“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.

“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.

“Myself and my business partner run the site http://www.hengifts.com.  We were hoping you could give us some constructive criticism on how to improve it.

We are working on repairing broken links at the moment, but any other advice you could give us would be really gratefully received.”

Here’s what Lammo and Dan had to say:

Lammo

Hi Rebecca.

The first thing that strikes me about your site is how dull and dark it looks – I’d lose that background and go for something vibrant and fresh – Hen nights are supposed to be fun – so should your site!

Any reason a bingo banner has pride of place across the site?  I know it matches your demographics, but I’d really try and keep the focus 100% on Hen-related merchants and products.

I think this site is crying out for some user-generated content – encourage your users to share their stories of their own, or their friends Hen nights – you can then drop relevant affiliate links in where required.  Perhaps a forum?

Once you have a loyal following providing you with UGC, then a little editorial prodding can work wonders – spend some time planning a “suggested Hen weekend in Malaga” complete with affiliate links to flights, hotel, costumes, etc. and it’ll be repaid many, many times over.

Dan

Hi, Rebecca, how are you?

The site looks really pretty and definitely ‘on-theme’!  I’d love to know how much traffic you’re getting & how sales are going.

If this was my site I’d focus on the two most obvious things:

A. Getting more visitors.
B. Turning more of those visitors into buyers at your merchants.

Here’s a quick idea for 5 steps you could go through to do that.

STEP 1.  GET MORE VISITORS FOR CURRENT TERMS

Looking at Google’s keyword suggestion tool, it looks like the biggest core terms for you would be ‘Hen Party Gifts’ & ‘Hen Night gifts’.  At the moment your homepage title tag is ‘Hen Gifts’.  I’d make sure the words ‘Night’ & ‘Party’ are in there, e.g. ‘Hen Night Party Gifts’ (in fact, looking at the #1 listed page for ‘Hen Party Gifts’, that’s exactly what they’ve done!).

Next, I’d take a look at the main competitors for those terms & see if I can outrank them.  Here’s the data from Yahoo on which pages link to the top page for ‘Hen Night Gifts’ & the top page for ‘Hen Party Gifts’:

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:henpartygifts.co.uk%20-site:henpartygifts.co.uk
http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:hen-den.co.uk%20-site:hen-den.co.uk

The first of those only has a couple of pages of inbound links.  I’d go through each of those & contact them asking very nicely if they’d link to me.

STEP 2.  GET VISITORS FOR NEW TERMS

Next I’d have a look at what else I can get traffic for.  Again, looking at Google’s Keyword Suggestion tool (https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal) I see that ‘Hen Night Accessories’ is a really big term that you’re not currently focusing on, (along with things like ‘hen night games’ & ‘hen night t shirts’ which you do have categories for).

You can of course repeat the process from step 1 against the sites ranking for these other terms.

STEP 3.  GET VISITORS OUTSIDE OF SEARCH ENGINES   

Yours feels like the kind of site that would do well in facebook or twitter, or where one hen party guest might email to another, etc.  Why not add a prominent ‘Tell your friends about hengifts.com’ function somewhere, maybe using one of the social widgets like “addtoany” that lets you post direct to facebook?

STEP 4.  TURN MORE VISITORS INTO BUYERS

To do this I’d perform a few little tests on the site & then carry on with the bits that work, here’s an example:

Does removing adsense from the top (or moving it to the foot of the page) increase my overall profits or decrease them?
Does reducing the height of the main banner reduce my bounce rate?
If I add a search box below my top navigation, does it get used?  Do people buy as a result?
Does making product pages for my items work better than pushing visitors direct to merchants from the category page? (could trial that on one category for example).

STEP 5.  SELL TO VISITORS OVER THE LONGER TERM

I don’t know how much priority you want to put on the site, and this suggestion’s slightly more labour intensive: you could gather email addresses through the site & market to them.  A simple way to do that would be to bundle some of your content up into a quick ‘Complete Guide To Organising a Hen Party’ guide (even if it’s just a word document).  Advertise that prominently on the site and build a little landing page for it.  The landing page would require the visitor to enter their email address before they can download the guide.

If you build that list up, it could be very valuable as it tells you 1) this person’s going to a hen party; 2) this person’s going to be going to a wedding soon; 3) this person is a woman, likely to be between the ages of about 18 & 40.  That’s a lot of useful info to help you sell more products to them.

Hope that’s useful.  Good luck on the site – it looks great & I hope it’s a big success!

Dan.

Pete would like to know what the docs think he should do when trying to set up a site for a single product using an exact match keyword domain:

“I am in the process of setting up a site to push a single product to a merchant.  I have an exact match keyword domain (let’s call it supersmashingredwidget.co.uk), but I’m unsure how to structure what will effectively be a landing page.

