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It is possible to fi lter the new-products
list by category, which is helpful. It would be
even more helpful, though, if you could fi lter
for material (nylon, ABS, LDPE, rubber) and
The site looks
other product attributes as well on the search
results page.
like an online
Seek and ye shall not fi nd
The website is clearly aimed at existing Plastic
trade counter.
Parts customers, and there does not seem to
be any attempt to attract new business through
All that’s
online marketing. The site performs very badly
in search engine rankings; when searching
missing is a
Google, even for specialised product names
and verbatim page title text, the site does not
appear in the results at all. In fact, the only friendly man
search term other than the site URL itself that
The straightforward presentation of
appears to return a link to the site on Google
the Plastic Parts Centre home page
in a fl eece and
UK is plastic parts, where it ranks second to the
Moss website.
probably appeals to its no-nonsense
I cannot claim to be an expert on search
target audience. a slightly less
engine optimisation (SEO), but after doing
a little bit of digging I discovered that the
than tasteful
Plastic Parts website and the Moss website,
which are both hosted on the same server,
share a single robots.txt fi le. This fi le gives
wall calendar
well-behaved search engines such as Google,
MSN, and Yahoo! some hints about how to
index the website. One of the hints that may
be provided in the fi le is a link to a site map,
in XML, that provides the URL and some
additional information about each page on
the website. Because the two sites share the
same robots.txt fi le, they both tell the search
engines to use the same site-map fi le. The site
map specifi ed is for the Moss website and not
the Plastic Parts website, which is probably not
helping the search engines very much and may
be the reason that Google is almost completely
ignoring Plastic Parts.
If you know exactly the products
Although the site does work fi ne in all major you’re looking for and exactly what
browsers (and even on my smartphone), it is
Plastic Parts calls them, you’ll
not XHTML compliant, which makes it less
be able to fi nd what you want.
likely that search engines will be able to index
Otherwise, good luck.
the site correctly. To be fair to the developers,
the site appears to be built on the Lotus
Domino server platform, and given that the
Lotus Domino website itself is not XHTML go far beyond these simple steps. the search engine performance of the website
compliant, this may be a limitation of the I imagine that Plastic Parts is quite happy it could service a much larger market outside
platform. with its website, and I am sure that it satisfi es of its existing customer base for very little
Google provides an excellent and free set of the brief that the developers were given when additional investment. At the moment its
tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/) they built it. I imagine that this brief could be website is operating at only a fraction of the
to help webmasters understand how well summarised as “Create a website that enables effi ciency that it could be, and those are the
their websites are being indexed and to our smaller customers to buy from us online kind of words that no engineering company
identify potential problems. Plastic Parts is and pay for their goods by credit card”. I likes to hear.
using Google Analytics to track the usage of would even be willing to lay a small wager
its website, so I would suggest that it add the that the site was launched on time and in
Nigel Atkinson is a cofounder
webmaster tools to its account and try to rectify budget (at least within acceptable engineering
and director of Neoworks.com,
as many of the issues it highlights as possible. tolerances).
There are of course many companies that offer I think that Plastic Parts would do well to
a software and digital marketing
outsourced SEO consultancy and services that broaden the brief a little now. By improving consultancy.
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