A friend of mine wants the site below improving, as it is just a ecommerce site it is a lot harder to improve on the seo side of things. What I want to know or confirm, would it not be better for me to build a site them point to the shopping cart through this? Also I was thinking of telling him to get a new domain to include the word catering as this is what his business is, so maybe www.hilkscatering.co.uk, any advice would be welcomed. http://www.hilks.co.uk/ Paul
I do SEO work this site is using frames. you will find this very very difficult to promote through search engines. redesign using css and html or possibly even a CMS such as Joomla or Drupal I use joomla for ecommerce sites as it is very easy to administer and you can get plugin components which will give you search engine friendly url's from long url strings with lots of parameteres. in terms of the actual url of the site i dont kjnow if you really need to have the word catering in the domain name. having www.domain.com/catering should give a good idea. ensure you use the keywords in the title where possible and just make the site easy to use. I would imagine this site will rely on conventional advertising aswell as online so concentrate on a good easy to use site and then create backlinks gradually with good anchor text. there are a few good directory submission people and link builders here on dp give them a try when you have the site up and running.
Thanks Turbosatan, So would you suggest me building a site with a new domain and point to this just as a shopping cart or work with this site? I have decent seo knowledge, but need to build from scratch rather than try and work with an ecommerce site and not sure I could do as suggested above. I may try and build the site and incorperate a shopping cart myself, otherwise it means buying a seperate domain. Thanks for taking the time to reply. Paul
Are you asking if it would be better to buy another domain name with catering in the title($), buy webspace that links to that domain name($), design a site on that space, and then link to the site already setup? And the 'alternative' is to say create a directory on the existing site called catering (free?) upload a drupal/jommia package to that directory (free?), design the content of the page in the directory and point to the shopping cart? If the existing directory and site can hold the space needed and you can easily work with it. I would try that first. If you want to buy the domain name and point it to the same site then at least it will be less $ive then buying a whole new space (which is still somewhat cheap anyway I guess) I agree with turbosatan, and if you can use what you got to get there (less $) all the better. INMHO
Good advice and something to think about there. I have not been building long, so all different pieces of advice are welcome.
There is no need to have two separate sites sitting on two domains but restructuring the site may well be sensible.