My friend has this online toy store. It has a fair number of inbound links, but he's getting very little traffic from Google. It's doing OK in MSN and Yahoo, but despite significant endeavours, it is not getting anything like prominent listings in Google.
The site has been created with Netojbects fusion.
What advice would you give please to help it get listed in Google? Don't hesitate to criticise if you feel that something is being wrong - that is the only way we will learn.
Many thanks 
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andy206uk posted this at 21:25—14th October 2006.
He has: 1,742 posts
Joined: Jul 2002
Problem #1 - code bloat.
Net objects fusion creates REALLY bloated code. Menus that can be done with simple css and lists are done with MASSES of over the top code and images are used when text will do for the job! Take this for example:
<TR VALIGN=TOP ALIGN=LEFT><TD WIDTH=105 HEIGHT=26><A HREF="./index.html" style="cursor:hand; text-decoration:none;" onMouseOver="F_loadRollover('NavigationButton1','',0);F_roll('NavigationButton1',1)" onMouseOut="F_roll('NavigationButton1',0)"><IMG ID="NavigationButton1" NAME="NavigationButton1" HEIGHT=26 WIDTH=105 SRC="./assets/images/autogen/Home_Hbutton_white.gif" onLoad="F_loadRollover</TD>
</TR>
'
This should look more like (obviously, with some external css for styling):
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>'Thats for one menu item (just one of many examples of bloated code) - and it's located before the page content in the code. It's no wonder that Google is having problems spidering the page - it has to read through all that crap before it gets to the good stuff.
Personally, if your friend wants to do better, a redesign using a modern css/xhtml approach and ditching netobjects fusion would help. Dreamweaver might be more expensive, but it's code output is much better (plus it could be templated so he can only edit specific areas).
Andyk
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Busy posted this at 21:34—14th October 2006.
He has: 6,148 posts
Joined: May 2001
page wise: the links down the side could be done with CSS (more text keywords for spider), the font could be a lot bigger, in firefox it is tiny (as small as copyright notice), not sure if search engines look at font sizing but if they do could be seen as hidden words. All the pages are in a folder called html, this makes the url longer but the word html should be a keyword related to your content if used (not recommend), short urls are what folks want.
code wise:
the TITLE tag is way to long and spammy
no C drive on the net
those 3 would scare me away if I was a search engine
lots and lots of tables, maybe run the site thru html tidy
<?bhb if(broken){ echo("It wasn't me
"); } ?>
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