink together and ensure that every blog point to b4tv.co.uk, and that the links contain various anchor texts
- 2) Create about 10 links from owner’s sites
There are probably other ways to improve rankings for ‘carrom’, but they’re not ethical, so I won’t be analysing them.
As we can see, the site has been updated so the subpages don’t have any PageRank yet, but if everything goes well these pages should get high PageRank starting at a value of 2, but mostly of about 4. I used the old files’ PageRank for this prediction. Also, if you use my PageRank calculator, you will get an idea how I established this result.
The off-site optimisation has been done well and I’m giving it 9/10 points. There is 1 point missing, because directory submissions could have been done better.
OK, let’s go to the on-site optimisation. As we can see, the site uses static looking pages, which is a plus. But the advantages don’t end here. There is very clear navigation, keywords in filenames, h1 heading, keyword presence, clear title tags. Really, these factors will result in many visitors.
On the other hand, the site isn’t HTML valid. It seems it’s the only one error on this site. Fortunately, b4tv.co.uk doesn’t use things like double declaration of the head tag, body tag and so on. Mostly all of the errors can be fixed within a few days.
Apart from classical on-site optimisation factors there is a directory, which creates an area for increasing the link popularity. It’s simple; any directory contains categories and subcategories which give a site 2 very important advantages:
- 1) A site gets more content without any heavy effort. This way, it gets more links pointing to the main page as well as other pages which are available from the navigation menu.
- 2) More links pointing to the main page mean more anchor text of the links present in the navigation menu.
But I’d like to offer a warning about linking to everybody. Linking to penalized sites means a penalty to the linking site. You can easily avoid any penalty by checking links pages on the target site, or simply querying Google for the target site (use site:target_site) in Google’s searchbox.
There’s one thing which can be improved. Use
[TITLE]B4TV Board Games – Mahjong[/TITLE]
[LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.b4tv.co.uk/b4tv.ico"]
instead of
[LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" href="http://www.b4tv.co.uk/b4tv.ico"]
[TITLE]B4TV Board Games – Mahjong[/TITLE]
because search engines still rank pages with the title tag as the first one better than pages which don’t using this strategy. Anyway, this is only a minor change, so there’s no need to worry about it.
Another factor to improve is the meta tags. It’d be better if the meta tags were different on each page because Google doesn’t like the same meta tags on the whole site. Using the same meta tags will cause duplicate content even if the real page content is different on all pages.
For example, use
[META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Mahjong board game, it's history and origin."]
[META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="mahjong, board, games, game"]
instead of current meta tags for the page which is dedicated to Mahjong. But I think that the webmaster could spend about 5 minutes on these updates. They’re a really fast kind of update. Of course, it is necessary to use different meta tags for the US and UK versions. I would simply add ‘UK version’ and ‘US version’ to the meta tags. Title tags are more sensitive, so simply adding ‘UK’ and ‘(US)’ after the actual titles are enough.
There’s probably nothing more to improve and I’m giving this site 9 points out of 10 again.
The final verdict is 9/10. Great site with great potential and opportunities!