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www.worldfamousgiftbaskets.net- Fancy a Review Anyone?

Discussion in 'Websites' started by ProductivePC, Jun 8, 2004.

  1. #1
    We have worked extremly long and hard on this website. I would appreciate any aspects of anything for improvement (or kudos) on it to help in any way such as navigation, SEO, color scheming...... etc etc etc...

    World Famous Gift Baskets


    Especially SEO. At one point in time the website was filled with a bunch of spamming techniques and came in around 200 for the term gift baskets. I took them out to make everything nice and clean, more readable, set up for the blind.... and now we dropped to around 850

    This is not a good thing. :(

    Take a look at our competition. Just do a search for Gift Baskets in google and look at the number one website. If that is not spamming I don't know what is......... they have been up there for 3 years. Y?

    Thanks for any repsponses.

    Wayne
     
    ProductivePC, Jun 8, 2004 IP
  2. ProductivePC

    ProductivePC Peon

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    #2
    I supposed no responses is not a bad thing.... at least nobody had anything bad to say about anything.... ;)
     
    ProductivePC, Jun 9, 2004 IP
  3. JazzyBen

    JazzyBen Peon

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    #3
    Purple?

    Are you sure?
     
    JazzyBen, Jun 9, 2004 IP
  4. JazzyBen

    JazzyBen Peon

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    #4
    I found the text on the homepage a little verbose and hard to scan. I would suggest simplifying it, as well as putting some basic information like where you are based and where you will ship to early on in the page.

    Also, if you think of your homepage like a shop window, you'd want to put an example of your goods, and something that you had on special in your shop window right? i think the same goes for the homepage. Show examples with prices.

    I would imagine that once a visitor gets to the site they want to get pretty much straight into seeing if your gift baskets are what they are looking for.

    I'm making an assumption, but people who shop for gift baskets usually have a budget or amount they want to spend right? And they will usually spend right up to that amount?

    What about a table displaying titles (linked), a one line description and and the price for all the items in a category, so that people can get to the baskets in their price range with fewer clicks and know they're not missing out on any baskets they would like to investigate. I found having to click through the entire category just to make sure cumbersome, and I'm fairly certain it would lead to customers clicking away from the site.

    The navigation at the bottom of the home page, is way too far at the bottom and would be missed by a lot of vistors with smaller screen who don't read all the way through the aforementioned text.

    Lists are great usability. what about listing the contents of a basket directly as well as in a sentence where you talk about them. would allow customer to instantly see if there was an item in the basket they particularly liked/disliked.

    Do you offer free ground shipping on all baskets over a certain price range, or all baskets? tell people on your home page. It would also serve the purpose of telling them where you ship to. US customers are your target market right?

    Hope this helps.

    Cheers,

    Ben
     
    JazzyBen, Jun 9, 2004 IP
  5. mnemtsas

    mnemtsas Super Dud

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    #5
    Ok my thoughts are that you are working in a very competitive space. 'gift baskets' in Google returns 2.5 million pages and digital points keyword suggestion tool returns 10000 searches /day on gift basket. Looking at your front page only here's a couple of things I noted straight away:

    1. There's too much stuff in the <head> portion of your HTML. You have too many keywords in the meta tag (stick to 3 or four I'd say) and some other meta information that shouldn't be there. Remember try to minimise the amount of unneccesary code the 'bots have to crawl through.

    2. Try to use CSS to position your elements rather than tables. This will help reduce your code size.

    3. I think your title tags and alt tags could do some with some work.

    4. Your primary keyword (which I guess is gift basket or gift baskets) should be the first text in both your page title and H1 tag.

    5. You only have 9 incoming links in Google. Using the MCDARS tool the top 10 for 'gift baskets' have a minimum of 38 up to 300. Get more links. I'd do a link: search on my competitors and try to get on the same sorts of pages they are. Also the MCDARS is only listing you as 38 on all in anchor for 'gift baskets'. So your anchor text on your site could use some work.

    6. You're using tables for layout. Personally I like doing this but again for code size better to try to use CSS.

    Here's some general thoughts from what I've picked up from reading here and else where

    1. Try to concentrate each page on 1-3 keywords or keyword phrases. So you might have your index page concentrating on 3 primary key words. (may be gift basket, gift, gift baskets). Your keyword density on the front page for these keywords is pretty good but I'd look at working some of them into <H2> tags. Also remember to link to your front page from other pages using these keywords in the anchor text.

