“Hi.

I bumped into the very friendly Elaine Forth during my recent day out at ThinkVisibilty in Leeds. During a quick chat I explained my teething troubles with my first affiliate site and she recommended I get in touch, so here goes…

www.simplychildsavings.co.uk is my entry into the affiliate marketing arena. It’s 5 months old and full of original unique content for parents looking to save cash for their little ones.

I’m a Dad myself and experienced in financial services so I’ve designed a site that I think is genuinely unique.

The problem is Google doesn’t agree.

Yahoo seems to like me a lot. I’m on the first page for keywords such as ‘children’s savings’ and ‘compare child trust funds’, but my only success with Google seems to be scattered longtail keyphrases.

So, can you help? Have I been penalised for some basic blunder (I submitted my site for reconsideration which has been apparently done) . The site is built using Wordpress – is there something I’m doing fundamentally wrong?

I recognise I’ve only got a handful of backlinks but Yahoo doesn’t seem to mind. Is Google so dependent on links that it doesn’t care about content?

Thanks

Simon Westwell”

Kier

Hi Simon.

Google cares a lot about links. I’m unsure from your question exactly what the problem you have is, your site seems to show up in Google. If you mean you aren’t ranking well then yes build more links! That’s the reality of things. Thankfully as you have lots of good content, if you make the time to build the links then you should do well. I would advise making your title tags a bit more focused though, choose on keyword/phrase for each and then put variations of it in the <h> tags. This will give more power to those that you choose. Unfortunately, finance is a very competitive area though so you may find this a tough niche. I’d advise to keep working on this steadily over time, don’t get too despondent if things don’t kick off straight away. Get some other sites on the boil but keep at it. If you know your stuff and the content is good, then with time and links you should be able to make a decent bit off the site.

Lammo

It’s a refreshing change to see someone starting a site that they actually have an interest in.. so many people chase the money and start a site about credit cards or poker tips, and then end up abandoning it after 3 weeks because they’re sick to death of writing about the subject matter. Myself and my fellow Doctors are always saying “do a site you’re passionate about”, so it’s good to see someone doing that already.

I certainly don’t profess to be an SEO expert (a quick glance at the search results for most of my sites will confirm this!), but I doubt very much that you’ve done anything wrong as such to annoy Google – they certainly have around 65 pages indexed for your site, so you’re not blacklisted!

I feel your pain though.. I launched a site two years ago now.. and religously added content every single day for nearly 6 months.. at which point Google was sending me the grand sum of 20 visitors a day.. I was convinced that I’d done something wrong, and even had some SEO guys check out the source code for me.. all was fine. So I kept on adding content and (most importantly IMO) building links. After around 8/9 months, almost as though someone at Google had flicked a switch, I started to see rankings and traffic. After two years, I’m still adding content and building links on a regular basis and have some very tasty positions in the search results, all of which I would put down to not giving up when it seemed Google was ignoring my site!

Are you motivated enough to keep adding content to this site for another 6-9 months before Google pays you any attention? Since you submitted your site for review, the new Coalition Government has been elected and announced that Child Trust Funds are to be abolished. Yet despite that news happening over a month ago, I could see no mention of that on your site? you don’t have “Trust fund” in the domain name, so this news hasn’t killed your site, far from it.. Now that CTF’s are to be no more, many parents will want to know what the alternatives are. You have this page which I would update with a very detailed article looking at the range of options open now that CTF is no more. Then I’d PPC that page for terms like “child trust fund alternatives”, “child trust fund changes”, “child trust fund 2011” etc, to build up not only potential visitors and revenue, but also natural links to your site. Become a source of information in a market that has a lot of uninformed people, and you should succeed. The worst thing you can do is nothing.

Tim wrote in to ask for some pointers on his new gadget review site – gadgetopinions.co.uk.

“Hi Guys.

I would like to submit my new website for surgery consideration.

Any advice would be appreciated since I am still deciding which direction to go in with the site. I’m trying to decide whether or not I should cover mainstream gadgets, or whether I should put my focus onto hi-tech, “long-tail” gadgets.

Thanks, Tim.”

Here’s what Jay and Clarke had to say …

Jay

Strategy

My recommendation to you would be to continue providing the reviews you are doing, but also to develop slightly more niche reviews to build up your website. This would have the benefit of developing a USP, ensuring that people come to your site for those specialist reviews. You should strive to ensure that reviews are as timely as possible too, reacting to new product launches or events to ensure that you are seen as up-to-date – something that is very important in the gadget world.

You should really try to keep updating the site as frequently as you can. This will ensure that you always have fresh content. I’d recommend outsourcing if you cannot do this yourself. The more relevant, fresh content, the better for both user experience and for search engines.

Content

I noticed that you also have a section named ‘gadget guides’ which could be a great way to get content on the site that would draw in visitors and act as link bait. If these were comprehensive and kept up to date (think about automating or outsourcing the content if needs be), then they could really support your site’s content. However, it’s important to note that visitors searching for ‘guides’ probably already own mobile phones, and so they probably won’t be looking to purchase anything. Unless of course the guides showed that accessories were the way forward, but these are low value. Lots of pros and cons to this strategy! But the guides could always include Adsense or display ads.

You should also ensure that all pages are highly targeted though contextual ads / other content to make sure that users have the best possible experience. So when someone visits for a particular review, the ads on that page should be as relevant as possible. The large display ad you have in the top of the side bar is often distracting through animation and not very well related. Another idea is to make use of features such as links to related posts (Wordpress has the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin that works wonders), show tweets that talk about that content or any other related content, whether it is on your site or from another social site.

SEO

Taking a step back and looking at the site from a different – SEO – angle, I would highly recommend that you identify your core keywords, then your ‘secondary’ keywords and so on. These will be different according to each page, but will help guide the structure of the site and the content. For example, one of the core keywords for your home page is ‘gadget reviews’. Other core keywords for rest the site would be categories such as ‘laptop reviews’ or ‘mobile phone reviews’ or ‘mobile phone user guides’ and so on. All of these core keywords should really form the main navigation on the site, dictating the core directories and ‘hubs’ for the reviews etc.

For the review pages, the keywords they should be targeting would include the make and model of the gadget followed by ‘review’, such as ‘Dell Inspiron 1525 review”, but you may want to do some research using the Google Keyword Tool for example, to see which keywords have the most traffic but least competition, and compare these numbers to your existing highest converting keywords on the site.

SEO ‘quick wins’

Browsing the site, there are a few ‘quick wins’ you could fix before even getting to the site structure and content stage which include ensuring that you promote the most important headings on pages, and demote those that are less important. For example, some review pages have an empty <H2> heading tag. Why not structure your review so that the main heading includes the core keywords (probably the make and model plus the word ‘review’), and then have subheadings with some keyword variation to break up the text which would make the reviews easy and attractive to read.

The page <titles> should also include the core keyword for each page first, followed by keyword variations or a succinct description.

Location-based targeting

I noticed that in some instances you are using adding ‘UK’ to some page <titles> for example. I’m not convinced that the content you are offering is location dependent. The content is actually fairly universal. If you wish to narrow down your targeting to just a UK audience, for example for your affiliate programs, then in addition to your .co.uk domain name, you should consider getting UK-based web hosting and adding location centric content such as shop locations and shop reviews or price/service comparisons to strengthen this targeting. Comparing shops (such as John Lewis, Currys, Amazon UK) would narrow down your target audience naturally, as not all these shops are available internationally.

