Site Review. Urgent

[chhchung]

Please tell me what do i need to improve my site. Tell me the speed if using boardband or 56k. How's the content, keyword, title, everything? Also, the suggestion on navigation, color, etc.

Do you suggest me using "waterfall picture wholesale" as anchor text? Because if i use "wholesale Gifts" looks like too much competitor. I had exchange many links. But i didn't see any backlink in google. Anyway, what's backlink? How do i find how many bl from my site. Is it search "link:www.site.com" in google? IF it's the way, google show me the bl less than i actually had.

This is my site.

http://www.anawholesale.com

[creative666]

I have a few tips:

Use an hX tag as an introduction on the home page - GIFT wholesale store.

In the title leave out the word online, its a waste or prime seo real estate, of course its online its a website 8-|

In each of the categories have two or three lines of text, the search engines have nothing to read and evaluate.

Last tip, link building. Go through the link building tips forum and you will find a few thread relating to free and paid for directory listings - make sure your site is listed in all of the free ones. Then hunt for links from sites where they will be willing to link to yours where they see it will benefit their users and your own.

[bhwebby]

I am going to help you out, because you will be so grateful for my advice and owe me a lot.

1) Your 300k homepage is not suitable for any surfer. You will lose every customer on your first page.

2) Your descriptions are so bad, the search would not even know where to begin. Try to make it 1-2 paragraphs.

3) If your site is not good for lynx, you are going to have problems with how the search engines see your content. All they are seeing currently are your menus.
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

4) Don't name your links page "links", call it another name. Search Engines will wise up.

5) Your have very poor titles. http://www.anawholesale.com/product.cfm/merchid/256.cfm

6) Are you a complete store or what?
http://www.anawholesale.com/subcatprod.cfm/cat/11/subcat/1

7) When you search your whole cold fusion cart is broken.
http://www.anawholesale.com/search.cfm?search=waterfall&1=Go

8) I don't understand how you can have a forum & guestbook on a professional retail site.

9) You don't accept AMEX, why?

10) Your site is far from being complete. Keep working on it.

[creative666]

Very blunt there bhwebby!

I will try and expand a little on what he said in his post:

Title tags are one of the most important parts of on page optimisation. Make sure that they are specific to each page and are written to be a descritive sentence, try and aim for 68 characters anything past this the search engines will not hold much weight.

300K home page?!? Looks like only 50K in source code to me - images are different again, and the size of them are not taken into account for optimisation.

The Meta description and keyword tags need to be specific to each individual page, at the moment they are generic site wide.

The other points dont seem to be related to SEO - but bhwebby seems to think they are important.

[chhchung]

Thanks, bhwebby. Great advice. I apology for what i did to you.

It give me hard time to slim the index page. I don't want to give up the flash in order to gain speed. My client doesn't like that. There's great improvement on SEO after i visited this forum. I got top 5 on yahoo for my target keyword.

The lynxview is a good site. Some search engine put the view cart, login, etc on the description. I don't know how to solve it.

Actually i try to spend more time on link exchange and looking for Free directory.

Because this is my girl's friend store and i don't get a dime on it. I prefer spending money on prada, Lv than buying link for her. She doesn't know all that stuff anyway.

What's your suggest on decreasing the load time of my page? I already give up alot of image.

[bly-me]

I will give 2 cents which should help the looks.

Change the red color to the exact same color of blue in the border of the 5 boxes on the sides.

However, if you are trying to cater to US customers by using red, white, and blue. Make your blue more of a navy blue.

[creative666]

Read this article by Chris Ridings, the title of it is Why a search engine crawler is not at all like Lynx: http://www.searchguild.com/article1.html

Everything in the article stands to reason and is sound advice.

[bhwebby]

chhchung, just messing you. Don't take it to heart.

I just want to add that Riding's article is pretty optimized in LYNX. :)

Don't get me wrong, but I think he injects a lot of bull into the comparison article. First he starts talking about SEO and then bases the comparsion on cookies, and session id's. When do you ever talk about cookies and session id's in regards to SEO.

Then he says, no matter what page you have, your page will be indexed. Everyone and their mom knows that. For SEO purposes, we are concerned about getting to #1.

I have followed the LYNX rule and very happy with first page placements for a majority of my keywords on Google and Yahoo with my OTHER site. Let's just say I kill my competition in the natural rankings.

Believe what you may. Even chhchung states "Some search engine put the view cart, login, etc on the description. I don't know how to solve it."

As for size of page. I am sure your flash file can be better optimize down to 50k. Use action script to move the clouds instead of motion tween. The waterfall background image at 80% jpg compression rate should be around 25k-35k. You may also be able to downsample your sound file and still sound good.

You have 3 17-20k thumbnail images. Resample them to 2-3k each.
ny_s.jpg
nybridge_s.jpg
dolphins_s.jpg

That should cut your front page to 150k.

[creative666]

I think in the article he is talking about why a search engine spider acts in no way like lynx.

So when people say optimise your site and then go look at in lynx and this is how a search engine will see it is wrong - lynx and the search engine spiders look at and interpret sites in different ways and for different reasons.

[bhwebby]

I still think it is not right to throw a wrench into the topic of SEO with cookies and session id's. No body said there is an absolute to LYNX representing how SE's see your site, but it works.

The main purpose of a LYNX viewer is to see if your content is clearly dominated by your menus and links, then your site will have problems. It is clearly not for checking cookies, session ids.

[creative666]

If I have visited a page and then move through several other pages on a site and I am tracked by a session ID or a cookie it is possible to have pages put together based upon the information stored in the session or cookie. Lyxn would be able to store this information and act upon it - a search engine crawler would not - that is a fundemental difference in the way the two act!

Thats cool though bhwebby, I respect your views