Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

For the first site mentioned in your post ....

Coding ....

1) You have 2 title tags in your index page, and 2 meta keyword tags.
2) Why are there so many meta "verify" tags?
3) Your h5 tags make the text smaller than the following content, which personally I think should be reversed.
4) Put titles in your links, and alt tags in your images.
5) The first javascript include should probably be inside the head tag, not before it.
6) You also have javascript after the closing html tag.
7) Does not validate at W3C ( missing utf tag isn`t helping ), shows 134 errors.

Usability ....
1) If I want to consider ordering, I need an easy way to find your shipping/purchasing/return policies, payment methods accepted, warranties/guarantees, etc. I don`t see this anywhere.
2) Although I get the SEO aspect of the first main paragraph, to me it looks like obvious SEO because you have so many links, and you`re looking to get your viewers to those product pages; it doesn`t read naturally with all of the links added into it.
3) As was brought up in another critique, the religious inserts have nothing to do with your product or website and are not benefiting your visitors. Not saying this to be anti-religious or anything, just that it serves no purpose here.




-------------------------

M Hall
Website Critique Community
International Society of Curmudgeons

Thank you for your input.  I appreciate it very much.  I will work on changing some things and the h5 tags will be made larger.  I was thinking they were equal in size but I will make them larger.  I have been working on it for a while but I was a real web illiterate person when I started and I can see I am probably still  not very literate in that I am not sure how to correct some of the suggestions you made.  For instance the meta "verify" tags.  Is my doing the site through the Yahoo website set up limiting me or am I just not understanding where to make the corrections to that.  Also I don`t understand "missing utf tag" or some of the other language.  Thank you, Dawnay

A sample head/meta area .....

-> Your DOCTYPE
-> Opening html tag
-> Opening head tag
-> meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" or similiar
-> Page title tag
-> Meta Description
-> Meta Keywords
-> Verify tags
-> Javascripts
-> css includes, if used
-> Closing head tag

Multiple verify tags .... is this one site basically all of your sites together?

You can control "H" tags font/size/color/padding etc. through css. Search engines generally rank their importance from h1 to h6 ( I beleive ).

Generally, site builders like Yahoo`s ( if that is what you used ) do not make very good code for SEO, and never create a validated site, regardless of what they may tell you. Yes, your site will work, but the pages are usually bloated and have unneeded coding.




-------------------------

M Hall
Website Critique Community
International Society of Curmudgeons

Webline, as he often does, has provided some really excellent technical help. I`ll coment on the "customer perception" side of things, I think.

I quickly checked all four sites, and believe that`s one of your main problems. You`re not focused. I get that you want to sell all kinds of things, but the way you`re going about it, although it can work, is going to make it much harder to "optimize" your online presence.

What I`d suggest is that you go ahead and keep your other sites doing whatever they`re doing, and focus on your main site. I`ll assume that`s the "Health Fitness Tools" site?

Let the other go for now, until you work out some sort of strategic plan for your overall business approach. You`re trying to solve a strategic problem with tactics, or, to use another metaphor, you`re treating the symptoms...not the pathology.

For example: You have a fitness site that appears to be all about me getting fit. Then your second menu item is "Dog Exercise." Hunh? What`s that doing on this site? See what I mean?

There`s no point in trying to connect a blog in five different, scattered directions. You might use the blog to write about multiple interests, all at the same time, but you`ll have the same problem there. Who will be your "following?"

So, the bottom line: Think only about the Products4Fitness site, first. Work through the technical issues, then layout. Then begin fixing each page, one at a time, with such complexities as SEO in mind. Use whatever analytics software to track your progress.

As you build visibility and revenues on that one site, it`ll educate you. Later, you can turn around and use that education to work with the other sites, or you`ll figure out how to consolidate everything into a more streamlined process.

Craig brought out what I wasn`t quite grasping about multiple sites .... not seeing the forest for the trees kind of thing, I guess. ( He`s good at pointing out the obvious things I tend to miss at times )

Trying to run 4 sites out of one might be economical in a way, but not beneficial. If your hosting and shopping cart let you, maybe set up sub domains for the other 3, and don`t link to them in the menu or push them in the main area of the site as they are now, but maybe pick a spot in the sidebar and mention them as something like "If you like Products4Fitness.com, be sure to check out these additional sites", with links to them. And like Craig said, get your main site straightened out and where you want it first, then bring the others in line.





-------------------------

M Hall
Website Critique Community
International Society of Curmudgeons