Clarke

Hi Tim.

Firstly, get rid of the Google Advert Banner across the middle top of your site, I feel it’s a huge turn off if it’s the first and main thing you see, however feel free to add it down the bottom of the site. You already have a Google Ads on the top right square box and you really don’t need much more than that as the initial thing users see.

The reviews are not very inspiring, one paragraph of text and no images, flesh it out with an image of what you’re talking about.

Get some kind of directory structure in your main url paths (I see you have a directory but it’s separate from the actual product urls) and start to build up different sections to your site. As it stands you have all the products in their own directory, whereas if I was on site looking at mobile or laptop reviews, I would expect to click down and read other reviews.

You can’t click on any of the reviews to go to a site selling them or a manufacture site, I take it your plan is to add Affiliate links later, if not and it’s just about showing Google Adverts, then I can’t see this ever working at any great scale, but if that’s the case then bear minimum to expect is to see a row of Google AdSense adverts after the review.

By the way, you also need to update your Wordpress version and the plugins you’re using.  By not keeping up-to-date with the latest Wordpress versions and plugins, you put your site at risk and you also miss out on improvements to the code.

Editor’s Note

Hi Tim.

Thanks for sending in your site for review and hope that Jay and Clarke have given you some ideas on what to do. The gadget sector is definitely a tough one to tackle with the amount of competition and high quality sites that are out there. Having said that, Kirsty’s post on niche selection yesterday was an interesting read, so check that out as well. One of the points relevant to your case was not letting pre-conceptions prevent you from entering a niche that you think is over saturated: “Choose a small area and don’t take on the big boys, but don’t be put off by a little competition either” … best of luck.

“I’m completely stumped as to why my site isn’t making any conversions and I wondered if you guys would mind having a look to see if there’s anything I’m missing.

Website address – http://www.digioutput.co.uk/

The site is a PPC comparison site that (at the time of writing) has only been live for about a week, so I’m quite happy to sit on this for a little while as it’s not costing me all that much. However, I’m mystified as to why I’m not making any conversions.

Over the past week I’ve had 18,500 impressions, and out of that I’ve had 309 clicks (CTR 1.66% – not great, but not disastrous) and out of those 309 clicks I’ve made precisely 0 sales (and I’ve checked the links are working as they should be)!!

I’m reasonably sure my site isn’t crap as I have analytics running on it and it says my bounce rate is reasonably low – 34%, and the average time on site is actually quite high at 2min 46secs. On average each user looks at 5.35 pages and I have almost 90% new visitors … so I just can’t figure out what my problem is? I’ve been creating new content by writing news articles and adding additional pages, but since the site is only a week old, I guess all the content is pretty new.

I know the site’s only been live for a week, but I’m clearly attracting custom to it, but absolutely no one is generating any sales. I’m desperate for some help please Affiliate Doctors, this is driving me up the wall, there must be a solution! Have I just signed up to rubbish merchants?

Very much looking forward to your reply.

Mark”

Here’s what Mark, Elaine and Dan had to say …

Mark Boyd

Hi Mark, thanks for submitting your site to the doctors, I’ve got a few points which will hopefully help you increase your sales figures.

PRICE COMPARISON

The first thing that strikes me when looking at the product pages, is the lack of “price comparison”. Take a look @ http://www.digioutput.co.uk/product/3/Micro1112%20DAB/Goodmans-Micro1112-Dab.html for example, it shows the price from Bennetts, which may well be the best price, but how does your visitor know that unless you show them? You should bear in mind it’s not always about price, there are other factors that come into play when buying online, such as the consumers previous dealings with the company, returns policys, p&p costs etc.. So if I were you, I’d focus on adding as many prices to each product page as possible. You appear to be using ECU, so this should be relatively easy for you.
 
BUY NOW BUTTONS

I’d also have a look at some of the other buy now buttons that ECU have on offer, I personally prefer the buttons like http://www.easycontentunits.com/images/r-sn.png and I’ve found with a bit of A-B testing that they convert visitors to clickers very well! So, maybe give different buttons and colours of buttons a try and find out what works for you.

(buttons updated since review)

CONTENT

Not only does content help to improve your organic listings, it helps give the reader an idea of the quality of the site. If you’ve taken the time to handwrite 100’s of articles for the site, this hard work will be transferred to the consumer in terms of their perceived trust of the site. Again, looking at the Goodmans example, I’d immediately click away from that page and find a site that had taken the time to write a description.

I believe if you focus on those three things, getting them perfected, you’ll see an increase in your sales.

Best of luck!

Elaine

I’ve had quite a good look round your site, Mark, and there’s a ton of stuff you can fix, which will hopefully increase your sales.

1. Why all the review this, review that – I might want to send in a review after I’ve bought something, but not before – I do find it off putting.

2. At first glance it doesn’t  look like a price comparison site – I would expect 1 image and description and then a choice of merchants – it took me a while to detect that some of the products were actually the same – lots of images are missing which makes  it quite confusing.

3. The product images are quite small – I have found that the best converting sites have large images – so you can see exactly what you’re buying.

4. I’d prefer better descriptions or bullet points on the first page rather than have to click through all the products to discover the type I’m looking for – e.g.  I like a few preset buttons so I don’t have to keep retuning.

5. On the home page I’d put the best selling products at the top, with better images and descriptions and keep the blurb at the bottom or remove it.

6. The Digital Coverage page is a tad sparse, the link to the BBC site doesn’t work and the map doesn’t tell my anything!

7. The Radio Stations page is, again, a tad sparse, and the BBC link goes through to the wrong page, so I can’t find out which stations I can receive!

8. And the Why Dab page appears to be in Arabic!

To summarise – I’d spend a while cleaning up the site and providing good quality information without relying on third party sites – or at least ensure the links direct properly. Get rid of the request for reviews and the Add to my saved list – I can’t see that they serve a purpose.  Ensure all the images are available, make them bigger and produce better descriptions.

At the moment it doesn’t look very professional and instill confidence to buy, but with a bit of work I’m sure you’ll get there.

Dan

hi, Mark, how are you?

I like the niche (dab radios). And it looks like you’re using affilistore, which is an ok affiliate price comparison platform. I think there are a few things you could do to improve things if you’re willing to stick with it.

Here are some ideas:

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

1. The first introduction to the theme of the site (DAB radios) is 700 pixels down the homepage. I’d put that right up top, e.g. changing your tagline “doing the searching so you don’t have to” to “We’ve found the best DAB Radios so you don’t have to”.

2. The homepage is largely taken up by a single graphic, which doesn’t really lead anywhere. I’d switch that to a smaller graphic, and link it through to the product page of the particular radio.

3. Product recommendations from 3 different sources are then crammed into a messy area at the bottom of the homepage (from amazon, an affiliate window content unit, and an affilistore content unit). I’d clean that area up & focus on one unit at a time. Figure out which works the best & stick with that until things are working.

