Cee Lo Green is probably my favorite musical artist right now, but his website is an SEO disaster. I spent some time looking at it and making comments. I hope that we can learn from their mistakes. Cee Lo, if you read this, your website can be fixed easily and you’ll finally get the rankings you deserve. You can see his site here: Cee Lo Green.
Canonical Addresses
www.ceelogreen.com and www.ceelogreen.com/home.htm are bringing up the exact same page, but there is no canonical meta link telling the search engines that they are the same thing. This creates duplicate content on the likes of Google, which will dilute its SEO value. They also link to the ‘home.htm’ page on the website, while I imagine external links to the site will rarely ever include this. That means that their internal linking to the homepage is useless, and harmful. Furthermore the concept of a 404 error does not exist on the site. If you go to www.ceelogreen.com/lol, you’ll get a valid page with the text “Page not Found” and a link to the homepage.
Images
No alt tags on most images, including the logo. Not only does this create accessibility problems, and not only does it mean that the site isn’t strictly valid, but it’s a good reason that Cee Lo’s own site doesn’t rank above his Wikipedia page. The first alt tag that I can find on the page (right at the top) says “Click here to open up a new window” – why on earth would anyone use this as an alt tag? It tells you nothing about what is on the image. There reason that we use alt tags is so that when the image doesn’t load we’ll still understand what it was meant to tell us (hence, alternative). Well, at least we would know that we can use that link in case our browser stops being able to open new windows – this is bad SEO though.
Keyword Density for “Cee Lo Green”
The text “Cee Lo Green”, the main keyword of the site, is featured on the site’s homepage a grand total of one time. Apart from the domain name and page title, how would a search engine really know that this page is about Cee Lo Green? This is seriously hindering its performance. Never mind the fact that Cee Lo Green isn’t featured in any h1 tags, emphasis, bold, etc. It’s not even included in the footer.
The homepage title is too long, and it dilutes the keyword density by including irrelevant details. The keywords are clearly “Cee Lo Green” and his new album “The Lady Killer”, but the homepage title says “Cee Lo Green | Official website of the lady killer | www.ceelogreen.com”. At 71 characters, most SEO professionals would say it’s much too long thus weakening the emphasis on Cee Lo Green, which is the critical phrase.
Meta
The meta description of the site is “Cee Lo Green | Official website of The Lady Killer | www.ceelogreen.com” – exactly the same as the title! That’s odd – were they just too lazy to come up with a description of who Cee Lo Green is? That information shouldn’t be hard to find since his wikipedia page ranks first on Google, ooh! There is nothing in the meta description about it being the website of an American musician, nothing about the fact that he has performed in multiple groups by different names, like Gnarls Barkley. It’s no surprise that Cee Lo’s website ranks nowhere on Google for any of his alias names or associated acts. Did the web developer not know about Cee Lo Green’s career so far?
The designing company that created the website gets commissioned to do many websites for famous artists, including James Blunt. By the way, a quick keyword density count on the website shows that the name of that design company ranks first above any other keywords – yeah Cee Lo, they mentioned themselves more than they mentioned you on your site.
Cee Lo Green does everything so excellently, that it makes you wonder why his website development was taken so lightly.