Comments on new site / web optimisation

[Ben Colman]

Hope I'm not jumping on the bandwagon, but there are a number of requests for comments on newly created sites.

I am not a web designer and have built our site at www.enchanted-wood.co.uk with the help of Actinic themsleves (really good quality advice) and am personally pleased with the results.

I would, however, value greatly comments from some of you guys who are experienced at looking at how the site works and holds together rather than just the visual content.

I'm also considering using a web optimisation service to improve the ranking in the various listings - has anyone used such a service and could make a recommendation for a proven supplier?

Many thanks in advance.

Ben

[carbon-design]

Hi Ben

Just looked through your site and it's looking good. Easy to use and all products are accessible in a few clicks.

For optimisation there are a number of issues you could address. Firstly your titles could be sharpened up to aim at specific keywords or phrases a potential customer may use to find your site. For instance your index page is displaying only 'home' as the title. Really this needs to be changed to something like 'swings trikes climbing frames and go-karts'.

Keywords can be researched using overture suggestion tool or indeed by analysing your direct online competition. Keywords or phrases that customers are likely to use are then applied to your title, headings tags (<h1>,<h2> etc) and your main text with a density of around 3 - 6%. This will help your search engine position.

Another area I found could be improved upon is the large image used for facts about wood. Instead of using an image use text. This gives more weight to your page as the text is read by search engine robots and cached.

For high search engine rankings and to increase the overall page rank of your site you need some good quality on topic back links. These need to be constructed using optimised anchor text, again using your keywords.

There is a lot you could do with this site either yourself or by enlisting an expert seo company.

For professional seo I can recommend Klout Design, they offer a free seo report. I know a few companies that have used them for Actinic and they get good solid results that convert into sales - http://www.klout.co.uk

You just send them a snapshot of your site, they optimise it and send it back.

hope this helps

[Ben Colman]

Thanks - much appreciate your comments.

Ben