jackson992 — Mon, 27 May 2002 02:28:01 +0000

thx everyone for the replies. Yes it is a sale site and all items are from affiliates that I sell for them and get a commission from. I will think about the banner ads as I thought they highlighted the centered items on the respective pages. I am terrible with keyword and description tags, the ones that are there now were already there with the program I used to set up the initial page so I will have to work on this. I'm not really sure what I should do about content as this is a sales site. I can't really see musch point in there being a lot of text? About linking...I would love to link to other sites but am not sure how to add the coding as the links page is a pl file in the CGI directory and I know nothing about CGI.

Thx again everyone!

pennyshares — Sun, 26 May 2002 18:23:52 +0000

Well think about the keywords people use most to search for sales sites, and name your site after those keywords. That is the simplest I have discovered.

The Webmistress — Sun, 26 May 2002 10:05:04 +0000

As said above you definitely need to work on a layout & design and make it more appealing as right now it looks kind of thrown together and a logo will help with this for a start.

As for getting indexed by Google you really need to work on the things that Google likes:
content - the site doesn't really have any as most of it is images with links off the site
Title - should be descriptive and contain your keywords, maximum of 7 words

Meta description - again should be descriptive, contain keywords and can be fairly lengthy. "I sell stuff that is pretty cool." really isn't going to work and wouldn't entice people to click on your listing as this is what is often used as the search engine listing. Besides it's not your stuff you are selling!

Linking: Google and many others now place great importance on links into your site so you need to spend time working on getting other sites to link to you and this also includes other directories.

Heading - try to get a H1 at the top of the page, again it only needs to be a few words but make them your keywords for that page and you can always control the appearance of the tag with the stylesheet.

Busy — Sun, 26 May 2002 02:50:19 +0000

Welcome jackson992
The layout type Mairving mentioned is something liketable layout but with footer which could be another table or text.

disaster-master — Sat, 25 May 2002 22:31:19 +0000

I agree with Mairving on what your layout needs.

Just a few other things....mostly going to be my personal opionions but all of those adds are very annoying and the content of your site seems to be buried under them. It is a little confusing trying to distinguish what is yours and what is just a add. Actually, it doesn't seem that you offer anything that can't be found on Amazon. Are you going to have your own content to sell or will all the items you offer be from other companies?

You should get rid of the black background on your rollovers...especially the ones on and under your images.

Also, I am not positive and someone else might can help here but all of those banners may be holding you back with google as well as the lack of unique content on your site.

Keep working at it. Good luck!

jackson992 — Sat, 25 May 2002 21:20:13 +0000

thx mark. I did know about reviewing 3 other sites and just happened to post this before I posted my reviews of other sites lol

I did indeed have a logo before but everyone said it was too big, so i scrapped it and just added a big text link. What exactly is a header and a left navbar? Isn't the left navbar the thing I have with my links going down?

Thx in advance

mairving — Sat, 25 May 2002 21:06:37 +0000

Jack, welcome to Webmaster Forums. We like for new members who want the site reviewed to help us out by reviewing 3 other sites here at WMF. It is not a requirement, just a request to return the favor.

Don't worry about Google indexing your site. In the past they have been quite quick. Lately though they have been fairly slow.

The site could use a little work to make it better and more memorable. First, you really should have a logo. It doesn't have to be anything tremendous, but it should be something that brands your site well. Then, you should reconsider your page layout. IMO it is somewhat disorganized. For a site of this type, I would recommend that you have a logo, as prev. mentioned, a header, a left navbar (menu) and a footer. Every category link should be on a separate line. I would space them out a little more and enlarge the type to make them more readable. The footer should contain stuff like your privacy policy, about you, contact, etc.

I' ll try to review more later.