Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

My Tech Team is essentially tech support for residential consumers.  The website explains more in detail.  I am looking for advice/criticism on the content strategy, copy, etc.(All of the above).  My goal was to make it as easy as possible to read while at the same time making it easy to use and as informative as possible.  Recently, I added the ability to download our toolbar application when visitors visit the home page.  I basically took a free css template and modified it to fit my needs.  See our site at http://www.mytechteam.net

 

I look forward to all of your reviews/criticisms/advice

 

Very Respectfully,

-Jason

 

P.S. Vote for us in the homebased 100 competition - http://www.startupnation.com/homebased100/contestant/6801/index.php

@asEZasABnC

Got any more detail than that?

@webline

The sign up FORM is secure.  It`s actually an embedded secure form.  I could secure the entire page, but I dont like the internet explorer page that says it could possibly be malicious or something to that affect.  Unfortunatley, my host (startlogic), does not provide SSL certificates, nor does it give me the ability to utilize SSL certificates.  However, I can make it secure by simply using https://.  Looking into new hosting now for that reason.  Any advice?

 

@CraigL

Thanks for that advice.  That is an important change that needs to be made.  Additionally, webline asked if it was a local or national service.  I could tie into there somewhere stating that it is a national service.

 

The SSL issue has been addressed.  I found out Startlogic does offer SSL.  The "technician" I was speaking with apparently didn`t know what I was asking for.  We will be implementing that tonight.  Thank you @webline.

 

As for SEO, does anyone have any advice other than "Needs SEO improvements"?

Good advice from Webline, however i`d like to comment on some of the suggestions since he listed them as seo suggestions, but not all of them may be relevant.

 

"1) Meta descriptions. Helps search engines when crawling your site, and is the information that shows up below your listing in search results. ( If this isn`t in place, the info in search results may end up being random text from the page)."
This is something that you should do. But it is worth noting that this has no affect of serps. But a good description will increase your click-thru rates.

"3) Put "title" tags in your links."
Title tags have little to no affect on serps. Though it is good practice for accessibility, but may not be worth the effort. Search engines mainly just pickup the anchor text for relevancy reasons.

"2) Put keyword-rich "alt" tags in all of your images."
Unless your goal is to optimize the site for google`s image search, which for an ecommerce tech site probably won`t bring much targeted traffic, you only need to provide alt tags for images that are links. For search engines the alt tags for image links take the place of anchor text for text links.

"4) Move your CSS into a separate file and import it."
Again, one of those good habits you should get into, but have no bearing on seo. Externally referrenced css files are good because they`re separate files that describe the sites style, which can then be cached. This saves you bandwidth and allows the site`s style to showup faster for the end user. But again, has no bearing on seo.

"5) Get rid of empty "ul" lists; it`s extra unneeded code.
6) Get rid of the extra "br and "&nbsp" tags; see #5."
More good habits to get into, but again don`t have any bearing on seo. As long as you`re under the html output file size limit, wasted code won`t matter to search engines.
Not to mention &nbsp`s can be important to a sites style and structure, which is why i think he has those in there.

"6) Utilize h1 and h2 tags for paragraph headings."
Definitely one of the more forgotten tips. You can also extend this to font that is bold, which google gives more credance too, though less than  header tags.