Sales very poor

[Phoenix164]

Thanks for the suggestions, I will make the necessary improvements A.S.A.P

Thanks again

jonathan

[Bun]

Optimise your homepage for your primary keyword - if you dont know what it is you need to find out before you start!

Cheers Malcolm,

My main area of concern was the way I'd set out my front page and whether this would hinder bots looking any further? I'm quite happy with the search results for my main page it's a very competitive area and I'd really need to bastardise it to get any result for terms like 'Fishing Online', Online Fishing Tackle'......and besides most of my hits come from pages within the site. I was just getting twitchy regarding the lack of actual text on the main page and as mentioned above, if this would halt bots from going deeper into the site?

I think I'll remove the 'Hello and welcome image' and replace it with actual text to see if that will encourage the little blighters

Thank you for your time and patience

[pinbrook]

the fishing site has no alt tags.

Maybe someone else can say whether you can use alt tags to supplement text on a page.

[RuralWeb]

Most certainly alt tags are very important - try and use your keywords in them.

[Jan]

hi,
have a look at mine www.siam925.com

what a tempting site that is, I do love jewellery though, I found it difficult tell the difference between 8 and 3 on the site due to the background image - possibly so because the prices seemed to me to be very cheap for some of the 3.95 necklaces.

Regards,

[Bun]

the fishing site has no alt tags.

Maybe someone else can say whether you can use alt tags to supplement text on a page.

Hi Jo,

Do you mean image alt tags? I'm a little confused here

[pinbrook]

Yes, image alt tags, given that your front page is very image intensive you could be adding some keywords to the tags for spiders and site visitors

You should have alt tags for accessibility anyway, and for people who prefer not to download images (I was recently working from South Africa on a 56k modem, i had image download turned off as default in order to see the sites I needed to more quickly. This site for example works just as wellwithout images, as do alot of other sites I regularly visit).

Additionally there should be some text on the page too.

When I saw your index page I felt there were far to many images on it, I was overwhelmed, the page seemed to long.

[Bun]

Hi Jo,

You're probably right about the graphics.......maybe I've been looking at my competitors sites too much and trying to emulate them. Also, the need for text is certainly something I'm going to address, though I might leave it as it is for now and see how the spiders treat it over the next few days.

I know there's not many alt image tags attached to the graphics down each side of the page.....but the images in the middle have plenty of them. Would you suggest adding more text to these?

Thanks for your time

[pinbrook]

generally you should be aiming for a page with a good mix of text, images, links, alt tags

[jont]

I might leave it as it is for now and see how the spiders treat it over the next few days

Can be a good idea to change a little and monitor rather than going for a complete modification - makes it much simpler to track what (if any) changes are having on the search engines so you can implement to the other pages accordingly.

[shabbie]

I found it difficult tell the difference between 8 and 3 on the site due to the background image -

would changing the text style on my site help? or the text colour?
i want it to look inviting, and not too clinical

www.siam925.com

[jont]

Have you tried washing the background image out a little? It does compete quite highly with the blue text at the moment

[Jan]

>would changing the text style on my site help? or the text colour?
> i want it to look inviting, and not too clinical
I'm not sure, I have terrible eye sight, so maybe it is not a real problem.
for me a less rounded font might help, or maybe you could put the price in a box with a clear background (shopper not web designer talking here).

Regards,

[pinbrook]

addressing the background will allow the text to be seen more easily.

I am sure than Jan isn't the only person with eye sight challenges

[RuralWeb]

DDR states that you should have good contrast between text and background. Your site uses small absolute sized text, if you changed to relative visitors would be able to increase the size of the text.