4. A simple fix to your search box would be to change the text to ‘Search for DAB Radios here…’ instead of just ‘Search for products here…’

DEAD ENDS

The site is full of little dead ends. An easy way to get rid of these is to click through it asking yourself the question “if I was a visitor, would clicking that link have moved me closer to a purchase, or closer to abandoning the site?”

Here are 2 examples:

1. The top navigation is a series of 4 dead ends. Once a visitor clicks on any one of them, they are presented with a page that takes them away from purchasing anything, rather than toward it.

2. If you’re happy dabbling with the affilistore code, you may want to remove the ‘+ Add to my saved list’ and ‘Review this store’ and ‘Review this product’ links from category pages. These are red herrings that visitors won’t use, at the same time if anyone does click on them, the resulting pages are quite confusing.

PRODUCT SELECTION

On a site like this, the primary function is to help visitors move toward a product selection, and then to click through to the merchant site. Here are a few observations on how you could improve that:

1. The product selection is very broad. There are 17 categories, only 2 of them devoted to the products you’re trying to sell. (and those are buried in positions 15 & 16).

2. In your 2 target categories (‘Portable Radios’ & ‘Radios’), there are 900 products. It’s very difficult to dig through these and, other than brand and price, no reason to click on any one of them. The default sorting seems to be ‘low price to high’, meaning visitors are presented with really cheap radios & left to find anything decent themselves.

3. Your Brand categories are alphabetical, but crammed together with no line breaks. I’d separate those to 1 per line and add the words ‘DAB Radios’ to the end of each (‘Cowon DAB Radios’ rather than just ‘Cowon’ for example). That will look repetitive, but is more helpful to someone landing on the page for the first time, and better for search engine rankings.

COMPARISON PAGES

The pages that should convert for you are your individual product pages (comparing the price of an individual product at various merchants). Here’s an example page & some thoughts:

http://www.digioutput.co.uk/product/7/16893/Pure-One-Mini-Black.html

1. The first ‘add to cart’ button on your product pages is *way* down the page. (off screen if you’re browsing on my laptop – in fact the first price is off the screen).

2. The top product is the one you’re trying to get the visitor to click through on, yet there’s nothing to indicate that. Putting it in a box with ‘Our Recommendation’ (or similar) is a very easy way to present them with a logical next click.

3. The alternate products are presented as ’similar products’

4. While I like affilistore, I think you have to spell out to visitors what’s going on with each page. On the product page. Heading a product page up with “We’ve found 8 products that match ‘Magicbox Dab Kitchen Radio’ – check out our recommendations below” helps them understand what’s going on.

PATIENCE

Finally, I think perhaps the biggest problem with the site was patience. It looks like you gave up on the site a little early. There are 5 or 6 news items & then it’s been abandoned. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as perhaps you found something more successful & put your efforts into that – but I’d have given it a bit more time & think you could still make it work pretty easily.

I hope that helps – good luck!

“My problem is that I’m pretty good at SEO, but I suck at affiliate marketing, and my site is a prime example.

At the time of writing, it is 4th or 5th in Google in an excellent niche, but I’m just not converting any of the site visitors into sales.  I get the odd adsense click, but no insurance conversions at all.

Can you tell me where I’m going wrong please?

I’ve ended up replicating this problem across other sites, which although some of them get good visitor levels, they have very poor sales.

I just can’t understand what I’m doing wrong.  Surely in the insurance market, I should be coining it in

Thanks.

Dave.”

Here’s what Lammo and Elaine had to say:

Lammo

Hi Dave.

I think the key issue you need to look at is what do your users want/expect to see on your site?

Put yourself in their shoes – you’ve arrived via a search for “insurance groups” on a site called “Insurance Groups” with the URL “insurancegroups.org.uk” – these people don’t want to know what insurance companies you recommend – they want to know what insurance group their car (or more likely a car they are thinking of buying) falls into. As far as I can see, you’re not providing them with that information, so most of them are heading back to Google (apart from a few who might click on an Adsense link that has the headline “Insurance Groups”) and you’ve lost the chance of a sale.

Now have a look at how GoCompare aim to convert those same users. They provide all the info the users are looking for, but also put a friendly (yet prominent) single call to action above the info:

“If you already own your car, or know which insurance group it falls under then why not compare car insurance quotes now? Otherwise, just choose a manufacturer (below) to check insurance groups by model” on the main landing page for the term “Insurance Groups”.

They then change this message to suit the user once they drill down to the car they are looking to buy. Once they’ve found out that their dream Porsche 911 is in Insurance Group 20, the next question they want to know is “ok, so how much is that gonna cost me” – look at the call to action now:

“Use our free car insurance comparison tool to find the best policy for your Porsche 911. Compare Porsche 911 car insurance quotes now.”

Now, as an affiliate you could add a second call to action here if you wish (I wouldn’t advise adding too many or you’ll mix the message and lose the sales) along the lines of “Looking to spread the payments on your Porsche 911? Click here to compare unsecured loan rates too”.

Above all else, don’t make the page too confusing, and give your users what they want!

Elaine

Hi Dave, sorry, but the site doesn’t immediately instill confidence – there are too many Google ads high on the page – I would place them at the bottom.

There is no explanation as to why you’re recommending the various insurance companies, and the first one links to the Buyat home page!

It’s a good idea to have a top tips section, but there’s way too much reading – bullet points, concise and to the point would be better.

You suggest using online comparison sites – and on the same page promote ‘The Shocking Truth about Insurance  Comparison Websites’!!

You also tell folk to check the cashback sites!

You need to give visitors a reason to click on YOUR links and not give them a chance to visit other sites first – they won’t return.

I’d tell the visitors why those companies are the best, and why they should use BeatThatQuote.com and check out your competitors sites – just to give you some ideas.

Good Luck.

“Hi Affiliate Doctors.

I’m having problems with my site FreshGrad.co.uk. I have slowly been improving my readership (but this still needs work). However with the visitors that I do get on my site, I’m not receiving any income through adsense or my other affiliate widget. No clicks at all.

Can you have a look at my website and give some tips on improving readership, SEO and conversion? I have considered adding a shop to the site.

Thanks

Santiago”

Mark

Hi Santiago.

It’s an interesting niche you are operating in. I’m actually graduating (fingers crossed) in July, so in theory I’m your target market! I’ve broken down my response into the three main areas you’ve asked for help on – Readership, SEO and Conversion.

Readership

Your site is in a particularly good niche in that it welcomes repeat visits; if a graduate visits your site and likes what they see, then there’s a good chance they’d also be interested in the content you publish in the future. You therefore have to make it very easy for them to find out about your future posts. At the moment I don’t think you are doing enough to encourage repeat visits. I’d suggest the following:

Twitter – If you don’t have a Twitter account, get signed up! @FreshGrad appears to be taken, but @FreshGradUK or similar would do fine. When used correctly, Twitter can be an excellent tool for identifying and communicating with potential visitors.  Use the Twitter search tool to find people who have recently graduated, or who are about to graduate. Just doing a search for tweeters mentioning “graduation” in July is bound to provide you with a huge list of potential visitors. Think outside the box about how you can get them onto your site and more importantly… telling their friends about your site. It would also be wise to include a feed of your tweets on your site and a big fat “Follow Me” button, so that all visitors to your site cannot leave your site without knowing you’re on Twitter.

