Most of the traffic to any website will be referred to its homepage. However, ecommerce sites need to be optimized for each landing page as it generates revenues or sales. Since, this is going to be my new line of posts which I’m going to start with some of the top online companies in Malaysia. I’m sure you might have heard about Airasia but they are lacking with some of the vital basic SEO on their website. Below are the key points that they can improve with no time and under free consultancy from Atniz dot com. If you are an SEO guy for Airasia, please forward this suggestion to your webdevelopment team and provide this suggestion.
For this study, I have used their home page link to Malaysia at http://www.airasia.com/my/en/home.page
1. Change your meta title from “Lowest Fare, Best Low Cost Airline – AirAsia” to “Airasia – Now everyone can fly!
Reason > A well-known brand usually starts their meta title with the brand name and not the keywords. Your current structure may be useful 10 years ago when you started the business but now you are well established brand name, so please show that authority on your pages.
2. Completely remove your meta keyword “book ticket, booking airlines, booking ticket, cheap air fare, cheap air fares, cheap air ticket, cheap air tickets, cheap airfare, cheap airfares, cheap airline, cheap airlines, cheap flight, cheap flights, low cost air fare, low, cost air ticket, low cost air tickets, low cost airfare,flights, booking, cheap flights, cheap air ticket, promotion, sale, online”
Reason > Having more than 5 keywords per page is considered acceptable. Yours with 25 keywords, a definite invitation for keyword stuffing penalty. Although, Google and other reputable search engines like Bing have clearly mention that they don’t use meta keywords in their ranking algo but that doesn’t stop them from issuing penalize for those sites that heavily spamming it just like yours. Please remove them or reduce the numbers to less than 5.
3. Declare your search engine sitemap overview xml page at http://airasia.com/robots.txt
4. Migrate your site’s content from http://www.airasia.com/my/en/home.page to http://www.airasia.com.my because using country specific domain is the best way to setup an website for each country market. You can ask your Partner, Expedia’s advice on this as they do the same and conquered the world in OTA (Online Travel Agent) business.
5. Add rel=”nofollow” tag on Expedia link since this is your partner where monetary gains is possible. Any links with profits which passes Google page rank value will be considered as involving in bad link schemes in Google’s SEO definition.
6. Claim your site on Google Analytics and please use multi-variant A/B test tool to improve your usability. Couldn’t identify your analytics code anywhere on your site. You may use other analytics services but hey give a try with Google Analytics too. There are some functions that only available on Google Analytics compared to any other top analytics in the market.
7. Claim your site on Google Webmaster Tools and submit each country as targeted country. This is a first step of any website.
8. Have some contents instead of sliding moving banners on promotions as it is not search engine friendly. Search engines read images from their file names, title tags and ALT tag. If you can’t avoid using images, then please have some explanation on ALT tag for search engines to read and show your pages on relevant keywords.
9. Use News sitemap for your News releases as the format of news sitemap is totally different than standard sitemaps.
10. Show timestamp for users on each news shown on the main page as it helps not only Google crawlers but for the users to read all latest news.
11. Show most recent customer reviews on your home page (crawlable) not only increases your dynamic content but keep your main page contents changes frequently which attracts bots to crawl more. Crawl or attracting the bots to visit your site frequently will further increase your exposure in organic search results.
12. You have lots of duplicate title issue (Please fix it) < Most of your promotions shares the same title like “Book The Lowest Fares Now! – Air Asia”
13. Implement “canonical” link tag on all pages
14. Implement meta robots tag on all pages
15. Pagespeed – Improve your score from 78/100 to 100/100 on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
16. CSS – Fix 22 errors and 19 warnings at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
17. HTML – Fix 52 errors and 6 warnings at www.airasia.com/my/en/home.page
18. Reduce 13 H2 tag and implement at least 1 H1.
19. Replace http://mobile.airasia.com/ask/ to https://mobile.airasia.com/ask/ because it is redirected and it will slightly speed up your site.
20. User “ALT” tag on all your images or banners because it is similar as anchor text keywords used in link building or interlinking.
21. Declare height and width for all your images to increase load time
22. Use Schema markup on your daily prices, news, etc
23. Show # of followers or fans on your FB or Twitter instead just a logo
24. Get TrustSeals or any relevant B2C or B2B certification and display it on your main page
25. Show recent Tweets or Facebook mentions on your main page
26. Activate or add Google+ on your main page
27. Add Youtube Channel link on your main page
28. Update your http://airasia.com/robots.txt
29. Add some unique contents on your main page (150 – 300 words) with excellent selling points.
30. Remove “?” on all your links such as “http://www.airasia.com/my/en/passport-and-visas.page?”
I have spent over an hour to identify all these errors or improvements using some free tools and based on experience for Airasia which professionally can be costing around $300. I can provide more detailed improvement strategies for them if a little more time spent with some advance tools. Hope this can be a good start where AirAsia team can start working on improving their website for both search engine and users.
Written by Atniz
Topics: SEO Advice