SEO and Australia's Biggest Bank - Which Bank?

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia launched it's new website recently. Full marks on the design. It looks good! But if we take a peek under the bonnet, there are some search engine optimisation basics which have been completely over-looked.

First of all, the home page title tag reads "homepage". Bit of an oversight there.



Secondly, they have no meta content description tag, or meta content keywords tag. Unforgivable.



Thirdly, none of the images on the home page have been alt tagged for usability (and ethical seo).

Coming up next is the old DMOZ issue! Read this carefully because it could be affecting you too!

Look closely at the following images and compare:

This is the DMOZ listing for the Bank...


Next: Google's result...



What's happening here is Google is using the DMOZ editor description (if your site is listed in DMOZ), replacing the Meta content description tag from your own website! Google doesn't always do it, but if you don't have a Meta description tag, the DMOZ description is better than nothing!

What the Bank needs to do here is place a command in its header tag which tells Google NOT to use the boring old, unoptimised, DMOZ editor description.

meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP"

(Note: please encase the tag in <>'s - Blogger software won't let me put the tag around!)

DMOZ is the world's largest human edited (volunteer) directory. You've got to be good to get included! Google likes websites listed in DMOZ because they've been evaluated for quality by a human (something Google doesn't do with its spidering technology). Once you're in, your rankings will improve. But don't hold your breath, it can take years to be included once you've made your submission.

Finally, a quick look around the site, and none of their pages have had much thought to the most important aspect of Search Engine Optimisation. Title tags and Meta tags.

To their credit, there's pretty good content on most pages, with search engine friendly navigation, the site works fine with javascript and stylesheets turned off.

I'd be optimising their anchor text if given the chance. Often I see juicy links like this:

Home Seeker Approval - that's a link on their home loans page. I don't think there are many people searching for "home seeker approval". It should be changed to "Home loan pre approval".

Of course I couldn't help myself, I sent a note to the Bank with a few suggestions. Here's a excerpt of the form submission...

.... Your home page title tag reads "homepage". Change it to something like, "Commonwealth Bank. Home loans, Business loans, Bank accounts, Credit cards, Insurance, Personal loans" etc, etc.

Add meta content/description and keywords tags to the home page.
Add image alt tags - describe your images for usability and Search Engine friendliness.

Do a site wide review for keyword popularity - i.e. on your home page you use the word "super". In fact "Superannuation" is more popular and is typed in more than 15,000 times a month at Google.

All pages need keyword analysis followed by on page-optimisation, with clever but subtle anchor text optimisation for cross linking.

Hope this helps,

Cheers

Chris

Today is Tuesday 23rd of October. I wonder how soon it will take to get fixed? Click here to see if they've made the changes I've suggested have been implemented.

It never ceases to amaze me how much effort businesses put into their website design, usability and content. SEO is often 'called in' as an after-thought! Big business often spends huge amounts of cash on a new website, getting them up and hosted, along with hefty monthly maintenance fees too.

It's amazing how they balk at allocating a small part of their initial (and ongoing) budget to SEO and SEM advice and optimisation. A good seo provider will always bring ongoing value, long after the web design company has disappeared.

Reputation Management

It's interesting how the Commonwealth Bank has also tied up most of the top 10 at Google with their own results and business divisions if you search for "commonwealth bank". I've got hand it to them, that's very good reputation management!

Online Reputation Management is a whole other topic for another day, but basically, businesses like http://www.websalad.com.au/ help large brands with their online reputation; amongst other things monitoring blog posts (like this one - who says I'm paranoid?) and helping them to tie up the top 10 spots at Google. By doing this, whenever bad news hits, often people will turn to Google for information, but only get the company message, so to speak because no one else is in the top 10. It's a form of reputation damage control.

However, now that Google Universal results are hitting home - showing up-to-the-minute news stories in the Google results - online reputation management will become increasingly difficult.

So to finish, the lesson is this. Before you launch your site, step back make sure you've checked everything off the list and get the whole package right before launch! (or indeed, lunch).