Facebook – Create a Facebook fan page. It’s simple, free and effective if done correctly. To get it off the ground, you’re going to have ask as many of your graduate friends as you can to become a fan. Get your grovelling hat on.

Newsletter – One of the most simple and effective ways to get visitors back onto your site is to email them regularly to let them know what’s going on. Make it very easy for your visitors to subscribe:

- Add a form to your sidebar
- Add a form at the end of every post
- Add a checkbox to allow those who comment on your blog to subscribe

There are many free solutions out there. Off the top of my head MailChimp and CampaignMonitor are worth a look.

RSS Feed – At the moment you have a “Blog Feed” link on your nav bar. I personally feel that the majority of internet users haven’t got a clue what a blog feed actually is. On top of that, I would argue that the only ones who do know what a blog feed is know what the RSS logo signifies, so I’d scrap that from your menu and add a nice RSS logo to the header or nav bar of your site, possibly along with a Facebook and Twitter logo.  There are some nice social media icons available at Web Designer Ledger. This will tidy up the site a little but will still allow those looking for your RSS feed an easy way to find it.

Members – I see you have an option for the user to “Register”. To me it’s not apparently obvious why I would benefit from registering and therefore I wouldn’t spend time filling out the form. A strong member base adds value to a website, so it’s a great idea, however you need to have a reason for them to register. If you do currently have a good reason for a user to register, let them know it!

SEO

Analysing your site on the Yahoo Site Explorer I can see you have a very small number of incoming links. Think of each link to your site as a vote, the more votes you receive, the higher up the rankings your site will go. Your site can be optimised perfectly, but if you don’t receive incoming links you may never rank well enough to receive any decent amounts traffic. So, get cracking looking for some relevant links to your site.

Focussing on the on-site SEO of FreshGrad, I’d recommend changing the following:

Title Tags – At the moment, your title tags are not doing you any favours. Let’s take your Job Boards page; at the time of writing your page title is “Jobs Board”. Use your page titles to tell both Google and your user exactly what the page is about. Off the top of my head a more effective title would be something along the lines of “Graduate Recruitment Jobs Board – Find your perfect graduate job today”. This new title has the keywords “Graduate Recruitment” and “Graduate Job” included in it, which already is more relevant than “Jobs Board”. I would recommend sitting down and brainstorming for each page of your site to write relevant “juicy” titles. I can see that you have the All In One SEO Pack installed already, so it is very easy for you to write bespoke titles for each page of the site. In case you are unfamiliar with the Google Keyword Tool, it is a great tool for getting an idea of which keywords are worth targeting.

Heading Tags – Although heading tags don’t provide a great deal of weighting, every little helps. At the moment your H1 tag for your homepage is “FreshGrad.co.uk”. I would recommend changing this to incorporate your main keyword. This also goes for your H2 and H3 tags.

Content – I’m sure you’ll have heard this time and time again – “Content is King”. Well it’s true, the more content you add, the more Google will love you. Adding a post every few weeks won’t get you on Google’s Xmas card list. Add a few posts a day and you’ll get invited round for Christmas dinner! At the time of writing, you’ve not added a post to the site in over 3 months, this would immediately deter me from your site upon hitting your homepage. Keep adding fresh, relevant content and you’ll find your traffic gets a boost from the long-tail keywords you’ll find yourself ranking for.

I could go on for hours about various on-site changes that will improve your rankings and therefore traffic, but so as not to bore you all to death, here’s an excellent post from SEOmoz detailing the various ranking factors you should be aware of.

Conversion

I think the reason you’ve had no clicks thus far is because your affiliate widgets are not necessarily as relevant as they could be. Put yourself in the mind of one of your visitors. You are searching for a graduate recruitment opportunity and you find yourself on FreshGrad.co.uk. Now, what banner are you more likely to click; a banner about finding graduate jobs online or a banner about books on Amazon? Personally, I would be more likely to click on a banner about jobs than books because that’s the state of mind I am in. After all I am searching for graduate job opportunities. Therefore, I’d remove all of the Amazon widgets and focus on promoting recruitment opportunities. I can see that you currently have a couple of WorkCircle widgets. I’ve never heard of WorkCircle and I feel that having a recognised brand on your site would help your conversion. Having conducted a quick search, I believe the Monster.co.uk (a well known brand that advertises regularly on TV) program on Affiliate Window could do very well for you. It pays £2.50 for each “Job Seeker that successfully uploads a completed and valid CV”. Focus on diverting your traffic through to Monster and you could see a handsome return each month.

Finally, utilise your white space. You’ve got a juicy 468×60 banner space available on the right hand side of your header, a perfect place for a very eye catching Monster.co.uk banner.

Please note: Monster is the first program I came across that is worth promoting, I’m sure there are many more available!

Dan

Hi, Santiago, how are you?

Well, it’s sad to see it looks like you’ve given up on the site (at the time of writing, the last update to your site was 21st October). Nevertheless, I think there is something you could do with this site, and you may still be able to use it to make some money.

The main issue is that your niche is very broad, you’ve tried to write content to address that whole broad niche, and you just don’t have the time or resources to fill it.

Here’s what I might do before throwing in the towel:

TIP ONE: Ditch most of the ads

There are too many ads, most in the wrong places. There are currently 5 ads on the homepage, probably getting zero clicks each. That won’t get you many links and probably isn’t getting you any sales anyway.

TIP TWO: Flip your content around

Your strategy seems to have been to write any content you could that a graduate may read. Instead, I’d only create content that meets 2 criteria:

1) Articles a graduate would actively search for.
2) Articles that are related to products/services a graduate would buy.

For example, your latest 3 posts are:

• ”Speculative Applications – Successful Email Tips”
• ”Symantec hires using Facebook”
• ”Top Employers Optimistic for 2010″

I doubt any of those will get much search traffic and, if they do, there’s no indication that those visitors will buy. Instead I’d concentrate on articles like these:

• ”Graduate Accountancy Jobs: 5 Books To Get You There” (amazon links)
• ”Graduate Loans: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know” (affiliate links & adsense)
• ”Graduate MBAs: Top 50 MBA Schools” (adsense)

ie. look for products & services that a graduate would buy/search for; Turn that into content; Monetise the content with tighter ads.

(as a side-note, I’d avoid putting any dates on those articles – write them so that they’ll be relevant forever and don’t put a date on them).

TIP THREE: Email

If you do manage to turn the site around, this would be a great site to build an email list off the back of. If you could manage to bring in 1,000 visitors a day and turn 5% of them into email subscribers, you’d have a list of about 13,000 new graduate email addresses within a year.

Graduates appeal to many different type of advertisers and being able to talk to them, rather than relying on them coming to your site, could be really useful.

I hope something in there helps.

Dan.

Kier

Hi Santiago.

You seem to have some decent content on the site so far and it sounds like you’re getting at least some level of traffic. The main thing I think that would work well would be to lose the amazon ads down the side and maybe adsense too and instead focus on working affiliate text links to relevant products into your articles. This may be tricky given the subject matter of the blog but I’m sure there’s some relevant products you can push.

Editor’s Note

Hi Santiago.

