Help

[J R Brown]

I am having severe optimisation problems with my Business Version 7 and understand from Actinic Technical Support that there may be developers who might to able to help. Thank you.

Email jrbrownrbc@tiscali.co.uk

[I-CC]

Hi,

When you say optimization problems, do you mean in images being too large or other elements to do with search engines.

If you can explain in a little more detail the issues you are experiencing, then I am sure that the good folk on here will be able to provide you with some hints and tips, which will save taking on a developer to do it for you, although if its big, then see that the forum can help with before going the developer way

[J R Brown]

Let’s Get Scrapping Ltd – www.letsgetscrapping.co.uk

I have been advising my wife and two daughters for more than two years on this web adventure! I have good business and accountancy knowledge but extremely limited web/computer experience. My first piece of advice was to develop a Plan. No - they new what the wanted and only required to be pointed in the right direction. I reluctantly agreed and the direction was wrong. The first of my many mistakes! I am retired – had a stroke with resulting very bad memory – and cannot believe I have spent so much time on this “what a good idea” project.

The directors, at my request, purchased a Business Version 6 from Teclan in January 04 and asked them to design and build our web pages, hosting and SEO.

By November it was clear their attempt at optimisation was not working so I looked for an optimisation consultant and choose Web Search Workshop leaving hosting and maintenance with Teclan.

After another year – when we also upgraded to V7 - the WSW experts failed to obtain any reasonable ranking and Google PPC also failed after a good start.

This has been an extremely expensive and frustrating 2 years! We are out our wits end and the directors not sure whether they have finance and energy to continue.

I have been surfing the net to see if I could find some help when I came across your site called Multimedia whose M D said after looking at our site:-

“Template driven, content managed site have great difficulty in being indexed by search engines and your site is zero optimised. Navigation was poor and overall look of the site needs major changes. Actinic software is good for the price but not built to be indexed fully by search engine. Also that search engines over the last few years have changed the way they index sites but your templates have not altered.
It's not a project I would relish even quoting for because the costs would be probably £15k +”.

I thanked him for his honest opinion but could not afford his excellent services.

I have been looking at S E Optimisation and tools sites to trying to understand how two allegedly competent companies could leave us in such poor condition.

One of my many tasks was to look at browser – view – source - HTML Meta codes of actinic sites and compare. Up to now the only difference is that some have a line:-

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”acatalog/actinic.css”>

If css is Cascading Style Sheets it may mean something but what I am not sure?

If we cannot find a relatively inexpensive cure to our problem we will have to sell onto someone with deeper pockets than the directors.

Hope this gives the background and look forward to your report after viewing our site.

Thank you.

John

[Mike Hughes]

Search engine optimisation isn't hard and the good thing is that actinic makes it easy.

Your site isn't too bad but could do with a makeover. FYI a Google search for "sandylion funky friends uk" shows you in third place which isn't too bad for what is essentially a home made, unoptimised website.

You could pay someone to do it, or do it yourself with a little learning. There are three things to focus on (from the SEO perspective):

1. Find out what the most important keywords are and make sure your site has webpages with lots of content for those keywords.

2. Make sure your navigation links to those pages have the keywords in the links.

3. get plenty of external links to your website to boost it's visibility to the search engines.

the design could also do with a fresher look, but that's not my forte.

Mike

[RuralWeb]

I think the first palce to start is with your hosting - you do not have a Alexa ranking which can mean hosting problems. If the hosting is wrong then whatever else you do will not work.

Second is the absence of text on the website, search engines can only "see" words - your site has very few, some pages have none at all. Pages with less than 100 words can be overlooked by the engines. I would change your product layout back to the original Actinic layout which will allow you to add more content.

Your navigation is ok and the look although a little dated is workable.

Get onto wordtracker or similar and find the keywords that people are using to look for your products and get them written into the site. Checkout the competition and see what they are using.

Check the ranking of your pages in google for various keywords and monitor their performance.

Get some good tracking software fitted to the site so you can monitor the number of visitors, navigation, search terms, countries etc. use it to check the effects of your changes. Each change will take several days/weeks to appear so dont panic. Keep adding content such as how to pages, customer scrapbooks etc aim to add a page a week.

Get links from other related websites and add outbound links to other sites of interest - aim to become a "hub site" for your area of interest.

As you say - make a plan of action and work through it slowly monitoring the effect of each part of the plan. If you vistitor numbers/sales increase after you do something then expand on it, if they drop then reconsider what you are doing.

Above all remember that there is lots of information and help available within the Community.

Good Luck

[leehack]

John

It's a big task for one person on here to spend the time and provide feedback on your site. What will probably happen will a number of people will look and we can all make observations and recommendations.

