Reviewing my site

[JaimeBon]

Hi everybody,

I am a professional English to Spanish translator and I am trying to optimize my website for search engines. Up to date I have set up, graphicly designed, copywritten, and translated it, and after a good deal of optimization I think I could use a little push in the right direction. I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me reviewing my site and giving me some advice as to how to further improve it.

So far I think I have covered all the basics: Keywords in title and all meta tags, 4 times in the text, normally present in a H1 tag, present in incoming and outcoming links, used as the last phrase in the page and so on. I have done quite a bit of link building that should show in the future but for now I would like to focus on on-page optimization.

Okay, so the index page is optimized for the keywords "english to spanish translator" and of course "spanish translator". That's www.jb-translator.com.

Then I have the home english page which is optimized for "english to spanish translation" and "spanish translation". That's www.jb-translator.com/english.htm

Finally, I have optimized www.jb-translator.com/subject-areas.htm for "website localisation", though I'm mostly concerned about the first two ones.

That's pretty much it. I have a total of 17 pages (7 in English, 5 in French, 5 in Spanish) but I'm only concerned with optimizing those 3 and especially the first two for now. Can you tell me how I'm doing and advice me on how to do better? If you need any more info, please ask me. Thank you very much in advance,

Jaime Bonet, Professional English to Spanish translator
Spanish translator (www.jb-translator.com)
Website localisation (www.jb-translator.com/subject-areas.htm)

[JaimeBon]

In case somebody is already reviewing my site, I have done some corrections, like taking out the webring I was a member of and adding a site map to every page and some other minor corrections. Thanks!

Jaime Bonet, Freelance English to Spanish translator
Spanish translator (www.jb-translator.com)
Website localisation (www.jb-translator.com/subject-areas.htm)

[JaimeBon]

Okay, I would like to ask a few specific questions:

- Is it advisable to kind of "forget" a couple of things while optimizing? Say, you don't put your kw in the ALT texts, nor in the Meta Description, nor as a final sentence in the Body text, but you do everything else perfectly (first sentence, title, H1, bold kw, etc). Would it turn to be kind of a safety measure for not being penalized for over-optimizing? Would this make your site more credible for search engines? Or do they prefer perfect optimization?

- I have tried to clean my index page from FrontPage disasters through an on-line tool designed for it. My question is: If I edit those cleaned pages with FP afterwards, will it mess them up again?

- Why are you supposed to analyse what your competition is doing as far as optimization goes? Doesn't Google apply the same rules to all sites? My concern is, out of the 10 first positioned sites for my keywords, only two of them have those keywords in the title tag, and that's only one example of how "off the mark" they are. So this leaves me thinking that either they're doing IP delivery or they know some obscure secret formula nobody else knows of. Or they're not properly optimized for my specific service since they offer a lot of related ones. Anyway, they're not much use if I want to emulate them. So, can I go look somewhere else?

- I thought I would have got at least a reply by now... I'm not complaining, just curious. Is my site so well optimized that there's not much to say, or is it a complete disaster and you don't know where to start? :confused: Anyway, I would greatly appreciate some insight from you who are way more experienced in this field than I am. Thanks for enduring through such a long message!

[jocelyn]

[QUOTE=JaimeBon]- Is it advisable to kind of "forget" a couple of things while optimizing? Say, you don't put your kw in the ALT texts, nor in the Meta Description, nor as a final sentence in the Body text, but you do everything else perfectly (first sentence, title, H1, bold kw, etc). Would it turn to be kind of a safety measure for not being penalized for over-optimizing? Would this make your site more credible for search engines? Or do they prefer perfect optimization?[/QUOTE]
Well I don't really follow a pattern. I make a page that sound good to my ears using H1, Title... but don't really follow a checklist. One it's been live for a while I then push more on the tweaking to move it up in serps.

[QUOTE=JaimeBon]- I have tried to clean my index page from FrontPage disasters through an on-line tool designed for it. My question is: If I edit those cleaned pages with FP afterwards, will it mess them up again?
[/QUOTE]
If you are talking about stiff like <span...> and crap, it depends. I code mostly straight in the html. If I make a new page or add lots of components and then fix it myself after looking at the code. CSS is usefull to minimize the crap in the code too.

[QUOTE=JaimeBon]- Why are you supposed to analyse what your competition is doing as far as optimization goes? Doesn't Google apply the same rules to all sites? [/QUOTE]
You don't have to, I usually don't. If you really have a hard time getting your rankings, you might need to look why you can't bypass them. Like me, 'poker' is not something I will fight for, when I look I see that I'll have to fight casinos...

[QUOTE=JaimeBon]- I thought I would have got at least a reply by now... Thanks for enduring through such a long message![/QUOTE]
Well site reviews is not really my thing. I had a look and all but did not really have anything to stress about. Looks good, serious. You're on the right road I think.

When asking a review it's always better to make smalled to the point posts, yes.

[JaimeBon]

Thank you very much Jocelyn. Ok, let's focus a little bit (I'm an enthusiast).

- I wouldn't really know what to look for if I wanted to clean my FP pages manually. Do you know of an article or something that talks about it?

I'm having a hard time refraining from asking a second question... I'm kind of hooked on this SEO thing... No, my precious, not now...
:confused::s&m:

[jocelyn]

Never found a place where they talk about how to do it. I looked at the code and with time I saw how screwy it was. Like <H1><b><span>... I would make just <H1>...</H1>

Maybe you could post this question in an other section to have opinions, not everybody looks at the reviews.