Hello all, Please can i pick your brain for your thoughts on my site www.sharpsbooks.co.uk It is based on OScommerce and i am receiving a steady stream of customers. what im after really is thoughts on seo and look. what do you like? what could be improved? what is missing? favourite element of site? poorest element? First Impressions? Would you buy from me? if not why? (honest answers help the most) Thanks for your time Mike
On the first page there's a lot of text about your shop, this is nice but I wouldn't put it at the top. Now you have to scroll to get to some pictures of books, I would like something interesting to hit me in the face when coming to your site. Browse to Amazon and look how long it takes til you get hit in the face with 20 products, they might be overdoing it but your on the other side. At least thats what I think
thanks perrow for the comments, i have moved the featured books to be more prominent.. any other comments woulod be excellent and greatly appreciated
I would like the website to look a bit brighter. Add some nice looking pictures of books. High qualtiy pictures. Have a look at this website . It's background is all white. The page looks more fresh.
Thanks for the comments, i am actually as we speak working to make the front page more fresh and colourful. thanks Mike Did you find the functionality ok? navigation?
Site seems clean, easy to naviagate and well laid out from a visitors point of view. Nice job. As mentioned the only thing that I would prefer to see would be clearer/more professional images.
Is there any way around usage of dynamic URL's? Not easy for Google to read these. Plus it would help with SEO if the inside pages were sharpsbook.com/used-books-anthropology.htm
I would change the 'hover' to maybe 1 shade darker. Overall I like the design - it needs a touch of colour I think - Maybe a special offer bright and attention grabbing. Also, narrowing the left column slightly to give a bit more centre space. The only other issue I personally have is that the site is a little 'forgettable' (nondescript etc) - Maybe add a few small icons, representative graphics etc. http://www.seobook.com/ - like it or not, it instantly gets your attention + is distinct. Also, logo takes you to this page http://www.sharpsbooks.co.uk/index.php not http://www.sharpsbooks.co.uk/ URLs could look better + be both User + Seo friendly - see comments below:
i have thought about this as i have recently reworked the site, the main issues i have had is that i want my current links in google to stay and also i am on a windows server and have had a few issues when trying to get this working... What do people think of these issues? what are the work arounds? thankyou again for the comments
Thanks, I have recently found a work around for the link to index.php - thanks for reminding me ill get it sorted asap. Do you mean generally just brighten the index page? im currently searching for relevant stock images to add. just as a side point how is the site displaying on different screen sizes? thanks Mike
Renders perfectly on Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox on Mac 1280 *854 resolution Actually, the colours remind me a little of Tesco
lol is that good or not? thanks for checking other browsers for me i hadnt even thought about that, so that was a stroke of luck mike
I got session IDs (bad for indexing). Use Chemo's Ultimate SEO urls if you can. I would change 'home' in the crumb nav trail to 'shop' or some other KW. Which contrib do you use on the homepage for the in-body featured books?
i have used the define mainpage contrib and then just hashed around to get the featured books there. I tried to use chemo's (rip) contrib, but it messed up the whole site?! so i had to remove it - i have got an up to date robots.txt etc to try and stop the spiders picking up sessions
Judging by this you need more META variation and SEO. Thanks for the contrib. With (rip) do you mean him being banned from the forums? (On forum.oscommerce-freelancers.com he was still online yesterday so he isn't really rip is he?)
What kind of programm do you use to resize your photos? Or are the width and height set in the template itself. Most of your pictures seem blurry/vaque when resized to the size 89*120 although the original large picture are from a good quailty.
tbh i just use a thumbnail contribution from oscommerce, all the books are original scans that have been optimised in photoshop. my major concern is how the pages are listed in google, before my clean up they were ok. to bring everyone up to speed i was using a loaded (cre) version of osc but i hated it and after 6 months of my own whineing i decided to act and set about building my site from the ground up to look the same (as i quite like it ) what seo tips might you suggest? I have been PR3 for ages and im not in the top 1000 for second hand books, though i was no1 in msn search?? thanks Mike
I'd copy your shop to a development environment and get Ultimate SEO Urls working. It now has automatic 301's to cover for your indexed urls as well. Use a META Header Tag contrib to get individual meta tags which will help getting rid of the url only SERP entries.