Thanks again for sending in your site for review.  I see you’re using Wordpress at the moment (great choice), but I would seriously think about ditching the theme for something a lot smarter. There are oodles of professionally designed themes out there for a site like yours which ultimately needs to look the part.  We’re not talking a lot of money, in fact, you can pick up lots of decent themes for free.

Another key point is that I’m guessing you put the site together whilst at Uni (or shortly afterwards?), and if that’s the case, then it could pose a potential problem: unless you’re very interested and maintain awareness of the graduate recruitment scene, within about a year to two years tops, you are likely to lose interest in keeping it up-to-date with fresh, relevant content.  As Mark and Dan pointed out, it’s already been a while since you last updated the site. Why not have a think about how you can tap into some of the Universities and see if you can recruit some of the final year students/recent graduates to run some case studies etc..  Hope this helps and good luck with the site.

“My wordpress site www.proteinshake.org.uk targets the keywords protein shake/s, protein bars, protein powder.  The website converts ok, not great but not bad either.  Some merchants convert around 5% or so, but this varies alot.  Lately the site has only been getting around 13-15 unique visitors per day and it should be performing much better than this.

The site has a fair amount of content and used to rank well for the plural and singular, but roughly 2 months ago it only ranked for the keyword ‘protein shake’.  I feel it should be ranking for alot more terms and in a higher position.

The site has a PR of 2 and a few backlinks.  Very few of the backlinks are for the secondary and third keywords, the majority are for ‘protein shake’ or ‘protein shakes’.”

What I would like to know is why you think the site is under performing so much in the SERPS?

Thank you for taking the time to review my site ”

Here’s what Dan, Kier and Elaine had to say:

Dan

Hi, Richard, how are you?

Congratulations on the site – it’s a great niche and should bring you money for years to come!

Here are 3 quick tips that I think will help you:

TIP ONE: Tighten up your keyword/page targeting

Your homepage title tag right now is:

“Protein Shake | Protein Bars | Protein Shakes | Protein Powder – proteinshake.org.uk”

In other words, you’re trying to get the homepage to rank for:

• Protein Shake
• Protein Shakes
• Protein Bars
• Protein Powder

Instead, I’d reduce your homepage title tag to simply:

“Protein Shake | Protein Shakes – proteinshake.org.uk”

Here’s why I’d do that:

1) You rank really well for ‘Protein Shake’, but you could improve the rank for ‘Protein Shakes’.  Tightening the targeting of the homepage to focus on those 2 terms only could easily bump you up for ‘protein shakes’ (which seems to be the higher volume term).

2) You already have other pages on the site targeting ‘Protein Bars’ & ‘Protein Powder’ respectively.  Therefore, by targeting those with the homepage, you’ve got 2 pages fighting to try and rank for each term.  Stop targeting those terms from the homepage and make sure their individual pages work as landing pages for each term.

TIP TWO: Gather backlinks for your secondary terms

Once you’ve stopped trying to rank the homepage for your secondary terms, you can concentrate on building a few links direct to their pages, with relevant anchor text.  Concentrate on each as if it’s a homepage for the term.

TIP THREE: Use Your Competitors

Without being spammy… if I search for ‘Protein Shakes’, the 3 sites that rank above you right now are all user generated.  It feels like it would be very easy to put together a useful article ‘Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Protein Shakes’, and to post that – quite helpfully and honestly – to each of those forum threads.

It looks like the Yahoo one is now closed, but Google is placing the latest related Yahoo Answers directly underneath it.  It would be very easy to set up a google alert for any topics from Yahoo Answers, Mens Health Forums, or PP Online that mention ‘protein shakes’ and to post a link there if appropriate.

Incidentally – I notice Mens Health Forums also ranks first for ‘protein bars’ and the last post on the thread looks suspiciously like it’s been posted by someone from myprotein.co.uk.

I hope this is useful.

Good luck with it, Richard.

Dan

Kier

Hi Richard.

You’re ranking well for your main keywords but not so much for others.  Identify those that you want to be ranking well for (use Google’s keyword tool to see search volumes) and start working on it.  Add more pages of content optimised for those phrases and build links with them in the anchor text.  You know it’s worked well for your main phrase so repeat the process for others.

As you state yourself your back links are mainly with ‘protein shake’ as the anchor text rather than the others, you just need to rectify this by getting more links and building more relevant content.

Elaine

I’m not certain, but it could be a perceived keyword stuffing penalty and internal linking with the same anchor text – ‘protein’.  Google does seem to have taken a harsher stand against this recently and I’ve had to cull some of my keywords and think of different descriptions and synonyms – sometimes less is more at the moment.

Might be worth a try.

“I have just had my website re-designed and this went live last Friday.  Previous to that I had an off-the-shelf template website from EKM Powershop.  I must now wait for the SEO the designer has done as part of the new website to start working which I know can take several weeks.  However, I already had SEO in place on the previous website, but now when I check certain keywords in Google I’m appearing in some reasonable positions, but when clicking on them it says the web page is not available as obviously this is relating to the old website.  Is there anything that can be done?  It seems a shame to have actually gained some reasonable places by virtue of the SEO I did with EKM to now start at the beginning again.”

Dan

Hi, Janice, how are you?

I don’t think this is really an affiliate question, but here are some notes that I hope will help you.  I’m going to tackle it in 3 parts and I’m also going to assume that your domain name hasn’t changed.

Here are the 3 parts of my answer:

1) What you’d do if you were going to fix this problem
2) Why I wouldn’t bother in your case
3) What you should do instead!

WHAT YOU’D DO IF YOU WERE GOING TO FIX THE PROBLEM

The most straightforward fix would be to tell the search engines firstly that your pages have moved, and secondly where they’ve moved to.  The standard way of doing this is by using a ‘301 redirect’ for each page.

You’d generally do this using either ‘.htaccess’ or, in your case (as your site is database driven, on an apache server, with thousands of pages), a better option would be a ‘mod_rewrite’ rule.  Mod_rewrite is a little module that helps out your server, looking for certain formats of URL & translating them into your preferred format.  For example, if your old format was ‘/category/bathrooms’ and your new format is ‘/bathrooms.html’, you’d set up a rule to look for the word ‘/category…’ before mod_rewrite would work its magic, pass people to the correct pages, and notify everyone that this was a permanent change.  You’d do that rejigging your old style URLs to your new ones.

WHY I WOULDN’T BOTHER IN YOUR CASE

In your case though, it looks like the site only has a couple of links coming into it, and that all of the links are to your homepage anyway.  That’s good news, as it means there’s not a huge advantage to sorting out this problem with dead links (and so you need not worry about the complexities of mod_rewrite).

It’s bad news however, as inbound links are hugely important as far as search engines are concerned, and a lack of inbound links probably means you’re not getting very much traffic from search engines.

WHAT I’D DO INSTEAD OF FIXING YOUR URL ISSUE

Instead, I’d firstly start putting some effort into building links to the site, and secondly I’d fix some other little SEO issues on the site.

I won’t give you any linkbuilding tips here, as there are many ways to do that and it’s far removed from your question.  I do know that one of the other doctors has a very good linkbuilding service over at http://www.contentnow.co.uk/link-building.php though.

