Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Excellent advice as usual from the marketing perspective. On the SEO side, I can offer some hopefully helpful advice as I manage to get number one rankings on Yahoo, MSN and Altavista.

First, some background. I set up my site www.estateagentsespana.com because I had terrible difficulty finding a straightforward list of estate agents in my chosen area when I decided to move to Spain. I had never done a website before, so everything was new to me.
I read loads of web articles on SEO and tried to weed out the rubbish from the good stuff. I started with the big ones Google and Yahoo and read their info on submission and promotion. I then looked at various other sites on SEO. I can summarise what I learned, but advise you to dig deeper. You have already launched your site, so some of my points don't apply

1) Never pay a company who "guarantee" top rankings. Both Google and Yahoo say that nobody can guarantee this.
2) Do not use automated submission services. All the major search engines warn you about this
3) Read, understand and stick to the search engine guidelines.
4) Do not submit your site until it is fully functional. Pay particular attention to broken links. Use free services such as www.sitereportcard.com which gives fantastic info on your url.
5) Submit your site manually to Yahoo, MSN and Open Directory. All other engines will pick up from these.
6) I disagree with Puru on graphics versus text. Graphics, or text embedded in graphics, will not be indexed. I suggest text description with links to the graphics - people want to know first what your product is going to do for them, not what it looks like. (Also, people on slow dial-ups will often leave your site rather than wait for graphics to load. Check your load speeds on the slowest modem you can find - if you optimise for this, you will have near-instant loads on broadband etc.). Look at any major site (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Mozilla etc) and all are low-graphics, text dense.
7) Do not use your product name in page titles or meta tags. Your product name is proprietary so nobody is likely to search for it (unless they have got the name from a friend). If they do search for your name, you will get high rankings anyway because your site name matches the product name. People may search for 'pruning tools' or 'repairing damaged trees' or 'sealing tree wounds' - whatever (I am not a gardener). It is for this type of search you need to optimise. Title your pages with likely search terms (the title only shows in the browser status bar and who looks at that?). You need to research what people are likely to search for. Do this by asking friends, dealers, customers etc. what terms they are likely to use.
8) Name your pages with likely search terms. Your page "meet_pal.html" is more likely to turn up in dating searches. Far better to call your page "destroy_wasp_nests.html". Again, the page name only shows in the URL and is not of interest to the viewer but is very important to the search engine.
9) You have little control over what summary detail the search engines will display when they return a link to your site. All you can be sure of is that they will return text from your page. You have to ensure that the text returned makes people want to learn more. 'Click "Care for Your Trees"' on your home page is not likely to do that, in my opinion. In short, use text on the page that matches what people will search for but beware of spamming (do not stuff the page with search terms unless you do so in meaningful sentences). Emphasise key feature text, and not link text. Also, its better to have in-text links rather than having the user look elsewhere for the link. E.g. Where you have Click "Care for Your Trees"... , "Care for Your Trees" would be better as a hyperlink.
10) Your "Care for Your Trees" page does virtually nothing in terms of SEO. Far better to give brief extracts (being aware of copyright restrictions), again making sure you have key search terms. Provide the links as an additional bonus service but avoid users having to go elsewhere to get info they thought they were going to get on this page.
11) Use all the meta tags available - you seem to use only 'title'.

Finally a question. You have a Google PageRanking of 3/10. Any idea how you got this?

Hope this helps

Billy

Goodness, gracious. Can I offer a different kind of advice here?

Give Billy the points.

~ Shelley

p.s. There's also a TON of useful articles on this website. Try the Search box at the top of this page, and use "SEO" as the keyword.