Comments on: A Truly Rotten Website Review – A Brochure Site

By: Learning About Affiliate Marketing

Learning About Affiliate Marketing — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:41:42 +0000

[...] small-business people simply want to create a website (or rather have a website created), and then have that site make them lots of money, as if by magic. That isn’t the way it [...]

By: Ideas for An Architect’s Website

Ideas for An Architect’s Website — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:19:48 +0000

[...] But then this enormous, international firm of architects does not need to bring customers in through its web site. They probably market in other ways. They are big. But look – notice their news page is sparse. A big firm like that and their flashy flash website is information poor. It’s not that they have no news, it’s more like they’ve forgotten their web communications goals. [...]

By: Jill Dean

Jill Dean — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:15:34 +0000

It is great to see the individual points itemised – so often when you go to a bad site you just get a feeling of dodgy-ness, but to see it analysed and broken down into the different issues is very useful. It not only helps me with my own site, but also gives me a way of evaluating others. Thank you!

By: Kyle D Jan

Kyle D Jan — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:45:20 +0000

Liz

Unfortunately this almost sounds like my website. It is great the way you pointed out what was wrong and gave links on how to help. Thank you

Kyle

By: How to Write A Website Review

How to Write A Website Review — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:44:02 +0000

[...] a WordPress consulting friend of mine. She posted earlier this week, an informative post called, A Truly Rotten Web Site Review. Great post Liz and she is my go-to-guru for all of my WordPress questions, problems and [...]

By: Joyce Brister

Joyce Brister — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:58:02 +0000

Getting your website reviewed by a professional, like Liz is critical to your business growth. Even some techie types struggle with certain elements of design, presentation, user ability, and content, not to mention the various SEO methods needed to develop a Google friendly site.

If you’re a do-it-your-selfer, then this post can be transformed into an action list. However, for me, I need to leverage my time and outsource this to a WordPress expert, like the post author. You’ll get from point A to point B a lot faster, which means more money in your pocket with a monetized blog.

By: Liz Jamieson

Liz Jamieson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:56:03 +0000

The first thing on a page does not need to be an H1 tag. I assume that by header you mean a banner containing say text and graphics which is repeated on every page. If this is the case, the header will be the first item on the each page and unless you code for it, the header will be the same on every page. This isn't a good thing. If you are able, you should code a different header for each page which is pertinent to the content for which you wish to rank, on that page. As I type, we are in the process of building our new site at the Power Blog Service. This is a new site and I'm a great believer in putting something up that is imperfect and then tweaking as time passes. That site will improve over time. You will see today (4th August 2009) that I have a header that contains graphics and some text. At the moment on the Power Blog Service, the same header text appears on every page. In time I will change that so that different header text appears on each page pertinent to the content. Currently that header text is not in an H1 or any header tag. Later I will probably put it in paragraph tags. Your question is should that text be in an H1. I don't think so because in my case the text is mostly written for humans, not search engines. If you make all your headings just for search engines your site will be unreadable. Some people get around this (see Dave Taylor's site ) by placing the text as a graphic. On the page I believe you should place your main keyphrase terms and your main variations on these terms in headings and sub headings (H1, H2, H3) on the page. Of course you should also work these keyphrases into your main text and into link on the page. Jerry West and Dan Thies are experts in this area and are part of the group I belong to (Stompernet). Jerry's done tests that show multiple H1's dont hurt you but Google only counts the first one. Your home page H1 doesn't need to be Home - it could be a phrase that sums up your business. The fact that it's a home page could be reflected n the the selected menu option. Anyway a reader wouldn't want more than one H1 per page. Always think of the reader. Besides the headings, you should also try to work these same terms into the text of links which then link to other pages internal to your site for which you want to rank for other terms. Don't go mad - just do this internal linking strategy a couple of time on each page. The bottom line is that this is all tweaking. The main thing you need to aim for is to have a large site, with lots of useful pages. Pages that people want to read. You will end up ranking for many long tail phrases as a by product. And that's good for you and your site.

By: Pertinax Munro

Pertinax Munro — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:05:32 +0000

One thing on which I can’t seem to find good consistent advice is Heading tags.
Should the first page heading in the body always be h1 ? If my site is the Really Amazing Car Company, which is part of my header, it seems to be more sensible that this has the h1 tag, rather than the page headings of Home, Used Cars, New Cars, Repairs, but is that so ?
Should we have only one h1 on a page, or are more OK. If I want to segment my Used Cars page into Old Bangers, Reliable Runners, and Exciting Engines; should they get h1 or h2 tags or something else ?

By: Pamela Beaudet

Pamela Beaudet — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:53:36 +0000

Wow! What an informative article! I really thought that I was your muse and that I may actually BE Steve!
I coach small business owners who have found themselves in this same situation with their webmasters. It’s very frustrating and it accounts for a lot of wasted time. Like me, they can’t spend half of their day learning all the technical ins and outs of their websites. As small business owners, we need to focus on our clients and consistently bringing in new business. If blogging will bring in more business for you, you need to be able to write it and be done with it. I’ve been preaching this to others for a long time- now it’s my time to walk the talk. Liz has been trying to get me to blog for months and now I see that I need to convert to WordPress and hire her to maintain it. She can cut my learning time in half so I can focus on what I do best. At present, I haven’t blogged in a long time and the comment section is full of those “masses of pharmaceutical and porn laden spams” that Liz mentioned. I can’t even keep up with deleting it anymore and have given up. Save yourself time, money, and hassle: hire the Power Blog Service – I’m going to.
Pamela

By: Sam Kanakanui

Sam Kanakanui — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:06:11 +0000

Ouch! Poor Steve! Your review was spot on, Liz. You hit all the right SEO points that need to be addressed. But from a professionalism point of view, I HATE webmasters that can’t even take the time (or hire someone) to check for spelling and grammatical errors. That is my pet peeve. When I see those errors I click away faster than you can say misspeeling!
Thanks for sharing.
Sam