GoArmy.com has launched a new design today. Overall the site looks awesome and almost makes me want to join..haha

I wanted to share some areas of improvement as far as an optimization stand point. Why you ask? Well, when a major redesign is executed, optimization is thrown out of the window because the marketing department and design teams are so caught up in conveying the message for their client, sometimes SEO gets tossed to the side or not even considered at all.

Before I start with improvements, I wanted to point out a few things. It appears that the site is using a meta refresh that contains meta data, but this probably won’t be picked up by engines.

Improvement #1

The obvious, No meta data on the pages. this is a no brainer. Some keyword research would not take any time at all. Once you have the keywords for each page, they could build the meta data, <title>, meta keywords and meta description. This should always be included on the page, especially if using Flash.

Improvement #2

Flash on the homepage is pretty, BUT, when search engine spiders visit the website to index the page, there won’t be any content for them grab. If you disable JavaScript, and view the page, you will notice the only content is Flash detect text. There are ways around this to incorporate the content from the Flash movie into the page itself and this is a pretty easy fix.

Suggestion

I’m not sure if this is being worked on or not, but wanted to point out a local search suggestion. If you search in Google- city state army recruiter - some results are returned from Google Maps, but when clicked, the user is returned to the same GoArmy.com homepage on all of the listings. My suggestion would be to offer the recruiters a custom landing page containing information about the recruiter, maybe a map to the location, etc.

These are just some observations from a 10 minute look over. I’m sure there are some other areas of improvement.

Side Note: This is by no means meant to bash anyones work. They are just observations by myself, an independent internet marketing person.