Marketing Evaluations

Hi Michael, http://e-e-t.nl/

That’s a nice site. Well done in terms of visually pleasing Google in particular. You took an advantage of cross linkage, which not many sites offer. However, for a travel site, you do not use enough images to attract people on the first hand. Even if you use icon-like images in front of each menu destination (like here, if you pull down any category) http://www.bostonjewelrymall.com it’ll bring some taste of your site. I don’t understand the language, I can only guess, but I would definitely add travel images, or create a photo gallery. I would also add more ways of communications. You have listed 2 contact us forms, which is good, but confusing. I would add some kind of instant internet messaging, such as skype.(http://www.skype.com). I would remove one form and the icon with phone. You can ask for phone number in your other contact us application. I would assume that travel company would only win listing a phone number right on site. And did you know that there are many services that forward calls to any phone number? This one I guess, s/b good for a travel company: http://www.tollfreeforwarding.com

I would also add a calendar to your contact us form, so people can tell you which dates would work for them for their travel. I would also create the onsite possibility of translating this site to some other language, unless you specifically work with the auditory, who speaks this particular language.

Also, I see just little description about each country, but not specific pre-packaged trips, or the ability to add optional trips to the whole package. For individual travel that you offer, I think it’s a must. What sounds strange, that I can clearly see some English lines among your content, but I cannot understand as why you are mixing the stuff. If only for SEO purposes, it’ll actually harm more than create a value. Actually I just found a pre-packaged tour: http://e-e-t.nl/land/voetsporen-van-paulus, but it’s not very attractive without pictures and bullets to summarize the main content. And I don’t remember the path – meaning, those pages are hidden, where they should be right before your eyes. Actually, I even find the path. Why don’t you put your hot trips (Voorbeeldreizen) on the top and add some thumbnails to them?

Pricing is also an important point for travel site. I did not see any prices listed on your site.

I would also add some weather and currency exchange widgets that you can “steal” from the internet

Also, for a travel company, referrals are crusual – I haven’t seen any on your site.

Make it more interactive, so people would be interested to stay longer or to comeback to your site. Travel blogs are very popular, why would not you add one? Also, start working with forums, Q&As, social networks – that’s where people get convinced to use this vendor or another.

I also don’t understand why do you have a redirect from www.easteuropeantravels.nl to your http://e-e-t.nl/ site. Not to mention that the idea of redirecting is not very SEO-friendly, but also, the first domain would be considered much better optimized to start with, because it contained some searchable keywords.

The content on your site… is it only me, or is it really stretched, instead of default to left align?


Take a look at your metadata. It repeat itself, and the title and description sometimes too long to make it efficient.

Your Alexa rank is to high. I think, you don’t have many visitors to your site yet. If you were to work on this part, please understand, that there should be a healthy balance of visitors who comes from different domains to your site.

I guess that’s it. I am sure I could add more valuable recommendations if I understood your language.

Thanks,

Sasha

Hi Dave - http://www.researchbank.co.uk/

It looks like your site is missing a summary of your services  that is usually makes the home page. Right now, your home page is overwhelmed with links to different sources. I find it uncomfortable to start with.  Also, you have a picture of fortune 500 companies – looks like it should lead to a white paper download, or similar? The link http://www.researchbank.co.uk/FortuneGlobal5002008.htm doesn’t work, giving 404 error.

Speaking of errors, your site also shows a 301 error, meaning, that search engine don’t see at www.researchbank.co.uk and researchbank.co.uk (without www) as one site, and don’t summarize the credits for both – and because of that, your position in organic search result is lower than it should be.

I would remove your “your cart” button from unrelated pages, where there is nothing to buy. If you want it be visible everywhere, you better move to the top right corner somewhere.  I would also add more of the content to your webpage. Right now it looks very sad and boring.  

Most of your content ends up with a sentence “Please contact us with your database maintenance projects.”

However, not all your pages has a link under “contact us” – that should be changed.  And, instead of pointing this link to your email service, it should go to a contact us form. The form itself, if you don’t want to keep a SQL table with information, so the form after submission can come to your email. As long, as there is a contact form on your site, you are given some extra positive points in terms of SEO.

Also, once you leaved the home page there is no way to go back unless you simply put it into browser again. I think your logo should be always clickable back to home page, and I think a link Home should also be in the top menu.

Then, you are explaining how good your in-house team is, however, once you are on About us page, you are only talking about yourself (or may be some other Dave). Give some live, add nice human faces, job roles, etc. Do not let people think that you are actually a sole proprietor with no other employees on board.

Overall, your site is poor on content, bullets, charts, and pictures. It can definitely be improved from this point!

Coming next, it looks like you are not using the Cascadian Style Sheets (CSS) properly. The report shows me some wondering HTML tags here and there. It brings your overall score of your site down.  

