Graeme Davidson speaks

I have been purchasing Charles Tyrwhitt shirts and accessories for the last couple of years now and I must say that I think there clothing is fantastic.  Or at least the shirts are.  The trousers are nothing special and the shoes jackets look they are designed more for the fox hunting types (or those that like to kill deer on the weekend).

However, the Charles Tyrwhitt shirts are excellent and at a great price too for that sort of quality.  I am not really into fashion at all, but I do like a good shirt to wear, no matter what the occasion.

In my years as a business development manager for Equator, I have spoken to many of Charles Tyrwhitt’s marketing department and they are a nice bunch.  I have even complained to them about their url structure and the fact that you can’t pay using Visa Electron (this has lost them many sales through me trying to buy stuff and then remembering that they don’t accept it.  By the time I have transfered money onto an accepted card, I have lost the urge).

The url structure is bad, but they have been correcting this as time has gone by.

For instance, check out the url for a Rolleston slimfit shirt:

http://www.ctshirts.co.uk/p/gbpdefault/pr/FU004NAV/Rolleston-Navy-Fine-Stripe-Cutaway-Slimfit-Shirt/r/Web-Department/Men’s-Shirts—-Formal/Web-Category/Slim-Fit-Shirts/productdetail.aspx?ppp=12&sortBy=Relevance&page=1&back=False&canned=&browse=Y

A bit of a mouthful there.  I must admit, there is the keywords in there that are necessary, but there are a lot of unnecessary or strange characters in there.  Google’s spiders do not like symbols like that as they cannot interpret these characters for relevance.  So for search engine optimisation purposes, this url is quite a confusing one.  Although as I said, there are some keywords there that would help the Google spiders.

To put this in context, good url structure is just another part of the overall SEO goal.  Using important keyword phrases, good URLs, metatags and good content.  The content sometimes cannot be accessed by the spiders and indexed should the architecture not be correct in the first place, so it is imperative to get these first steps right.

Mind you, I don’t search for Charles Tyrwhitt, as I know all about them and love their shirts, so I go straight to the site and attempt to purchase there using my unaccepted Visa Electron.  So I don’t care about their SEO, but maybe the lovely guys at the CT Shirts marketing department should.

I’m off now to try and transfer my funds to buy this jacket:

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.