POTN.COM review

[POTN Bloke]

[url=]www.potn.com[/url]

Ive been reading the forums for a couple of weeks now, trying to soak up your combined experience, and have been tweaking away. So I figured it was time to see what you think.

Its a big site with around 40,000 products listed, so things like h1 text at the top are dynamically generated based on where the user is.

Also the premier stores down the right hand side have (i hope) server a double purpose of being imformative about my key brands, but also kewyword friendly (not too much so i hope). Im currently trawling around for link exchanges and stuff which is coming together nicely.

Ive done a custom mod to allow me to add additional keyword rich copy on each of the major sections, and home page text is updated each week.

I currently get google coming around about once every 15 days or so, and it has spidered 18,000 pages this month, but i dont fare that well in serps for key brands.

have i missed anything, done anything completely wrong.

[jocelyn]

Not the best site reviewer here but your post was sinking on the page...lol

What strikes me on your site as something that I would not do is use super long link anchors. Some are 4 lines long. Chances are this one might be hurting more than help. I'd use the best key phrase (not 10 words there...lol) and make it the anchor text instead.

I'd start with this cause the rest does not look bad.

[POTN Bloke]

Thanks, I see what you mean on that front, and ive ammended it.

Anybody got any thoughts on they the way the url's are formulated when you click into a category.

I have it as. http://www.my-site.com/performance/keyword1/keyword2/cPath/pathinfo

Would i be better off losing the keyword1, keyword2 part and just having

http://www.my site.com/performance/cpath/pathinfo

Googles referenced and indexed the top one, but its the old question of wether its better to have a short url or keywords in it.

[RideQ]

I thought you did a pretty good job on that site, what shopping cart are you using?

[seo guy]

I would try to use mod_rewrite to get rid of the extra folders in the path like /buy/cpath/ you dont want extra directories in the path if you can help it, just more for Google to have to decide whether to parse or not.

[POTN Bloke]

Thanks for the comments, cpath's gonna be fairly tough to get rid of. the buy & brand bit is gonna be easy, as it was added on by me anyway. I put it in there thinking that the old chestnut of keywords in url was going to be more important than short url.

Ive looked into mod_rewrite, but all that regular expression stuff confuses the hell out of me. Ill perhaps have a delve a again.

RideQ, I use a pretty heavily hacked version of oscommerce.

Simon

[POTN Bloke]

Think ive cracked this mod rewrite stuff now.....

feel free to have a look..

www.potn.com (http://www.potn.com)

[THE-ONION]

Hiya,

I just wrote an essay almost for this reply and it deleted it when i clicked reply.
oh well, here goes again.

To optimise the site id make your keywords relevant to your page content.
im getting a 43% relevancy which is pretty poor.

you dont mention one of your best keywords in your title... POTN :)
I go to pretty much all the car shows as well, and everyone knows your company as POTN.

keywords have been repeated on the same lines in some of the meta tags.

try to use keywords from your page in your meta tags... or visa versa... just as long as the words are present in both the meta and the content.

===================================================

with the pages themselves try and keep the scripts in an external .js file rather than a hefty script at the top, then repeated at the bottom.

can you not put the table styles into the .css file to neaten the code up a bit more?

maybe look at other ways to tidy and shorten the code on each page.
i prefere to have as much code on 1 line as possible.
rumours went around that all the white space in the code is bad so i crunched my files up and now my code on my pages is only about 20 lines long.
wether this is true or not i dont know but its cleaned my code up a lot.
dreamweaver then has a nasty habit of messing it all up again.

====================================================

seo aside and onto function.
when you click to buy, there is no continue shopping button.
once you click another product and add that, and again, and again, the list to the left becomes huge.
once you add say 30 products to the cart the site becomes unbearable.

====================================================

All in all i think its a good job so far, youve hacked os pretty well (better than i have at the moment)
and youve even turned the pages into html.

id definatly work on the link relevancy, and the js files though to help your site.


Hope the above is useful for you.

Regards
-Dave.Peacock


p.s you have PM :)

[POTN Bloke]

Hello Onion, thanks for the review

Ill have a go at addressing the points you raised.


Relevancy:
Thats a pretty tough one for us. Because POTN search puts us top as its not a oversubscribed keyword we dont really optimise a particular keyword on the homepage at all. The premier stores down the side have done a great job with getting the rankings up for particular keywords.

Code:
JS should mostly be in offpage, ill have a double check.
Its a fine line between compressing the code to remove whitespace and keeping it readable when i hack it.
Theres no dreamweaver pages on the site ;)

Functionality:
Im going to address the continue shopping thingy
I wish people would order 30 things a time... that would be nice.Its generally no more than 1,2 or 3 items at a time.

Checkout the new homepage ive been slicking it up a bit.


Any other comments (especially useability) are very welcome. You can get so close to a site sometimes that it clouds your vision and its very hard to optimise for so many brands, keywords and parts. The site currenly has around 50,000 unique items on it.


Geezer.

[THE-ONION]

lol ive been on this pc far too long.
i should have realised potn wouldnt be an over used keyword.

me = dumbass.

after the chat on msn im pretty impressed mate.
nice hacking youve done :)

[FreeAgent]

Here are some small things I found in your code...

1. In your header I would go with this order. title, meta tags, link tags.
2. Utilize your alt and title tags on your images and text links.
3. I would kill a lot of your html comment tags. Try keeping to 6 or less comments per page.
4. Kill all your white space.
5. Keep searching for relevant BL's

I really like the way your site looks. Keep up the good work.