My gut instinct is that your new site could do with some big changes.  My gut instinct is often wrong though, so instead here are 3 quick on-site SEO Tips and 2 conversion tips:

1) Fix the Titles on your Category Pages

If you go to this page: http://www.divineinteriorsandgifts.com/Lamps_and_Lighting–c6.html, you’ll see that the page title is “Products: Divine Interiors and Gifts”.  There are hundreds of category pages on your site with that same title, all of which are very unlikely to rank anywhere in Google.  You should ask your web developer to fix those so that they’re relevant to the individual pages (in that case something like “Lamps and Lighting at Divine Interiors” – this could be automated for every page on the site with about 30 minutes work).  While they’re at it, it would be worth you asking them to put your page headings into ‘h1’ tags too.

2) Dot com or Dot co dot uk?

Google has latched onto your .com address, yet in your question you referenced the .co.uk address.  You can fix this by redirecting the.com to the .co.uk. (again your web company should be able to do this very easily).

3) Register with Google’s Webmaster Tools

Google would happily let you know about both of the problems above (and many more) if you signed up to their set of fantastic tools and notifications totally free (‘Google Webmaster Tools).  Visit www.google.com/webmasters/tools/, follow the instructions, and it will give you various bits of info and offer suggestions for improving your site.  A little sidenote is that you’ll probably have to fix the 404 page on your site in order to do this.  Again, your web developer should be able to do that.

4) Conversion Tip: Move your ‘Buy’ buttons

At the moment, the ‘buy’ buttons on your product pages are miles away from the product image, price and stock information.  They’re also in the same colour as all of the other buttons on the site.  I promise you that if you move them nearer the price and change their colour to contrast with the rest of the site, they’ll do better.

5) Conversion Tip: Fix your cart process

When I hit the ‘buy’ button, it’s taking me to a cart page with a link that says ‘Confirm’.  That’s fine, though perhaps ‘Check Out Now’ or something would be better.  But the rest of the cart process is a real struggle to get through.  I’d recommend that you go through this yourself, pretending you’re a first time buyer and then hassle your web people to fix the painful bits.

Semi-finally… there are plenty more little fixes, and bigger fixes, that could help out your site, but I’ve already gone on forever here.  Feel free to get in touch if you want more.

Completely-finally… your site isn’t an affiliate site, but you could benefit from setting up an affiliate program.  A few of the other doctors could help you out with this so do add a comment if you’re interested.

I hope at least something there helps.

Dan.

Clarke

Redirect the pages that are ranking to the new versions via 301 redirects.  It’s not ideal, but it’s better than losing the visitor to a 404 error page.  Your 404 error page is the same as your homepage at the time of review, and that’s going to cause you issues with Google unless of course the server is correctly telling Google it’s a 404 page and it should ignore the content.  Either way, it’s a bad idea to have any 404 showing, check your logs and 301 redirect the links to another page and or front of the site.  Less than ideal but not the end of the world, you have a sitemap in place, and would imagine that Google knows about it, so it should be a case of just waiting for the new pages take effect, but the time can vary on when this will happen in full.

What you should have done where possible is to re-use the same URLs and site structure, unless of course it was not SEO friendly in the 1st place.  Keeping the same page titles during a swap to a new layout and design can help when it comes to not losing rank on the pages that do rank, you can then slowly edit them over time.  I have noticed in the past that any complete shift in site URL structure and page titles leads Google to treating the site like it hasn’t seen it before, and not always a bad thing.  Sometimes you need to take short term pain for the longer term gains the new site structure, page layout and SEO can bring.

By the way, each of your sections in the product menu has the page title “Products: Divine Interiors and Gifts”.  This must be killing you on the SEO front; I would advise you get each title renamed to reflect the products sold in each section.  You also have no description meta-tag for each of your products, again not great for SEO.

Elaine

Your web designer should have used 301 (permanent) redirects on your site.  This is to tell all the search engines that a particular page is no longer available and automatically directs them to the new page.  Here’s some more information, 301 redirect, but your web designer should already know how to do this.
 

Kirsty

Well, if I were you and if the pages that have been 404-ing have counterparts on the new site version, I’d be pulling on my big tackety boots and asking the developer if they wouldn’t mind just bending over and giving me a minute or two to take a good run up.

It’s an easy job for a developer to set up redirects from old page versions to new ones to ensure a smooth transfer for your new site version in the serps. 

Even if there are some pages which didn’t have counterparts in the old site version, your developer should have anticipated 404s and set up a nice looking custom 404 page to help your site visitors find their way around.  

Kier

Hi Janice.

If I understand you correctly the issue you’re having is that with the site change, URLs from the old site are still showing up in Google but aren’t leading anywhere as the URL structure has changed.  To remedy this you need to use what’s called a 301 redirect for all the old URLs and have them redirect to the most relevant page on the new site structure.  You can find more info here.

Editors Note

Hi Janice.  Thanks for sending in your site for review, and apologies for taking so long to get it published.  It’s a very nice looking site overall and fits well with the product offering you have.  However, aside from the Docs reviews, I also noticed that you have a Twitter account associated with the site, although it doesn’t look like you’ve been very active with it since setting up.  You would definitely benefit from putting a little effort into this direction to pull in some targeted traffic to your website.  Without going into all the ins and outs of twitter, take a look at the following two articles by Kieron and Clarke on how to use twitter to grow your business and some general twitter advice and tips.  Kieron has used twitter to great effect in building and promoting his large userbase for ShareMyPlayLists.com.

At the time of writing, the keywords “laptop computers” received an exact search volume of 550,000 in January; an enviable domain name to have for development if ever you saw one!  However, it is a ruthlessly competitive sector, so Russ posed the following question to give him some ideas on how to progress the site development:

“Hi.

I have the domain name laptopcomputers.co.uk and have commissioned a designer to build me a site.

I have planned a large laptop review site with price comparisons, reviews and possibly videos, however, I would be very interested to see if the doctors have any other thoughts as to what could be included?  You guys think outside the box which can throw up some really interesting ideas.

The development is currently underway, but I’m in a bit of a flap so any input at all would be fantastic.

Thanks and kind regards.

Russ”

Here’s what the docs had to say:

Dan

Hi, Russ, how are you?

Congratulations on the fantastic domain name!  I’ve worked on a few laptop sites amd know you’ll get a ton of search traffic if you can rank well for that.

To be honest, you could do a hundred different things with the site.  BUT I’m going to be the most boring man in the world and suggest you keep it simple for the first few months.  Set yourself some targets, concentrate on the launch, plan some actions to get you to your targets, and put together a longer term plan to make money from the site.

A few examples for targets could be:

1. Reach page 1 of google for the phrase ‘laptop computers’ by June 2010.
2. Increase traffic to the site by at least 100% each week for the first 12 weeks.
3. Add 20 new laptop reviews to the site each month.

Aside from that, one big, big thing you don’t mention in your plan is to build an email list.  A good opt-in list in this niche could be worth thousands every month.  Laptop manufacturers are clambering over themselves to increase market share and have very good advertising budgets.

Hope this helps!

Dan

Lammo

Hi Russ.

How about the ability to compare more than simply price?  By offering your users the chance to compare any two laptops spec next to each other, they can make the purchase decision much easier.  I say this as a non-techie who buys his laptops using the criteria “is it a Toshiba” (they’ve always been reliable in my experience!) and “is it cheap” (I’m tight), but if I can compare two models next to each other and see that one has much larger memory for the same price, then it may sway me to buy there and then, rather than look elsewhere.

