Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Hello Olivia,
First you have a great looking site and it seems to be user friendly. However, let's take a deeper look to how well your site will rank in the search engines.

Let's take a look at your source code. In your meta tags you have 3,300 characters. Most search engines will not look that deep into your keywords. For example, Google will only read 1024 characters.

Secondly, you are using the same keyword/phrases on every page. Bad. You have to understand the search engines and what they do. A search engine does not try to classify your website, it has to classify each page. Therefore, if you present to the search engines in your meta tags 50 keywords/phrases and not back that up with relative content, then the search engine will not know how to classify that page. If it can not get a very clear understanding as to what that page it about then it will rank it very low.

You should only have 2 to 3 keywords maximum per page, then your content needs to speak to those keywords. Density is critical. If you use your keywords too much then you'll be looked at as spamming the search engines. If you don't use it enough then you won't rank very well.

The other thing you'll have to work on is Page rank. This has to do with how many other websites link to your website. It's like casting a vote. I would suggest finding good links or other websites to partner with. But you need to make sure that the links are relevant to what your site is conveying.

There are companies that have tools to evaluate your entire site. www.buildtelligence.com has software that will do a detailed analysis on every page for density as well as other things.

I know this is a lot but it's a start. You can spend an enormous amount of money on a website, but if nobody can find when they search, what good is it?

Hi Olivia,

Well I am assuming you'd like to hear what you can improve, rather than what is done right.

1. What is the main purpose of your website?
Increase sales or present the firm. My first impression is that you are trying to do both and not quite succeeding at either

2. Webshop
If it takes more than one click to see what is it you are offering it isn't good. The visitor should be allowed to dive in immediately. Put featured products immediately on the home page, move user registrations to the end of the process rather than at the beginning.

Hope this helps.