Collate all of these comments, especially those that are repeats of others people recommendations and hopefully you can come up with a plan to move forward. I'm new to the internet and Actinic, but i know with patience, shear hard work and a never say die attitude, you can succeed - i am living proof (so far anyway lol).

My very first thought was "what search terms do people use if they want to know about scrapbooks". I personally would type "scrapbook(s)". I do not see this word anywhere on your site. Now this is fine if "scrappers" and "scrapbooking" are the terms people would use, however what if someone like me wants to investigate, i would certainly not use those terms.

When you use a search engine to find something and your site does not come in the listing anywhere near where you would like it to, take a look at the sites that are up there. What are they doing that you are not?

My initial search on Google had almost every site with "scrapbook" as part part of their domain name.

Lets get scrapping (in my opinion) could be a spoof site about people having fights on camera or could be about car scrap merchants etc. Because of this i would make sure the words "scrapbook", "scrapbooks", "scrap book" and "scrap books" were clearly mentioned. "Scrapping" covers a number of different meanings.

As for your site, when i click on "click here for online shop" the page i am greeted with is a bit of a mess. Apologies if this is blunt, however you sound frustrated enough to want straight talk and no mamby pamby.

You have 3 products per row, with text to the side. This looks ugly as the text wraps and just isn't good on the eye. Get the look of this reduced to 2 columns so people can read in a normal manner (left to right).

I also noted on your home page that people get free P&P on orders up to £20 and have to pay if they spend up to £40. This is arse upwards in my opinion. The more people spend with you, the more postage they have to pay - this should be the opposite way round.

Its a very wide site (page width) and on a number of browsers the right hand menus will not be available on the page without scrolling. Move the navigation menus on the right hand side up to the top of the page under the logo. This way they can be made to look the same (same text size etc.) and the page width you have can be used to display your products better.

Have a link on your homepage to your Actinic sitemap, this helps with search engines. I have one on my site, however you won't be able to see it, unless you look for it. It can be obfuscated.

Special Offers on the right hand side takes me to a page that doesn't exist.

Im personally not a fan of having to click on a link to find out more info (personal opinion). I believe if you got a customer to your page, then you should give them the info they need straight away without the need for too many clicks. I also prefer this for search engines as pages are content rich and half the info they want to read is not hidden behind yet another click.

I don't like your images, i would like to see a full picture of the item (with space around the outside) and then be able to click for further images and close ups. I understand why your piccies are that way, my opinion is to show the complete item initially and then enable a more detailed close up if the customer wants to.

Youve been going for 2 years, but still have images missing? I hate this personally.

I can click on some pages with 7 or 8 items and only 2 in stock - once again i dont like this. Im thinking new company with nothing in stock or old company about to go bump.

Wheres your "about us" link. I tried something a bit different on my first site in the "about us" section as i wanted somewhere to have a bit of comedy but also add the personal touch, so that people could recognise and see us. Many people have commented on this and feedback has been good.

Thats it for now, will take another look when have a bit more time. Hope my comments are taken in the right light and understood that they are my opinion.

Good luck

Lee

[george]

John, I'm hardly in a position to reply after the above comments, but just in case you've any doubt's, Actinic will do the work you need if you can input the information that search engines are looking for.

I'd also say that some of the replies within this forum are worth quite a lot if they were to be given a monetary value.

Read through the replies a few times, digest, and work through your site accordingly.

All the best.

[Charles Bastari]

In the two cents worth department.......

Many will say that key words aren't the key anymore, but it wouldn't hurt to obey some of the established rules. You have too many key words and phrases to be engine friendly. Also, several words are repeated over and over which is considered a no-no.


Here are some links with free tools that may provide some benefit:

http://www.selfpromotion.com/

http://tools.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

http://www.widexl.com/


Charles

[RuralWeb]

Many will say that key words aren't the key anymore

I think that what is being refered to here is Meta tag keywords, which as Charles says are mostly ignored now - but they are a good money spinner for SEO companies!

Keywords/phrases are VERY important in:

Page Title (Should be no more than 40 characters inc spaces/ most important keyword first/ no punctuation.

Body of the page - in first and last 25 words / density of about 6% / make a link if possible / bold/ underline / italics / H1 H2 etc - use font tags for these as SEs do not as yet read css well.

Navigation - use keywords in nav links / use text links not images

[pinbrook]

Just to reinterate KEYWORDs are important - the definition of a keyword is the word or phrase you expect a surfer to tye into a search engine to find you.

Keyword meta tag is pretty well redundant

[george]

Waiting to get into our local leisure centre last night for football training I had a dozy browse at the posters of local events on the wall and saw one with `get scrapping` and `Bennachie Scrappers`.

Now.

My point is.

If I had not read this thread I'd not have known it was not a local fight club or car dismantling circle.

Just felt I needed to add this to the thread.

Some of yer hardcore terms were right after all John.