Many of your pages also missing or have an excess of metadata, and this should be changed, as well.

No Headings and Subheadings found on your site. Headings are special tags for your visual titles.

Alexa rating is above 7,000,000 which is way bellow it should be.  Google page rank is 2, but it doesn’t really mean much (browse my other answers).

For a site like yours, I think the social media platform is essential. At least, a blog, may be a forum, or just a FAQ page would make a difference. Also, your participation in forums and networks elsewhere should help dramatically not only with SEO and link building, but also with real convertible visitors.

This is just a beginning.. Good luck!

Sasha

Roshan,

 

What should you do with your site? Everything. Starting from the design of your site. If you visually divide your page into 5 parts from top to down, the second from top will be the most viewable part. I would suggest that you bring your flash banner  there and make it taller. Right now, the words in the top right corner do not bring you much value, because visitors do not tend to look all over website in order to find information they need at this moment. I would also make your re-written urls more consistent. Either let them all end up with .html (better solution) or remove all extensions from everywhere. In other words, if you look at these 2 of your links, choose one way or another, but not both of them: http://www.b2bsr.com/products_services/ and http://www.b2bsr.com/contact.html  even if one means a category, and another – just a page.

 

Btw, it’s not obvious, that you have categories with a separate menus (those yellow on your right). In fact, it’s very confusing. If you have a 1^st tier menu (and you do, on top), make sure, your hierarchy is somewhat near.

 

Also, you have 2 large registration forms on your site. They are enormous. You don’t need so much information to make a quote on your services, and I bet many visitors would simply leave your site because of the so many fields that need to be filled out. Only ask for a specific information that you do need to provide with a quote, and contact email or phone number – more than enough to begin with.  And don’t forget to ad browsing/uploading file option to your form – it may be very handful in your case.

 

Pricing is of course s/b part of your site. If you don’t want to place a price list, which latest reports find very helpful, then, at least, you may place the actual price or price range under the images in your gallery (portfolio), to give people some sense and taste just upfront.

 

You have too little information on your pages. Not to mention SEO optimization, that requires some certain amount of content on each page, but how can you convince your visitors to stay longer? I think, your contents s/b redone for good.  Also, I would’ve eliminated the drop downs on your page. I would replace them with the links. Links on your site, pointed to other pages on your site – is a real plus in terms of link building. However, JavaScript dropdowns are not search engine friendly at all.

 

Instead of having a separate tab “Search our site”, which is not actually a search, but more a site map, I would suggest having a search box on your entire site, each page of it (on your template, if you wish).  Site map is different, and it’s more for the search engine robots, than for real visitors. It should have place on your site anyway, but somewhat in the bottom, close to copyright information.

 

I think, your description of online services is very confusing. I would suggest to rethink what exactly you are offering in this case. And, if you are offering any long-run services, where is your member login for example?

 

From SEO point of view, you should clean up your site. Right now, the metadata on your home page is inacceptable long; many pages miss metadata at all;  many images do not have alt tags; you alexa rating is way too bad (over 9 mlns), you almost don’t have any backlinks (10-20), your domain is set to expire in several month, where it should be pre-paid for at least a year ahead at any given time;  search engine robots visit your site very rare, and so on. It’s a whole bunch of work there, but very doable work. If start doing things correctly, you’ll see the tremendous results in just 3 month, and you can be on top of every other similar firm in your state within a year or less.  Just by looking at your title, I assume, you know this stuff better than me. So, good luck! If you need any help, I can be reached at mynewjob@hotmail.com anytime.

 

Thanks,

Sasha

 

Sapna,

Thank you for your request. Here is what I came up with http://www.newdelhilab.com

1. Your site is done nicely, however, it confuses many search engines, because you can see it in both, flash and non-flash version. At one point, it was crucial to do so, because everybody wanted fancy-shmency flash, but did not want to lose on readability. Right now, most of the b2b companies that are not in marketing or media fields, prefer to keep only non-flash version of website, with a trace of flash banners on the home page, because it’s much easier to optimize, keep up, and promote non-flash version. Even though, Google, one of the major SEs in States right now, proclaimed that it can “read” flash now, it’s not totally true. So, if I were you, I would discontinue your flash version and leave only regular one on this domain. You will receive more publicity this way, for sure.

2. Another idea is to have more than 500 words of content on each page. Cross-links, from one page to another, in content, also help a lot.

3. Metadata – is missing on many of your pages. It’s essential to have metadata listed on all pages correctly, because many 2nd Tier Search Engines base their rating algorithm on it. Google tends to say – “not anymore”, but my experience shows quite the opposite. On your home page, the tag is over 70 characters, which is also a point down. The main rule of metadata are: title s/b no more than 70 characters, description should be no more than 150 characters, and there should be no more than 7 keywords per page. From page to page, the keywords s/b different, and they also has to be found in the content of your webpage.

