I've had this site for almost 2 years now, and I've only recently began to put a lot of time and effort into making it worthwhile. Its an SBI site, and for the record while I think its very easy to use (Site Build It that is), its very limited in what it can do and I think I'm outgrowing it and ready to move on to something more advanced. Originally it was about 15-20 pages of articles but I added tabs, and reviews to try to get traffic from other sources. Now its about 72 pages, and getting to be pretty tedious to update. Anyway enough babbling...feedback appreciated. Chris
In your description meta tag you have a word in quotes. I thinkg that will keep the whole metatag from being picked up. No quotes inside of quotes. Also the code seems a little 'thick' in that you have some empty tags and such. But that might be a result of that SBI thing you say you are using. Appearance wise, you might want to left align your nav menu - also, suggest going with a straight text nav rather than images - no anchor text with images and most search engines look for anchor text. I like the idea of your directory, but I found it confusing. I had to look at it a second and read a bit before I knew what it was. And it was only by intuition that I figured out the number represents the links in that category. Overall a nicely content-rich site that ought to genreate some traffic. Add a review or two a week and you ought to be doing pretty good just on AdSense alone. Anyway you can affiliate witha store that sells the gear? When I look at a guitar review, I don't see a lik that says 'and you can buy one here!" You might want to make the review a little mroe expansive as well - they seem more like mini reviews. If you can entice someone all the way to the review, give them some meat to chew on and a place to order more from
GuyFromChicago, I had that site map on my home page to see if I could get all those pages to have a PR 4 so they would show up as backlinks. This didn't seem to work so I decided to have the tier 2 pages on a site map page. iShopHq, thanks for the feedback. SBI is somewhat limiting in what you can do with it as far as layout for their generic templates goes. And I definately need to redo the directory, its turned into a mess. The reviews are usually small b/c they are submitted by users (and some by myself) so I don't really have any control over what they submit, but for the most part relevant ads show up on the pages that have reviews. There are affiliate programs, but they don't usually pay that much and don't convert that well. Unless I do a super-indepth review for a new product I don't really see that happening. But the ads usually do well and the CTR is high on those pages so I think I'm going to keep it the way it is.