Site Review

[judiw]

Site review please - particulary looking at optimisation. We have been live for 3 months and spent weeks populating the site as advised, but our traffic from Google is minimal compared to our old Actinic website (vers. 4) where we were highly ranked with all keywords/phrases. Our observations indicate that we have excessive code on each page referencing unrelating html files - is this normal and helpful or detrimental?

[leehack]

Provide the URL Judi, don't make people hunt for things so that they can help you out.

[Rich Brady]

Be aware of your page names.

http://www.cachetuk.com/acatalog/Cla...kes_cat_1.html

May be /motor-bike-pictures.html or motor-bike-prints.html would be better as you've used in your Title. Re-iterate that in your section name so that the <h1> read Motor Cycle Prints.

Also, you could group those prints by manufacturer?

Sub-section = Triumph Prints or Triumph Pictures for example, because that's what I'd type in a search engine.

I assume you've redirected your V4 site pages to the new site?

[judiw]

Re Site Review

Sorry! So intent on on the detail of the thread I forgot the url which is www.cachetuk.com.
Thanks for the feed back. The site was redirected from V4 in November and we have changed all the page file names. Where errors have shown up as broken links we have redirected them. We now understand the importance of this as it affected the stats dramatically but unfortunately we were not advised beforehand and the damage is done.

Thanks for the input re page names, will need to think about that one.

With regard to the bulky code and the huge amount of html files, this layout was setup by our developer as being the norm - are you saying that this is wrong and unfriendly to Google etc., and thefore detrimental to the site? If this is the case, how easy is it to set up a CSS style sheet layout template and what is involved.

[Rich Brady]

Could you elaborate on what you mean when you refer to "bulky code". You have some many html files because you have so many pages, there's no way around that, unless I have misunderstood.

Can I ask how you have your domains set up? I notice you are using .com and .co.uk?

[leehack]

When you say huge amount of html files, are you referring to sections as each section is a page on your website? If so, that's fine. The site design methods are old school, they're not particularly bad, but they do use much more code than modern day standards. To setup a CSS design, you'd either need to switch to a standard acitnic template or contact a designer to do it for you. Prices seem to range from around Ł1500-3000, it's not something you will be able to do if a standard theme doesn't float your boat.

[judiw]

We own both domains, cachetuk.com and cachetuk.co.uk and the latter crosslinks to the .com site - our ISP has configured the domains so that they operate using the same website.
With regard to the html files, I am referring to the source code for each page which has roughly 368 hidden links. This is what I am concerned about as I understand that Google would expect to see around 100. The template has been setup in this fashion and although we would expect the high level categories and artists as seen on our home page left and right to be included, there are non relevant html files relating to product levels, i.e on a page showing a motorbike image, the source code contains html coding relating to a product such as Killer Whale.
Just to let you know how bad it is, we have only had 48 visits from Google during the past 7 days. With our old site (v.4!)for the same period last year, we had 153 visits. Our old site was pretty poor with its descriptions and names being irrelevant and we had next to no meta tag data.

[Rich Brady]

Both domains have been indexed. 1940 pages against .com and 1260 against .co.uk

You need to make sure Google knows these are the same site, other wise you may be penalised for duplicated content.

Did you have both domains set up like this for your V4 site?

[leehack]

Judi, if this site is your livelihood, get some professional advice and help. You could be doing untold damage as it stands, it's bordering on a horror story. Have a look on the actinic site to see designers near you, one might be kind enough to come round and see you and take a look.

[Rich Brady]

Judi, if this site is your livelihood, get some professional advice and help.

It was developed by an Actinic Partner

[leehack]

It was developed by an Actinic Partner

Oh..........

[NormanRouxel]

One thing I've just noticed that's very inefficient:- You're using a JavaScript based menu ( showSubSections ) to display the sub-sections of your top-level ones. Unfortunately this requires the loading of file "Act_section_tree.js" which is 851Kb at present. That file alone gives your home page a ridiculous weight for first time visitors.

There are menu systems available (I've written several - Accordion Menu for example) that would have a similar look but have minimal effect on page size.

[judiw]

Both domains have been indexed. 1940 pages against .com and 1260 against .co.uk

You need to make sure Google knows these are the same site, other wise you may be penalised for duplicated content.

Did you have both domains set up like this for your V4 site?

Yes. Both domains were set up like this when we were running V4.

[judiw]

Judi, if this site is your livelihood, get some professional advice and help. You could be doing untold damage as it stands, it's bordering on a horror story. Have a look on the actinic site to see designers near you, one might be kind enough to come round and see you and take a look.

Lee, You have obviously looked at our site, - we didn't think it was that bad - can you elaborate on why it is a horror story?!

[Rich Brady]

If the domain set up hasn't changed then that shouldn't be the problem. I only thought to ask because you mention the sudden drop in google referals.

This may, ultimately, be down to the 301s not being set up properly.

There are a few things we've mentioned that may help, so take a look at each if them. Don't change everything at once because you won't know which change made the difference.

Make sure you have a good understanding of where your site is now using analytic tools and double check everything, just incase there is another factor we haven't picked up.

Google are focussing their attention on page load, so the observation on your navigation may be a good place to start.

Try webmaster tools | labs and asses your load times.