4. Not all of your images have a proper alt tag. It makes difficult for hearing and visually impaired people who use supplemental software to read your site.

5. Your domain is Aged enough to bring you positive points just by keeping it pre-paid for 3 or more years all the time. However, right now your domain is less than 1 year pre-paid, so Search Engines may look suspicious to it – in other words, this is where you would also lose some points.

6. The number of backlinks (references elsewhere on internet, pointing back to your site) is low (one source said 200, another 500), and the quality of references isn’t high enough either. That’s may create an issue with your Google PR ranking. Although, Google PR rank is not very important, especially if you are not looking to sell the advertising space on your site, the number of backlinks is used as the well-rounded indicator of popularity and relevancy with many search engines. So, you might want to start improving your backlinks map by submitting articles and blogs, bookmarking, PR, and so on. The idea is to have at least 1000 backlinks for each year your domain has been active. Even 500 per year, would work… but you are 9 years behind…

7. Your Alexa rating is fair enough 451,855, however, I would try to lower it to at least 300,000 or even 100,000 and keep it this way. Eventhough, it’s a traffic indicator, It doesn’t cost too much to keep it lower.

8. I would’ve also work more on your social networking. First of all, I think the Linkedin is an optimal social network for your business in particular. Other similar networking places would be Xing, eCademy, Plaxo, Naumz, and so on. Also, i’ve noticed that you have submitted several articles to Digg, but never ended up on the first page. This part can also be optimized, because unless you are on the first page, you are not really anywhere promoting your site. Twitter – could make a real difference to you as well. I would not recommend you to explore. Delicious network is a good source of long-lasting backlinks, as well. 9. Also, when try promoting a site, make sure your visitors come to different pages evenly, not only to the home page. Non of your pages, except for the first one, has any legitimate indication of popularity. This is another point that you should work with.

What kind of internet marketing does your company pay for right now? I might be able to comment on your paid search techniques, as well.

Thanks, Sasha

http://www.first-consumer.com/

Hi Juan,

If this site is focused specifically on the Hispanic market, why would it be on English at all? Just curious.

No matter what is the site orientation, the main goal is to make it findable by your targeted audience, right? And for that purpose solely, it should follow and obey some common SEO rules.

Let see, what lies beneath of your site:

Your site, even the most important – Home page – doesn’t have meta description and meta keywords. You should set up both. Meta description should not exceed 150 characters, the number of meta keywords on each page should be between 3 and 7. The keywords and the description should not repeat from one page to another.

Most of your images do not have an “alt” tag – a necessary feature that allows Search Engines better understand your site. I’ll list you some, from your home page, but I can imagine, you have more images to work on.

images/spc.gif
   
images/logo.gif
   
images/img_spanish.jpg
   
images/menu_01.gif
   
images/menuhr.gif
   
images/menu_03.png
   
images/bluebox_01.gif
   
images/debtconsolidation.jpg
   
images/semoredet.gif
   
images/bluebox_03.gif
   
images/debtaudit.jpg
   
images/callnow.gif
   
images/hr.jpg
   
images/kotz.gif
   
images/readmore.gif
   
images/freeq.gif
   
images/sattisfaction2.jpg
   
images/img_bbbsm.jpg
   
images/esign-1.jpg
   
images/contactus.gif
   

At any given moment, your domain should be registered for more than 1 year. You have a little over 6 months to its expiration date.

Permanent Redirect not found, meaning, that the Search Engines think that www.first-consumer.com and first-consumer.com are two completely different sites and do not combine credits for them.

You have a very low number of the back links. You should work on this more closely. This site, for example, is up only since April 29th, but it’s already have more than 70 high quality links: http://www.BostonJewelryMall.com

You should work more on social networking. Just a little thing like adding bookmarking buttons for Facebook, Twitter, StumpleUpon, and so on will dramatically improve your site’s profile.

Adding a Blog and RSS will also help, but given the fact that this website is not ready from on-site SEO point of view, you should focus first on making it SEO-friendly.

I cannot say, I like the look and feel of this site either. But I am not in Hispanic market – that’s may be why. To me, it looks very busy and there are many boxes that can be seized or removed.  I would also make it more airy – add more white space at left and right. I would use different horizontal banners on each section, and I would rethink use of green and blue at the same time. I would add more graphics to your site, as well. It’s very plain with a lot of text.

I would definitely add a search box on your site. And may be some surveys to make this site more interactive?

Since you are on PHP, it’s easy to rewrite URLs, believe it or not, it’s better to have html extensions than any other extensions.

Good luck!

Sasha