 Dear
Readers,
If your site seems invisible to the search engines,
check out Dan Thies's
article and give your site the ten-minute tune-up. He'll
have your site as
visible as the sun in ten minutes flat.
We recently received the suggestion that weperform
a peer review on our PeerReviewProsite. Our reviewer
brought up some usability issues, and we're going back
to the drawing board, having decided that any peer review
site had best exhibit the highest standards of usability
and style.
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That said, be looking for the relaunch early next month.
(By the way, my birthday is in December - the ninth
- and yes I DO accept small denominations) In the mean
time, we'll continue to publish sites for review here
in the newsletter, and continue to publish the best
peer reviews.
RuthiesMusic received some excellent advice, the best
of which you can find
published here in WebPro, just below Dan's article.
We're going to give our reviewers a break today, but
look in our next issue
for another site to review.
Hope you enjoy this issue,
Garrett
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 10-Minute
Homepage Tune-Up
By Dan Thies
Is your site's home page search engine friendly? Think
so, eh? The vast
majority of websites, even those belonging to Fortune
500 companies, are far
from optimized. I use a simple four-step process to
find the most common
errors. Using this to do a quick tune-up on your homepage
takes about 10
minutes, and it will pay off for years to come.
Step One:
Identify Your Keywords The first step, and often an
overlooked one, is deciding which keywords and phrases
you're targeting with your home page. What you want
to identify are the 4-7 top keywords or phrases that
you will use on your homepage.
Step Two:
Keyword Placement Review Once you know which keywords
you're targeting, pick the most important 1 or 2 keywords
or phrases, and make sure they're loaded into the right
places on the page.
TITLE tag:
keyword phrase | more keywords if possible The optimal
title tag starts with a keyword or keyword phrase, followed
by a vertical bar (should be above the Enter key), then
as many more keywords as you can work in. Limit your
page titles to 5-8 words if you can. Make sure your
page title still makes sense to someone who reads it,
because search engines will display the title in your
site's listing.
META Description & Keywords
Your top keyword or phrase should appear as early as
possible in these tags - "Welcome to..." is
not the right way to do it! Your Description still has
to make sense, since many search engines will display
it in your site's listing.
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Software
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H1 or H2 Heading
The first text on your page should include your top
1 or 2 keywords or phrases wrapped inside of an H1 tag.
In addition, I like to work my other keywords into H2
headings (2-3 of them) farther down the page.
First Paragraph and Body Text
The first paragraph of text should include your top
1 or 2 keywords, as
early as possible, preferable within the first few words.
Additional
keywords can be worked into the rest of the text, under
the H2 heading where
they appear.
Hyperlinks
For best results, all of your top keywords should appear
in hyperlinks on
your home page, leading to internal pages on your site.
If you use images
for your navigation links, use the ALT property of those
images to contain
the appropriate keywords for that link.
Closing Text & Site Map
If it makes sense to have your top 1-2 keywords appear
again at the bottom
of the page, use them again here, but don't make nonsense
out of your
homepage over it. If you have a site map, put a text
link to it at the
bottom of your page.
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Page Size:
Your home page should be as small as possible. More
than 5K, less than 10K, if you can do it - this is important
to dial-up users as well as search engines. Move any
Javascript or CSS you're using into external files,
and do what you can to move your important keyword content
toward the top of the file. Using layers instead of
tables for layout makes the latter task a lot easier.
Step Three: Check Your Links
It should go without saying, but you should check every
link on your
homepage to make sure it's working and active.
Step Four: Validate Your HTML
Finally, run your homepage through an HTML validator.
Invalid HTML can make it impossible for the search engines
to read your page correctly. Here's a link to an online
validator you can use for free: www.htmlhelp.com
There you have it - ten minutes to a higher ranking
homepage!
I wish you success...
About the Author:
Dan Thies is the author of "Search Engine Optimization
Fast Start," a concise, step-by-step guide to search
engine positioning for the beginner to intermediate
level webmaster - available now here.
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Top Peer
Reviews of Ruthies Music |
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Did you miss the issue
that featured Ruthie's music? You can read
ithere.
Ruthie's site is good, but these reviewers
found ways to make it GREAT.
Build confidence in
your customer. On the product page, I would
include a
"satisfaction guaranteed" statement
or blurb. Instead of just a
testimonials page, place a customer testimony
on the products pages with a
link to the testimonies page. How about a
Company Info page and real world
contact info. Who are you? Do you have a brick
and mortar store? How long
have you been in business? I want to know
I'm dealing with a reputable
company. Roxanne
McHenry
Read
the Whole Review
The blue color scheme, while
laid-back and unobtrusive, lacks an accent
color to balance the blues. This results
in a rather cold, sterile feel to
the site. A splash of orange, brown or beige
would help to lift the mood of
the design and introduce an element of warmth.
Another great way to improve
the menu's usability and appearance would
be to
use a different color or arrow shape for
the "non-product" options, such
as
Home and Search, to distinguish these options
from the product list.
Matt
Doyle
Read
the Whole Review
Ruthie said it: “Check
out these holiday deals.” I tried
to check them out
by clicking on the elf or the associated
text and nothing happened… as soon
as I did it, I said to myself, “Oh…
these holiday deals. The ones right
here.” It sounds silly until you’ve
watched someone look ashamed for doing
such a thing, but the act of clicking where
you don’t need to makes people
feel uncomfortable. It’s like tripping
on a crack in the sidewalk and
looking around to see if anyone was watching.
Chris
McFarlane
Read
the Whole Review
First, in order to ensure
that you start with the most accurate information,
you should verify that you are counting
unique visitors, rather than the
total number of hits. In reality, you might
have 200 unique visitors per
day, with each of them averaging 6 to 7
hits on your site. A good log
analysis tool like Sawmill or Webtrends
should be able to give you this
information, or you can also go with a simpler
service like Counted.com,
which is the best 3rd-party service I've
found so far and offers some nice,
compatible, information-gathering features.
Your most useful information
will come from your web logs, though.
Next, assuming a low 200 number
of visitors, this indicates that visitors
are probably having trouble navigating,
or are just not finding what they're
looking for. In this case, your best bet
would be to start analyzing the
paths taken by visitors through your site.
Where are the entry pages and the
exit pages? What keywords are people searching
for when they find your web
site? These are questions whose answers
will provide some insight into what
areas need to be worked on.
Jonathan
Hilgeman,
Read
the Whole Review
First the real world contact
information is too well hidden if it is
indeed part of the web site, phone numbers
and physical mailing addresses should be
easy to find, this helps to build user confidence
in the company. Even the customer service
page lacks and easily accessible email address,
clients would need to read through the FAQ
and maybe upon clicking a specific point
one could get an email address but this
becomes to much work for the clients and
most probably will not bother, they do not
NEED to do business with this company, it's
not the IRS.
Chris
Harriman
Read
the Whole Review
Your page layout is a little
search engine unfriendly. Your product details
on the category pages are in a table nested
5 levels deep, that's an awful
lot of code for a robot to fish through
before it finds those all important
product titles.
Amanda
O'Donnell
Read
the Whole Review
If I was designing this site,
I would want to know 3 things -
1)what is the biggest seller, 2)what item
is the most profitable, and 3)what
item has the most associated accessories.
Knowing this
may help in developing a hierarchy of what
items to spotlight, versus those
items that don't need much attention. I
am sure that you would love to sell
100 of each item every month, but reality
has it that certain items move
better than others.
Michael
Holguin
Read
the Whole Review
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emailing contact Susan Coppersmith at susan@ientry.com.
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