Then of course there’s those who NEED a specific amount of RAM, screensize, software.  You could pull all this data from the feeds and effectively let users narrow the entire laptop market to the handful of models that entirely match what they need/want.

Elaine

Hi Russ.

I think there’s plenty of scope for getting some unique pages/content up and running, simply by thinking of all the uses for a laptop.

- Different colours – red laptops, blue laptops
- Kids laptops with security built in – or recommended programmes to install and tips on how to keep kids safe on the web
- Gaming Laptops – need high spec – check out the World of Warcraft specs
- Business Laptops – fast spec, robust for carrying about or lightweight ones
- Long lasting battery life required?
- Basic laptops – is it simply going to be used for research or Facebook etc.
- Laptops for first timers/silver surfers  – with easy to use instructions and links to ‘idiot guides’
- Laptops for music lovers with good sound systems etc.

Good luck.

Kier

Hi Russ.

My main piece of advice would be to keep it simple and be sure what you’re building before it starts, because currently you sound a little unsure of the overall direction.  I’m not sure of the level of experience you have so far, but hiring a designer should only be done where you’ve got a very clear idea of what you want built and are sure that it’s beyond your own skills to do so.  As such, I’d say the trickiest part from what you mentioned is going to be price comparison.

Knocking together a basic CMS or modifying an existing one for a broadly static site consisting of content like reviews, pictures videos etc. isn’t too hard at all, and you could probably do this yourself in fact.  Price comparison however is a big undertaking so think very hard about this aspect, how it will work and how it will interact with the site.  Is price comparison the main focus and reviews etc are for extra fluff or is it the other way round?  Decide what you’re building and make it excellent in that area, then add new features later.

Editor’s Note

Hi Russ. 

Thanks for sending in your proposed site/domain for review.  I’d echo these views and add that with such a generic domain name and a broad number of categories and laptops to promote, try and find a merchant/network that can provide you with good quality feeds to work from.  If you don’t have much experience with feeds, find a developer who does!  It is a potentially massive undertaking in a sector that is very competitive, but you’ve got a fantastic domain on which to build something that could do very well.  Build it slowly and don’t rush to do everything in one fell swoop.

“I run a web development company, Anoveta, and although it’s not an affiliate site I don’t have much experience in SEO beyond the basics of the on-page stuff.  I’m looking for some general suggestions as to how the site could be improved.

I’ve recently changed the design on the site and it seems to be getting between 10 and 30 uniques a day, but I’ve only had one conversion from it in the last month, so I’d appreciate any advice on how to improve that.”

Here’s what the docs had to say …

Jay

Who is your target market?  What is your USP?  If you can answer both those questions you should get a few ideas as to how to portray that and further improve your site.

From an SEO point of view, it would make sense if you could hone your target market in order to choose keywords.  Do you have a geographical area that you wish to target?  If so you might consider ‘web design Durham’ or ‘web development Durham’ as your target keywords and ensure you have a page named after this on the site.  This will narrow the number of websites you are competing against in SERPs (as opposed to the entire of the North East of England) and might also give you a local appeal.  You’ve got a great link from a well trusted domain, dur.ac.uk (a Durham-based site, so great context for targeting Durham) thanks to your previous work – and you’ve used great anchor text so keep up the good work there.

I’d also recommend targeting the homepage to catch your ideal client’s eye.  For example, the ‘hero image’ on your homepage is of a girl in a field.  Perhaps this could be a snapshot or scrolling gallery of your work, linking through to your portfolio page.  If that doesn’t appeal, an image of a successful small business owner could also work; someone who looks very happy with their website and has a booming business as a result!  It’s a cliché, but clichés work.

At every step of your site design, ask yourself what route you want your website’s visitors to take.  In your case, keep suggesting to the viewer that they should find your contact details, and now, through obvious buttons and text.  Oh, and keep all contact details and calls to action above the fold!  Simple technique, but it’s proven to work wonders.  I expect your portfolio page is probably one of the most visited too – it’s how web design is normally sold to a prospect – so make sure that it’s easy to get to and digest.

In order to get visitors to act as fast as possible, perhaps sell web design to them through how it’s the perfect timing in the current economic climate to be thinking about marketing (i.e. web design).  Or you could have a time sensitive offer, or promote festive web development examples that you have.  You just need to keep answering your visitors’ questions at every turn: “what’s in it for me?”, “why should I contact you rather than the next person?”.  If you can do that, combined with a bit of SEO, you should have a steady flow of traffic to a well-converting site.  Don’t forget to let a bit of personality shine through – some character makes you more human and approachable and can actually form part of your USP.  You could do that through a blog or news section – great for SEO!

Clarke

Hi James.

5 headliners for you “Content, Title Tags, Links, Links, Links”.

I see your site is built on Wordpress so that’s cool, it’s going to make things a lot easier.  So before I talk about the “5 headliners”, let’s get some of the basics that I would do if it was me.  Others will have their own view on what plug-ins they like better, but I can only tell you what I have used and what has worked for me.

You have no site map from what I can see, so who’s pinging Google with your site changes and all the pages that can be found on your site?   Sure, Google and pals are great for crawling the web, but they have site maps to help them do it better, so get the “Google XML Sitemaps” plug-in.

I see you have a SEO plug-in called “Platinum SEO Pack”; can’t comment on it, but I have a feeling it’s not as good as “All in One SEO Pack”.  Personally I would remove the other and get that one instead, but it’s your choice.

Content

OK … on to the content, and by this, I mean what you have on page and what you have in your meta-descriptions.  I am not the worlds best at copy (a wordsmith I am not!) but your own page copy seems alright.  Try and make sure you that you have keywords you want to rank for peppered across the site (not stuffed, but at least included once or twice in the site copy).  You’re not going to be in the top 10 for “Web Development”, “Web Design” or “UK Website Hosting” so stop trying.  Instead, go more local like “Durham Web Development” or whatever areas you’re after.  Sure, we all want work from all over the place, but honestly, you would do better finding a large local area to be number 1 on first before you go national.  Use the H1 etc. tags to your advantage, get your keywords to stand out, but don’t over do it.  Your meta-descriptions are boring, no one is going to read them and think, “Hey should click this link”.  It’s a pain to do, but if you can craft all your meta-descriptions per page as if you were paying £1 a click for someone reading the text, then you’ll get a much higher click through rate.  Something I need to do more of myself.

Title Tags

Title Tags are so important, and yours I am afraid are shocking.  I suspect it’s the “SEO” plug in that’s doing the work, but why on earth it’s using a non-standard dot thing as a separator is beyond me.  Use a “-“ or “|”, or even a “,” or “.” is ok, but personally I use “-“ or “|” when I separate my words.

“Web Development, Web Design, UK Website Hosting • Anoveta” is your main page title tag, so that’s clearly all of your important words as the rest of the pages have nothing!  Instead I would have a page for each of your main areas and customise the title to that page and go longer tail; you will not be top 10 for “Web Design”, so go for something like “Durham Web Design”.  You should be able to get in to the top 5 for that with a little work.

