You can learn more about the FREE web site audits and how you can apply for more or keep reading for the review and analysis of Isotx.com.

Rather than have a long, drawn out story, I’ll get right to my analysis of potential issues and suggestions for improvement.

SEO ISSUES

Keywords Targeted/Additional Content
Nearly all of the incoming traffic from engines is generated by searches for Isotx or the names of software they have created. This is great that Isotx has name recognition, but clearly there is a large amount of traffic that can be gained by targeting more generic terms. Keyword research should be done to find these terms, and optimized content pages should be built to target these keywords/phrases.

Homepage header/intro content
There is nothing on the home page that describes to users or search engines what the site or the company is about. There should be a header tag with the target keyphrase in it along with a keyword rich paragraph describing the company and its offerings. This applies to interior category pages as well.

Canonical issue – 301 redirect from isotx.com to www.isotx.com
Currently, Google and others see this as two separate and distinct sites as a proper redirect has not been put in place. Because of this, there is not only potential for duplicate content issues, but also the link popularity is being spread across both versions. Currently, isotx.com is a PR3 and www.isotx.com is a PR4. The site would be in a much better position if all the link popularity was put in one place rather than spread between the two URLs. Additionally, there are some internal links which point to http://www.isotx.com/index.php – everything needs to point to the same place.

Main Content Pages
They should be setup to have SEO friendly page names instead of URLs like http://www.isotx.com/index.php?view=3542. This is not only bad for search rankings, it also makes analytics difficult because the page names don’t identify what is on the page. Additionally, all of these pages seem to have the same title which has no keywords/phrases in them. If the pages are renamed, be sure to setup 301 redirects from the previous URLs to the new ones.

Links
A link building campaign should be done to increase the number of backlinks in Google. Care should be taken to insure links are on relevant sites and anchor text is focused on target keywords/phrases.

Forum
The forum/message board should be upgraded to allow for a more SEO friendly page naming schema. URLs like http://www.isotx.com/forums/index.php?topic=3199.0 currently are not being spidered by Google and a lot of additional traffic could be gathered if the URLs and page Titles in the Forum were static. The Title tags of the topic pages do have the name of the post as the Title, maybe the forum can be adjusted so that the page names are named after the post names as well.

XML Sitemap – I do not see an XML sitemap present or a robots.txt file. Not only do these help spiders crawl your site better, they also can allow you to login to Google Webmaster Tools to get detailed information about your site, find potential issues that may affect proper crawling of your site, get detailed link reports, etc.

SHOPPING SECTION

The section is separate and not well integrated into the site. I’m not clear on where the division lies between the Isotx site and the Amazon site, but if the product category and individual product pages can be customized, here are some changes that should be made:

Page Titles – have product names in them but have ‘Isotx – Web Store:’ as the first section of each title. This area provides no benefit and the first words are the most important and should be reserved for keyword rich content.

No specials featured on store front page
I wound up seeing the special in the right sidebar after looking at the site for a long time, but it doesn’t stand out at all. It blends into the design and is almost camouflaged. This needs to be more prominent and jump out at the person.

Navigation
The navigation for the store needs improvement. The images for all categories are very similar and do not clearly define what that category is. Additionally, there are subcategories within certain categories that require multiple clicks to get to an actual product. The golden rule of e-commerce is the less clicks from start to finish (checkout), the better.

No upsell when adding products to cart
It’s a fact that average order amounts can be increased significantly by upselling customers in the cart process.

MISC. ISSUES

No about page
I found an about page after just clicking around, but it’s not labeled clearly. The anchor text should be changed from ‘ISOTX’ to something like ‘About ISOTX’, ‘Who We Are’, or ‘About Us’.

No Support Page/Link
I see there is a support section in the forums, but no direct link from the home page. It seems to be common practice for software companies to prominently display a support link.

Custom 404 Error page – current 404 error page is the plain vanilla and scary looking server error page which provides no navigation to get to areas of the site.

Run Link Checker
There is a bad link on http://www.isotx.com/index.php?view=3945 , there may be more and not only do these hurt user experience, but they can also interrupt crawls from search engines.

Other sites
I found listings in search engines for modtoaster.com, iron-grip.com, and irongrip.net. These domains are currently redirecting to isotx.com, but they are 302 moved temporarily links. These need to be changed to permanent 301 redirects. If there are any other domains out there that may mirror or redirect to Isotx, then those need to be checked as well.

Header images for category pages
The header images are very large and push content down the page. In a perfect scenario the key is to have the call-to-action(s) above the fold (before any scrolling). With the current design, there is little to no space above the fold on average resolutions.

Bottom Nav not centered
I’m not sure if this is intentional, but the bottom navigation area is left aligned as ested with both IE7 and Firefox 2. The rest of the site is centered so the aesthetics seem off.

Email Marketing
Isotx said they do little to no email marketing although they have a lot of registered users. An email marketing campaign should be developed and implemented to increase repeat traffic and ultimately increase revenue when a plan for monetization is in place.

Monetize site
Other than the newly added store, I don’t see anything that ‘monetizes’ this site. Take advantage of traffic, especially if you are doing a service and giving something away for free. If you want to sell products on the site, they need to be marketed with promotions featured on the front page, specials for forum members, etc.

Conclusion

Many of these issues are very common on lots of sites out there that haven’t been aggressive in focusing on SEO and other Internet Marketing strategies. However, Isotx has a good deal of traffic and by making some of the changes above, they can greatly increase those numbers and more importantly, their user base.

You can learn how you can have a FREE web site audit done for your site or check out the Isotx site and learn more about their mods for games.

So, what is Internet Marketing? Just like any other term thrown around the Internet, it has lots of different meanings but here is the basic definition as I see it: “To use multiple online techniques to drive traffic to a user friendly web site where the desired conversion can be obtained”. That’s the bottom line right, to bring people to a site and get them to take action?

Here are some of the topics I plan to talk about over the coming days/months/years:

• Traffic – various techniques to drive traffic to a web site, whether you are looking for relevant traffic or in some cases, eyeballs alone.
• Conversion – how to analyze and optimize a site’s performance to drive the highest rate of conversion possible (sales, leads, etc.)
• Analysis – what are the definitions of the key metrics, how they can be viewed to get a total picture of a site’s performance, various tools out there like Google Analytics on up to more expensive players like Omniture.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – the basics of proper SEO- it’s really not rocket science but it is ever changing. I will layout the formula for a ’search engine friendly’ web site.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) / Search engine marketing (SEM) – another one of those names that is in a state of transition. I’m old school, I still call it PPC! I will talk about how to build out and optimize campaigns, techniques on driving the lowest cost per conversion (CPC), what the new Google Quality Score really means, etc.
• Link building – various ways to obtain links, both paid and unpaid, the good ‘ole PageRank and how important it is, etc.
• Social networking/Web 2.0 – how can this be integrated into an Internet Marketing campaign, how effective or ineffective can be…
• General site auditing – how to quickly determine the issues with a site that effect it’s ability to get indexed, it’s ability to convert, etc.
• Ethics of SEO – black hat, white hat… How about grey hat? Learn about some of the grey areas in SEO that are currently up for debate (Text link ads, Blog outreach, etc.)
• News – if you know anything about this industry you know it is constantly changing – I’ll try to post newsworthy items on here as well.

Most of all, I look forward to interacting with people and discussing some of the hot issues in the industry.

All the best,

Brian