Help with site design!

[James Ball]

Hi

Re www.boardridersguide.com

Six months ago we had our site redesigned on V6 and ever since we have lost our right hand listing positions, before we had near top rankings for most key words. We were told by our web designer that this would be a temporary thing and that listings would take a little while to re appear but this
has never happened. We have now exhausted our knowledge and our that of our web designer. Does anyone have any tips for checking why the
site is not search engine friendly, or tips on improvements - one main difference is we now show six products per page rather than the traditional long list. Some help would be greatly appreciated!

James Ball

[TraceyG]

Hi,

I'm afraid that I don't know why you would lose your rankings because your site design has changed. All I can suggest is to take a look at this white paper or checkout this thread for help on optimising Actinic sites.

Maybe someone else has some ideas?

[garyhay]

Sorry nobody has piped up but it's the kind of question that requires a long answer.

Having looked at your home page I can say this about it.

It has no visable textual content so as far as the search engine is concerened thier is not much relevance on the page to one paticular thing making it difficult for the search engine to serve your page as a result as other pages have relevant textual content so they have a better probability of containing what the searcher is looking for.

For example your link for Kite Sports > Other Accessories to the search engine is just saying "Other Accessories". If instead of that you had a piece on your page that said "Our Kite section has lots or other Kite Accessories including Maui Magic Floats, this, that, and the next thing" Then your site would be more attractive to search engines.

None of the graphics on the home page have "alt tags". You can at least double your keyword density with these.

You should always include a link to the Actinic generated sitmap as this links to all the other pages in the site and is easy for the search engine to spider.

These are only starting points and as I said a longer answer is really required.
You can find lots of info on search engine forums and lots of threads on this forum discussing these issues although not particular to your site.