Links, Link, Links

Links, Links, Links.  So we are clear, all the on page optimisation is a complete waste of time if you don’t get links.  You should do it to give you an edge over people going for the same keywords, and indeed, if your on page stuff is good, you might not need many links – but you still need links.  You need links to your main page and you need links to your key pages inside your site.

OK … so on to the good news.  You have designed a site for a college; way hey!, happy days you can get free .ac.uk links back to your site   The problem is you have targeted ‘keyword links’ back to your site.  There’s nothing really wrong with that other than that the main page you link to contains the mixed message page of “I don’t know what I want to rank for”, yet your keyword link back clearly says you want to rank for “Durham Web Development”.  Why don’t you have that in your title tag, your meta description and text on your main page if it’s important?  So fix that and it will do wonders, but don’t forget to get more links.

By the way, have you researched if that’s even the right keyword you want to go for?  Do more people type in “Durham Web Development” or “Durham Web Design”?  You should look in to that using your logs and tools like Google Adwords Keyword Generator.

Last bit of advice, always try and get links back from work you have done for clients, however be aware, as if you were doing work for the likes of me, I would have already told you up front I am paying you for the design, without credits, because I am a control freak as to where I link to LOL, so expect that from time to time; a jobs a job

Elaine

Hi James – the first thing I look for when I’m interested in a product or service is some indication of the price, which I think is important for prospective customers, especially those who may only want a very simple, entry site, at the moment it seems that you’re mainly looking for larger projects – you could be missing out here.

I also found the site a tad technical, it might be helpful if you had a glossary section which explained everything in simple, layman’s terms – and I mean everything, we do forget that 90% of the population have no idea when it comes to the internet, phrases such as web hosting, e-commerce websites, customer management systems etc..

I’m also surprised there’s no mention of SEO and if/how you can help them create a presence on the web – organic and PPC options – another area that most folk find totally confusing.

I’d hurry up and finish the portfolio page, this is probably not helping, it does look very sparse – I’d consider removing it until you had a wider selection to showcase.

I’d simply make it more simpler, let prospective customers know exactly what you can do for them, and some indication of price, especially for the lower end.

Good Luck.

Kier

Hi James

First thing I’d do is make your call to action more explicit, for instance instead of saying ‘get in touch’, have it say ‘Call or email us now for a quote!’ and move this from the bottom right corner to somewhere much more visible such as the top left.  Your navigation also feels a bit oddly placed, maybe consider moving this to the left hand column or another more common placing.

There’s so many things you could tweak really, my main piece of advice would be to get Google Site Optimiser on there and start running tests, and always treat the site as a work in progress, not something to have a ‘redesign’ every year or so.  I’d strongly recommend you read Google Website Optimiser 101, it’s a fantastic article from the guys at Conversion Rate Experts and should give you plenty of inspiration for improving not only your site but any future sites you build for clients.

“Whenever I’ve developed a new website, or had one developed for me, I’ve either left it to obtain traffic purely through search engines, cross promoted it via newsletter subscribers of my other websites, or headed straight down the PPC route.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be launching three new websites that aim to do what they say on the tin, nothing more, nothing less – Buy Cheap Books.  This time however, I am stumped as to how best to promote them and would welcome any suggestions people may have.”

The sites are:

Buy Cheap Books (live)
Buy Cheap Films (now live, but wasn’t at the time of review)
Buy Cheap Music (coming soon)

Here’s what some of the Doctors had to say…

Elaine

That’s a great easy to use site, which I think is it’s main attraction.  I think I’d be tempted to contact as many book related forums, book clubs, women’s interest groups and ask for feedback and offer a free prize draw for those who respond.

I’d also try doing a competition for some free books, I used to do this with Allkids in the early days, and usually got a great response – just ensure they have to visit the site to get the answer – ask them to forecast the next weeks/months top 5 books to win them – that way you’ll probably get only those who are interested in reading!

Send some books to relevant bloggers – they don’t come much cheaper than that, and ask for a review.

Good luck with the site Chris.

Lammo

Hiya Frostie, How about running competitions?

Let’s say you stump up for a first edition book by John Grisham… (A First Edition of his first novel will set you back around $150)… Then give that away as a prize with a qualifying question into the draw:

“What is the name of the lead character in Grisham’s latest legal thriller ‘The Associate’?” (together with a link to your sales page for this book where they can find the answer from the spiel and maybe buy the book if they like).

Make sure you capture their email address, and on the “thanks for entering” page, link to all the John Grisham books they can buy.  You’re going to get two things out of this: Lots of traffic and links from the competition and freebie sites (you should of course link back to them as a thank you), and a fairly large mailing list of people who like John Grisham books who you can email every time he brings out a new book, with your link to pre-order (as well as perhaps putting them in a “crime/legal thriller” mailing list once a month/fortnight/week.. all with their opt-in permission of course).

If you find this works, then simply repeat with different authors/genres etc.. and of course that can work for the Films (signed memorabilia from the actors/directors) and Music (gig tickets, signed albums from each artist) sites too – Just rinse and repeat!

Dan

Hiya Chris

I like the site you’ve launched.  Good luck with the others!  Here are 10 ideas – I hope at least one’s useful.

Short-term promotion ideas:

1. Send a book to each of your blogger friends & cheekily ask for a link/site review.  Could be a funny book related to them, could be something they’d like, etc.
2. Send 5 questions to a bunch of high profile authors/actors/musicians, publish them as interviews, & promote the interviews (e.g. on facebook/twitter, link to them from wikipedia, email their fan club, etc.).
3. You have twitter/facebook/delicious icons on there, but they feel like an afterthought.  Encourage people to post ‘I’m about to buy [....] via http://bit.ly/cheapbooks !’ to their various profiles.
4. Post a question to a site that’s read by a bunch of people in the affiliate industry

Medium-term promotion ideas:

5. Build widgets around popular books/films (e.g. the usual ‘Which character are you?’ widget)
6. Run a series of competitions.  For example, ‘design your own poster for the new Twilight film’.  Use a good prize, ask a bunch of ‘twilight’ bloggers to judge the competition (hence they’ll all blog about you multiple times), post the entries to flickr, etc.
7. Slightly odd idea: Try hiding the merchant info of the cheapest price when someone searches.  Include an ‘email me this price’ button.  Get a newsletter signup in return (& have an ‘email to a friend’ option?).  Lastminute sort of vaguely do something similar with their “This hotel owner won’t let us publish their name they’re so cheap!” thing.

Long-term promotion ideas:

8. Donate x% of your profit to ‘Book Aid’, make a point of this, ask for links to help you, ask for book aid to promote you.  You could even extend this to other charities.  Rev share with the charities for the traffic they provide?
9. Allow readers/listeners/etc. to stick up their own fan pages on your site?  Give them a cut for doing so? (a la squidoo)
10. Set up your own affiliate scheme.  A version of ‘Amazon Associates’, allowing other people to promote buying individual books, films, music, etc. via your site (worked well for Amazon after all!)

Hope something there helps!

Dan

Editors note – It’s interesting to see that all three Doctors are singing from the same page (excuse the pun) about running competitions – we didn’t compare notes honest!  Everyone has their own take on it though, so lots of different ideas for you there Frostie – hopefully plenty you can run with – Please keep us updated with how the sites progress!