Am i being unreasonable (Please help)

[Kingscroft]

I am self taught web designers interferance as i ask questions continually to try to improve things, the bain of our web designers life.

I have a number of sites that we have been transfering to use the actanic software in the hope to increase sales for our business. The first two sites that we have transfered over have been lauched 8 monthes ago and 4 monthes ago. However i would have hopped that we would have seen a better improvment than we have. I feel that we need to push more on the SEOand that is where our efforts have been targeting. However I am now to close to it and would ask if you could look at the sites and see if there is anything you could advise to try and optimise these to the best advantange.


www.removalboxes.org
www.hamperboxes.co.uk

are the first sites that have been transfered

Many thanks

[bamboo]

Okay it's been a couple of days and I hate to see a request for help go unanswered despite the fact I had to read it three time to try and understand what you are saying so here is a list of things to fix before you attempt any SEO.

• Find out who your ideal customer is for both sites.
• Who would buy packaging materials?
• Who would buy a flat pack hamper?
• Make your navigation look like navigation!
• Lose the silly graphics on both sites. They make the sites look unprofessional and out of date.
• Shrink the headers they are far too big and achieve nothing.
• Get rid of the 'Welcome' messages. Either do the rewrite of the landing page copy yourself or get a copywriter hired to do the job but only after you work out who your customer is.
• Where is your company information? Answer NOT THERE
• Where is your about us page? Answer NOT THERE
• No-one I know ever looks at these two pages but they do like to see the links to them somewhere on the landing page as this give the site credibility!

Best advice I can give is to go to the great god Google and type in a search for your best selling line in each store and devour the top shop sites that Google serves up because IT thinks that these sites are the closest match to the search term and it is your job to then figure out why this is the case and make your sites do things a bit better than the current top and lo and behold as if by magic Google will begin to notice yours. It's better to do the top three as they may change places as each changes their sites but concentrating on one will be hard enough so don't overstretch and burnout.

If the first word on your page is 'Welcome' I would venture to suggest that this word carries as much weight with Google as 'and' & 'the' in other words none at all.
If the searcher types in bubble wrap for example and your page has 'bubble wrap' as the first two words on the page Google gets an inkling this page might be about bubble wrap.
It's so simple that people don't believe it's possible but it is.

When you've done all this and are moving product as a result of your efforts come back and tell us.

[pinbrook]

i took a brief look at your site, after bamboo helped me understand the initial question.

quite quickly i decided you sell flat pack gift boxes, but nowhere on the pages i visited did i see this being used as a key phrase.

home in on the phrases you would expect visitors to search on to find you and include these phrases in your product descriptions and page titles

i would also question the usage of a .org tld for ecommerce (typically .org is for organisations inc charities)

i'd also reorganise the products into one product per page, use components for sizes/colours and use related products so you can easily buy tape for example when buying postal boxes or ribbon when buying gift boxes.

[leehack]

They look like online comics to me, might make me smile, but its my wonga you are after. Need to look more professional IMO.

[RuralWeb]

The missuse of a .org is a big no no for me. Change it as it will hamper your seo efforts.

I buy loads of hampers so look at your competitors and what they do to get my money.

[gabrielcrowe]

i'm with him. Wonga. Smile. Cartoon.

[wesleythorne]

we buy flat pack hampers, as a buyer i need an outer box (protective) to ensure the nice hamper turns up in one piece. Do you sell these with the hamper boxes. How strong are the boxes, what weight can they hold before loosing shape. i couldn't find this info quickly or at all, then moved on to another site

[Paragon]

I agree with Malcolm and Lee regarding the domain name and overall look.

But for seo as in your original post, Google have issued a basic starter guide for seo tactics.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...ter-guide.html

As good a place as any to get started on seo