I also have an exact match domain for the wider product area, redwidget.co.uk, but I wanted to use the single product domain name to specifically capture the traffic from the exact match searches that are carried out each month.

I’m aware that landing pages are a no no unless you can add a decent level of value to the end user by way of quality content, including a minimum requirement of pages so as to avoid it looking like a ‘thin’ site.  I could feature related products to flesh it out, but intended to do that with redwidet.co.uk using the advice from Smingle’s post in the A4U forum.

What’s the best way to tackle this?

Many thanks.”

Frank

Hi Pete.
 
I would create a mini site for the supersmashingredwidet.co.uk and probably set up a 4 page website with the home page being about the actual product and as descriptive as possible, with a nice big call to action placed on the home page also.  I would then create 3 other pages with variations of the keyword searches.  There are 2 ways to determine which additional keywords to target:
 
1. By looking at the Google keyword tool for other keywords around that product which seem to be getting searches (remember the Google tool is not entirely accurate).  For example, if the main keyword gets 10k exact match searches, then look down the list of the other keywords and create additional pages based on these keywords – think “supersmashingredwidget prices”, “compare supersmashingredwidget”, “supersmashingredwidget reviews” which are all call to action type keywords in which the visitor will be in the purchasing mind frame, then create nice and informative pages of additional content based on the subject.
 
2. Use the old fail safe – What would YOU search for if you were looking for this/another product?  Use these keywords to create additional pages on the website.
 
If it is a true niche site which is promoting a single product, creating a mini site with 4 content rich pages will give you extra search traffic from the long tail searches, and thus much more likely to convert to a sale also.
 
Try not to over analyse things as it doesn’t need to be complicated, it just needs to be nice and simple with an easy “exit” button.  A lot of people tend to forget that the purpose of an affiliate site is to get the customer onto the merchant’s site as quick as possible, whilst ensuring they have a nice journey along the way.
 
Hope this helps and good luck.

Kieron

Just put yourself in the shoes of a visitor to your site, if you were to search Google for a “supersmashingredwidget” then what would you look for when you come across a site selling that product?  The key is not to overthink it, a product description, some images, user reviews and price comparisons from different retailers is all it needs.

“Hi.

I would like to say what a great idea this site is …

Questions:  I’ll start by saying I understand SEO, but an element that I am struggling with is link building, not in terms of how they should be obtained but more in terms of actually gaining the links.  In an ideal world I would outsource this to Kieron at Content Now or similar companies, the problem I have right now is I don’t have the funds available, due to personal circumstances.

I would also increase the amount of content I have at the same time in turn helping to attract links.  Where do I go from here, I really need to outsource regular content and link building, maybe there is a partner out there for rev share or investment in time?”

Answers:

Kieron

Not really sure what your question is? If you don’t have the budget to outsource link building and content writing then simply do it yourself. Link building is nothing complex, simply email sites of a similar theme to yours and ask them to exchange links.

Kier

Hi Stuart.

It sounds like you’re a new affiliate, so I’m guessing the scale of your business probably wouldn’t justify the costs of outsourcing for linkbuilding and content writing. You may be able to find a fellow affiliate who will engage in a joint venture with you in return for a rev share, but this can have its own complications.

I’d suggest you may be better served by reading up more on link building and just getting in there and having a go, as it sounds like you’re a bit wary of this currently and see outsourcing as the solution. Once you’ve built up the revenues on your site to a decent level, you should be able to outsource at least content writing initially at a reasonable cost if you shop around.

Link building is more skilled and so without a decent budget, you may find it tough to get good results, so for the time being just give it a go and see what you can achieve on your own steam.

“Hi, the site is www.house-parts.com which has been around for years in various guises.  At the moment, it’s in limbo through indecision in which direction to take it.

Fingers have been burnt with the first couple of ventures on Google! PPC is something that is needed but with good direction … funds are limited!

Long term plan is to have a site that should be bringing in some regular income.

Appreciate any assistance.”

(screenshot)

Here’s what Kieron and Lammo had to say:

Kieron

It would really help if you were to ask a specific question. My first thoughts when looking at the site is that I don’t really know what it is or what it does. After digging a little deeper it seems to be nothing more than datafeeds from merchants split into categories. TBH I would bin it and start again with some direction and clear idea and purpose.

Lammo

I feel your pain Mark – PPC can be a fantastic little earner, or it can swallow your credit card balance, and I’ve had both happen to me over the years!

House Parts looks “interesting” – I note you mention a lack of direction a few times in your question. I think it shows in the site tbh – you’ve tried to cover everything and anything in the site, without really narrowing your focus on any one thing.

No-one is going to land on your homepage and think “What do I want today? A Plasma TV or a Dog Kennel?”, and your internal pages are bereft of any unique content or any decent on-page SEO – for example I’ve just looked at the page for baby items such as pushchairs, highchairs, intercoms etc (we’ve just had our first little boy!) – the content is duplicated from a product feed, and your meta title is “House, Home and Garden Shopping – Product list by Category 0” – not targeted towards any people searching for baby items!