    2. Then I'd have product pages concentrating on other keywords you are interested in. So a page for 'baby gift baskets'. Remember to call this 'baby gift baskets' page 'baby-gift-baskets.htm' and to link to it from your other pages using the anchor text <a href="../baby-gift-baskets.htm>Baby Gift Baskets</a>. Try to get external links to these product pages using the same anchor text.

    3. Get more links.

    I'd say getting more links and having a very focussed front page should be your top priorities.

    Cheers,

    Mark
     
    mnemtsas, Jun 9, 2004 IP
  6. JazzyBen

    JazzyBen Peon

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    #6
    But there's no point in working to get lots of traffic if you're not doing everything you can to convert the traffic when it arrives by offering a good user experience...

    Unless you're miles cheaper than your competition of course.
     
    JazzyBen, Jun 9, 2004 IP
  7. ProductivePC

    ProductivePC Peon

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    #7
    Thank you very much for your comments.....

    I was just looking at the amount of keywords in there and am taking them out... it is on my list of things to do... lol

    The having products on the HTML pages is a great idea and one that I just got approved for about 2 days. lol I will have this up in about a week or so....

    I just converted everything over SSI ... we were coding everything by hand individually.

    The product pages are are ASP pages that use session ID's so there is currently only one way for the search engines to read them and then they cannot go onto the next product page or anywhere else from there so I am in the middle of converting them to HTML pages manually. I am almost done with that. I do nto have a lot of play on the names however. We are upgrading the shopping cart and the new one comes with an Automatic HTML generation for the product pages however names the pages according to their ID number. We do have play on what directory we can put them in and what we name the pages so I chose

    www.worldfamousgiftbaskets.net/shopping/gift_baskets/gift_basketID#.htm

    www.worldfamousgiftbaskets.net/shopping - This page is mandatory

    The controls way at the bottom of the page is were put there on purpose. When this website was first built (The initial website was not built by me) it was built with HTML pages that you could not have products on that were merely for the search engines... and there was no way to get into the shopping cart except for one button that you could not tell was a link. People could not get off of these pages... it was horrible. Well, since we already had the pages, we kept them. Now we don't care, as a matter of fact, we don't want people to click on those links... hence why they are first in the code but located way at the bottom of the screen out of site of anyone witha small monitor and say General Information Only.

    Now, I have <h1> tags on there currently witht he keywords in there that are resized with CSS. How many <h2> tags would you say to put up there?

    I have CSS formatting all of the tables and all of the other everything else however I was unaware that it could do anything else other than formatting.... I am not sure how to write tables in CSS but I guess I will learn really quick.

    We currently have some odd 300 or 400 backlinks but most of them do not have enough page rank ont hem to show up within google... only the 9 that you see.... I have already started going to the competitors listings to see if I can get on those pages...... working on it :)

    Good idea with the gifts by price.... I have spoken with the people on this and we are working on incorporating this. You gave me another idea that would work.... With this cart I can make it so we can add to cart from anywhere.... from any website, pdf file, or HTML page.... how does this sound. I will manually create the pages for the shop by price and we will place our gift baskets into that category with the price increments that we have.

    I very much appreciate all of your comments and will get those things done. Thank you for not holding back or did you? lol
     
    ProductivePC, Jun 9, 2004 IP
  8. mnemtsas

    mnemtsas Super Dud

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    #8
    I'm no expert but one opinion on <h1> <h2> tags is to drop your primary keyword/phrase in the <h1> tag and your other 2-3 targetted keyword/phrases into <h2> tags. Dont forget that Google might give some weighting to <b> around key words or even <i> in the normal body text. Don't go silly with <b> or <i> because it probably looks funny and might be considered spamming.

    Mark
     
    mnemtsas, Jun 9, 2004 IP
  9. Pablo Peillard

    Pablo Peillard Peon

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    #9
    I think that it is too purple, and you should make it more web 2.0 (flash, css, moving, shiny things)
     
    Pablo Peillard, Jul 22, 2010 IP
  10. MTT-Strategy.com

    MTT-Strategy.com Greenhorn

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    #10
    Whats world famous about them? lol Like the site tho
     
    MTT-Strategy.com, Sep 10, 2010 IP