Harvey Norman, a household name in Australia, is a franchise that retails products for the home and office.  Its diverse product line and quality of merchandise allows you to completely furnish your house or office with one visit, should you want to, and, if you know it exists. 

By all appearances, Harvey Norman is a successful company; from a search point of view, not so much.  Let’s take a look at their site.

At a glance, the home page looks great.  When you start digging, you suddenly realize:

• - All pages have the same title tag, but for the corporate page.
• - All pages but corporate page are full of pictures and flash; Googlebot only sees text.
• - Image tags are not labeled, but for one. Googlebot only sees this one.
• - There is no content, no useful information.
• - No pages have a Meta description tag, so Googlebot gets it from the content on the page itself. 

Given there is very little text on Harvey Norman’s home page, the descriptions look awful in Google’s results; and do nothing to encourage users to click.

How could Harvey Norman improve their title tags and Meta description tags?

Title tags

Use different title tags for every page of their Web site. 
Keep characters (including spaces) under 65 for clean looking Google results

Some examples for the title tags using better words:

Page: Home page
Title: Harvey Norman Australia: everything for your home under one roof
(64 characters – clean in results)

Page: Gaming central
Title: Harvey Norman Aust: Playstation, Xbox, PC: Software and Hardware
(65 characters – clean in results)

Page: Photo Centre
Title: Harvey Norman Aust: Photo services and locations or print online
(64 characters – clean in results)

Meta description tags

Instead of letting the Googlebot pull out stuff that is really not useful to a potential customer for search results, Harvey Norman should write their own.

Use a different description tag for every page
For a clean Google result, use less than 160 characters for each description

Some ideas for Meta Description tags:

Page: Home:
Description: Harvey Norman: Australia’s one stop shop for all your home needs: Computers, televisions, DVD players, CD’s, Household furniture, appliances and more (149 characters – clean)

Page: Gaming Central
Description: Harvey Norman: For everything in games, visit Games Central where you can see the latest in hardware and software, top ten, and what’s coming up (144 characters - clean)

Page: Photo Centre
Description: Harvey Norman: Our photo centre experts enlarge, archive, edit, remove red eye or turn your picture into a gift; t-shirts, mugs, calendars and more (147 characters - clean)

A few more areas Harvey Norman should investigate if they want to improve their search visibility:

- More text, less flash
- Use descriptions for any images
- Fix the error page to include links back to the site, and a proper explanation and apology
- Redirect www.harveynorman.com to www.harveynorman.com.au
- Reconsider keywords, those currently used are not relevant
- Put in relevant content e.g. cheat sheets for games, latest info on malware in computing section.
- Start a computing blog, let lead or all computer staff post

…but that’s another story.

If you found this interesting, you might also like to look at:

What does the Googlebot see when it visits your site?

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