The Grinch Who Stole "Christmas"!

I want to steal Christmas. I already have a site, Christmas-search.com. It's got a good amount of content and cached pages. I am pretty close to having the site redesigned and more focused around adsense and a lot more "worthy".

I originally created the website for a colaborative effort to take christmas with fellow members here. After about a week the cool factor wore off and now I must do it alone.

My main goal is to get in the top 20 by this Christmas and Top 5 by Christmas 2006. Very attainable goals I think.

I really am dying for some "HIGHLY CRITICAL" insight, so let me know how you feel.

I also can't escape the fact that I am trying to steal Christmas. I guess I am that cliche EVIL character bent on comericallizing the biggest holiday!! MWA HA HA!

 

Just some quick thoughts Bling.

I don´t know if it just me today but your site took a while to load on DSL... also it feels way too commercial and not Christmassy to me. I don´t think you need to have baubles, holly and Rudolph´s glowing nose everywhere but think a redesign to lighten it up would be a good idea.

What about your page titles? Just Christmas- Search won´t do it. You need to do some Chrissy keyword research and weave the best phrases into your titles, body content, headers and all that.

You´ve got a spelling mistook on the first page. even - not event.

 

You're going to have to fight Dominic for it, that is if he still has his Christmas page

EDIT: Ok I had a look at your page, and I will write out some of my comments shortly. BTW, You are up against some competition almost 60M SERPs in Google for Christmas.

 

I am moving away from this Mambo CMS. If you redirect www.christmas-search.com to 70.84.171.107 (like through your hosts file) you can see the new site. The new one is going to use DotNetNuke, so it will be be much easier to change the titles and headers. Too bad real-life is causing me so much work lately. I would have already finished this if it wasn't.

 

There, it should be now pointing to the newer site.

Please hit me with your comments, ESPECIALLY the bad ones.

 

In safari the images dont align with the adsese at the bottom, its very green - maybe add another color, some content and pics would be good too.. maybe some xmas lights/ reindeer etc..


Personally, im not a fan of drop down menus..

 

I don´t like the green - too peelly-wally. Check your spelling as I spotted I couple of gremlins in there - cupoples instead of couples and who´s instead of whose for example.

You´ll have a better chance of stealing Christmas if you work a bit more on your titles too. The Anise Cookies could be Christmas tree cookies - anise. There is a ton of free Christmas content out there. I am pos. 1 & 2 for Canarian Christmas for example and that is content reprinted by permission a couple of years ago. You should find it easy to really fill out your content making sure that every page has an appropriate title.

It all seems a bit sparse at the moment but there is plenty of stuff out there that you can use to fill it out.

 

I like the site nav and contents, but it needs bright images and pics to draw people into the site.

Christmas has 2 very strong connations
1) Family
2) Children/toys etc


For adults, its the family aspect and shopping for the kids-- for the kids, well its all about the toys!

You should try to figure out which angle you want to approach, and design towards that end.

My 2 cents, and good luck!

 

Just saw this thread in my CP. Good to see you are improving the site. Is your angle Adsense? If you wanted to promote more affiliate stuff, I would reccommend having some more graphics on the front page. Sort of a repetition of the top menu. Have recipies with a pic of a steaming pumpkin pie and a featured recipie. Have acoouple of pix for reccommended gifts for dad (circular saw, palm), mom (paint set, curtains) gramma (pointsettia) ... etc. Spice up the page some more. You ever seen teh magazine Country sampler? I'd suggest making look somethign like that. Good luck, just my ideas.

 

Great Ideas, you seem the type that is never at a loss for content!

 

I have way more ideas than I could ever have time to think about implementing

 

I haven't done an awful amount with this site after transitioning to it DotNetNuke. However, when I search Yahoo for Christmas, this site is listed as number 4. This is very unexpected but when I use DP's keyword ranker, it doesn't even appear in the top 200.

Anybody else see this site in the 4th position?

 

Yep I see it as #4 too.

 

I see it at #3.

(I'm in Chicago)

 

Good luck optimizing for "Christmas" - just try not to bump me down too far for christmas lights ;-)