Actinic Newbie

[Lionel]

Hi everyone,

Have just completed my first actinic site, and would be eternally grateful if I could have some constructive criticism or anything along those lines...

www.applegategardens.com

I have just started the long haul to get the search engines looking at my site, I feel this part of the job may go on some time!

One of the sites that offer to simulate a spider seems to think that there are no meta tags included, but they have definately been put there...or so I thought?

Does anyone think these sites give good feedback or not?

Thanks,

Lionel

[fleetwood]

Hi Lionel

Just a few initial thoughts...

Good Points:

Nice 'original' look overall ie dosen't look like a bog standard out-of-the-box template - which is good.

Plenty of clear pics - linking to more info - great!

Nice clean layout, and fast operation (though I am looking at midnight)

Plenty of info.....BUT

Bad Points:

Too much small text on each page. I know you have a lot to say about your product, which is good, but it needs breaking down into smaller pages, in my opinion. Web browsing is alot about holding the very limited attention span of the brwoser. I started to wander 2 or 3 lines into a paragraph. Try smaller bite sized chunks. The beauty of well placed links is that you can keep page size small, but offer more just a hyperlink away.

Not overly keen on the headings - not sure if its the typeface or the colour, but combined I don't find it pleasing on the eye.

Damn! Could have done with you about 3 weeks - now fully in the throws of having our back garden landscaped...

On the search engine front, if you follow the guidelines laid out by those far more knowledgeable than myself on these boards, you'll find that the important search engines will find you just fine. One of the software's key selling points is the search engine friendly pages it creates.
Give it a good 3-6 weeks from initail upload, and you'll find the spiders will find you without you having to chase much.

You seem to have a fairly origianl product in terms of price / offering which bodes well for well placed search engine listings.

Good luck

[Lionel]

Hi Fleetwood,

Thanks for the comments, appreciate your time to look at it.

Take on board and agree with your comments about the quantity of text on each page. I have been constantly battling with how much to say, and when to stop - as this is a unique product (to our knowledge) so without an established market for it, there seems to be sooo much to get across!

One problem with the actinic template I used, is that it forces a text link too the top of each page, for every brochure page you create. So we were ending up with so many top links, it looked terrible!

We have instead made dumb (non - actinic) pages to link to instead, avoiding more forced links. But this is not desirable as they take much more effort to change/update in future. Probably in an attempt to avoid making too many of these dumb pages, has made me put too much text on each page...excuses, excuses.

My first website, and know nothing about HTML etc, but there was probably a much simpler solution to my work around?

If the traffic goes up, but doesnt buy, I think I may need to re-examine all this text as you have pointed out...

Thanks again,

Lionel.

[Mike Hughes]

I'd ignore the comments about meta tags as they're definitely there.

I would do a couple of things though.

1. The keywords for a page should be words that are relevant to that page and in line with the content of that page. Using 'groundforce' for example on a page that has no reference to groundforce in the content is seen by the search engines as spam and is more likley to have a negative effect than positive. (although keyword meta tags have so little importance these days it's probably not a big issue).

2. Try to limit the keywords to those that are relevant to that page and don't have too many. Similarly have a different description for each page.

Mike

[Lionel]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the comments, I am learning a lot fast, as is the way I guess.

Site will be evolving on a regular basis product wise, which is a good thing as I think I need to revise much of the content and metatags etc too!

Thanks again,

Linette.

[george]

I'm actually okay with the text, its a subject that maybe does work better with a bit more info.

[Lionel]

Thanks George,

As you no doubt already know, when you get a bit involved with something it is diffucult to see the wood for the tree's!

Just one or two feedback comments can make you instantly look at something differently - thats been staring you in the face for weeks...

Have made some amendments to the wording on several pages on the site, and now working on rectifying the metatags/keywords issues.

Linette.