I’d rip the whole site apart, lose 90% of the categories, and focus, focus, focus on a particular sector/area. Add unique content, get the basic on-page SEO right and make it a site that real people could use – don’t just build it for the search engines. Until you’ve done that, I wouldn’t spend a single penny on PPC, as I don’t think you’d get much of it back.

Editor’s Note:

Thanks for sending your site in for review Mark – it takes balls to send something for review in the first place, and although it may not have been exactly what you wanted to hear, hopefully it doesn’t come across as too harsh! At the end of the day, the docs reviews are ‘as is’, and are designed to help you – even if it is to say, “draw a line through it and start again”. Don’t let it put you off though, you obviously know how to put a site up, so just keep plugging away and narrow it down to something more specific.

That concludes the Affiliate Doctors first round of Surgery reviews. There are a couple more Clinic reviews and then it’s time to crack on with the second round. We’ve already got some great submissions in for the third round, so if you haven’t submitted a site or question for review yet, get ‘em in quick!

On another note, there will be some additions to the Doc panel over the next couple of weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for some added expertise to help you out with all the questions you’ve been asking!

QUESTION 1 – H1 TAGS

Tom asks the Docs:

“The homepage of one of my wordpress blogs shows my most recent posts. I have altered the template so the title of each post is an <H1> tag.

I have given the home page it’s own title, description, and keyword data.

I’m not too bothered about the blog ranking for it’s own name, so is a homepage H1 really necessary? If so, is it possible to implement an H1 for a homepage showing only recent posts in wordpress?”

From a document structure point of view it is logical on the homepage that the site title is the h1 tag, I would then place your individual post titles (on the homepage) as h2. On the individual post pages have the post title as the h1 tag, these are the pages you want to rank.

QUESTION 2 – LINK CLOAKING

Richard asks the Docs

“What a great idea this site is.

My first question is:

Is it best to cloak outbound affiliate links from my website. At first I thought it was – and so I used a great Wordpress Plugin called WP-Affiliate. The idea was to cloak the links so search engines didn’t know they were affiliate links – but then the links just show up as errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

So my question is – should I cloak outbound affiliate links or not?”

Yes always cloak them as there is software out there that looks for affiliate links and blocks them.

I’m not sure of the specific error you’re encountering. Generally I’d say as long as your site has good content and adds to the user’s experience it probably won’t be too much of an issue for Google that you have affiliate links. You may want to keep doing it anyway though as affiliate links are a bit ugly and can be offputting for the user to see.
 
QUESTION 3 – LINK TEXT

Brian asks the Docs:

“Newbie question: Does it matter if I edit the text in a text link? Will the clickthrough still be credited to my account?”

Yes as long as you use the correct affiliate link it doesn’t matter if the text says click here, buy now, more info etc..

Hi Brian.

This wouldn’t affect the tracking on any system I’m aware of. The only issue to bear in mind is that a merchant may only want to used approved copy for text links and if so this should be clear in their terms and conditions.

Editor’s Note

Hope that clears up your questions Tom, Richard and Brian, and if anyone else has something to add, we’d love to hear from you – just scroll down and leave a reply! Cheers.

The following question was sent in by John who wants to know a little more about duplicate content …

“I’ve just about finished an affiliate site which has about 10 pages.

Most of the pages are comparison tables comparing the different retailers and products they offer.

I’m thinking of creating multiple duplicate pages using essentially the same comparison tables, but using different (unique) content.

These pages will be hidden from the user and created purely for the search engines by targeting related keywords.

Is this acceptable or would search engines consider these spam pages?”

Answers:

Kieron

Spam, don’t bother.

Lammo

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa! Did you really just say “ hidden from the user and created purely for the search engines”? That’s a big, massive red-flag, don’t ever do that if ever I saw one! I’m certainly no SEO guru, but even I know you don’t show your users one thing and Google another – it’ll just get you kicked out of Google!

Duplicate pages are another no-no, but you mention having unique content on each page – I assume you mean the product comparison will be the same on each page, but the content different?

The comparison units we offer at Easy Content Units are served by javascript as default, which ensures that they are “ignored” by the search engines and not spidered as content, thus avoiding any duplicate content issues. We do offer RSS and PHP outputs which can be read by the search engines, but you really need to be careful of duplicate content penalties when using similar content on a number of pages.

Kier

Hi John.

This is known as cloaking and is not looked upon kindly by the search engines. As such if they catch on, then you may find your site banned from the index, so unless you’re very sure of your skills in the area, it’s not a good idea if you want to develop the site in the long term.

Editor’s Note

Thanks for sending in your question John, and I hope this gets to you in time before you make the changes to your site! Look out for another post tomorrow which will be featuring a slightly different format.