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Step 5
This is probably the most important step of all. It is ensuring that your site design is fundamentally done right! This means that on page SEO factors are done right and that keyword research is applied to your site structure and site layout. It is to ensure that in terms of site layout the maximum conversion rate is obtained and that the home page indicates the most possible information relating to what the user can expect when hitting the site. In other words usability.
Now lets look at your site from a critical point of view.
SEO onpage factors for www.maxima-training.com
Page Titles
Page titles like Welcome and Home needs to be fixed.
When looking at your site layout you need to utilize your keyword research and plan it before you continue any further. I will use a real estate site layout as an example.
Lets say I have a real estate portal site. My main keyword is real estate. Therefore my homepage title will be “Real Estate – my company name”
My following keywords that I will target will be related to Real Estate and will form the first level of depth of my site. For example, Real estate news, Residential Property, Farms, Empty stands, Business etc.
The second level (depth) of the site will be pages located under their different categories. Eg Residential Property will have the following pages under it. Property in Gauteng, Property in Limpopo, Property in Mpumalanga etc.
The third level for Gauteng will be, Property in Johannesburg, Property in Pretoria, Property in Heidelberg etc.
And so forth. I think you get the idea. Now these keywords will be your page title. Unless you wish to rank for welcome and home
Meta tags
Meta tags are only used by directories like Ananzi.
The Meta tags should be unique for every single page in the site. Currently they do not exist and I suggest that you fix that ASAP.
Keyword meta tag only contains keywords that are actually present on the page. Do not put other keywords in there. If you have only 4 or 5 keywords in the keyword meta tag that is fine. The same rule applies to the description tag except that it will probably only contain the main keyword as is in your page title.
NOTE: Never target more than one keyword phrase per page! This also goes for the content of each page. If need to target another keyword, create a new page!
General
Remove all onpage style sheets and link to them externally. The same goes for JavaScript.
Remove all spaces from your URL’s and replace the spaces with Hyphens. These links will be read or published as dead links by some directories and search engines.
Use H1-H5 for page headers and avoid using class to assign specific styles. You can modify H tags just as easily in the style sheets but it will tell the spider this is a header and this is what the page is all about.
Use <Strong> or H2-5 for sub sections of your content.
Ensure that you have a robots.txt file in your root. Even it doesn’t exclude anything, it ensure that your site stats shows real indexing errors and not a SE looking for the file not finding it. The same goes for a favicon.ico
Utilize contextual links from inside your site context to link to relevant external and internal pages.
There are more stuff here, but lets just focus on the basics first
Conversion strategies and usability
Enough said about your home page?
Lets look at the current page saying home in the page title.
* Ask yourself what is the conversion indicator. Is it a registration of some sorts, perhaps it is a booking? What would you define as a conversion
* Now look at a standard website’s hotspots.
- They normally run from under your page header top to bottom in a zig zag formation from left to right. So your most valuable information that will lead to a conversion milestone must be located at the top left under the page header.
- Your site’s page header is located in the middle which will cause confusion to the visitor. This would have been fine but you have a search that is very prominent on the left and a contact us which is very prominent on the right.
- Prominence of areas of your site is also very confusing. Almost everything is equally prominent meaning that the visitor is not guided specifically to conversion milestones. Although this is bad for conversions it is extremely bad for the visitor, who immediately feels overwhelmed by everything being equally important and there are so many of them, that he will choose to leave. I am sure that your site analytics tool will confirm this.
- Main navigation is located at the far top, this is particularly bad as it has major usability issues especially with the current design of the site. The visitors normally expect a main navigation menu underneath the page header and the contact us link at the far right corner.
- Left navigation menu is cramped and it seems like all the links are in bold. This plays a major role in terms of emphasizing conversion factors on the site. Make it softer and les intimidating.
- Avoid using bullets for the navigation. Bullets should exclusively be used to highlight conversion factors within content. Users normally scan through a page and would read bulleted lists with more attention. They should be short and act as the salesman would act in a shop. Highlighting sales pitches.
- The main content area of every page is the center part. Especially on a home page. This should summarize the main sales points to the visitor. Remember a visitor scans through a website, they do NOT read everything.
- Internal pages are loosing the framework of the site, this is particularly bad. A site cannot continuously change its appearance as the user needs to quickly be able to find his way. You will definitely loose your visitors after the second click, guaranteed.
- In terms of your refer a friend functionality, I highly recommend you place that up higher and to the right side of the page. Hiding it at the bottom right is disempowering it completely.
I think this is enough for now, I really do not want to make it tougher on you.
I would love to give you more information and there is a lot more that you can easily do, but I seriously recommend that you look at the above first.
In the mean time if it is at all possible also get approval from your boss to purchase article submission software and news and press release software. I also recommend that you submit your website to directories as soon as you have fixed your site. I seriously doubt it that your site will be excepted into Dmoz or similar human edited directories the way it is designed atm, so rather wait before you submit to them, only until you have fixed the issues I pointed out.
This is probably the most important step of all. It is ensuring that your site design is fundamentally done right! This means that on page SEO factors are done right and that keyword research is applied to your site structure and site layout. It is to ensure that in terms of site layout the maximum conversion rate is obtained and that the home page indicates the most possible information relating to what the user can expect when hitting the site. In other words usability.
Now lets look at your site from a critical point of view.
SEO onpage factors for www.maxima-training.com
Page Titles
Page titles like Welcome and Home needs to be fixed.
When looking at your site layout you need to utilize your keyword research and plan it before you continue any further. I will use a real estate site layout as an example.
Lets say I have a real estate portal site. My main keyword is real estate. Therefore my homepage title will be “Real Estate – my company name”
My following keywords that I will target will be related to Real Estate and will form the first level of depth of my site. For example, Real estate news, Residential Property, Farms, Empty stands, Business etc.
The second level (depth) of the site will be pages located under their different categories. Eg Residential Property will have the following pages under it. Property in Gauteng, Property in Limpopo, Property in Mpumalanga etc.
The third level for Gauteng will be, Property in Johannesburg, Property in Pretoria, Property in Heidelberg etc.
And so forth. I think you get the idea. Now these keywords will be your page title. Unless you wish to rank for welcome and home
Meta tags
Meta tags are only used by directories like Ananzi.
The Meta tags should be unique for every single page in the site. Currently they do not exist and I suggest that you fix that ASAP.
Keyword meta tag only contains keywords that are actually present on the page. Do not put other keywords in there. If you have only 4 or 5 keywords in the keyword meta tag that is fine. The same rule applies to the description tag except that it will probably only contain the main keyword as is in your page title.
NOTE: Never target more than one keyword phrase per page! This also goes for the content of each page. If need to target another keyword, create a new page!
General
Remove all onpage style sheets and link to them externally. The same goes for JavaScript.
Remove all spaces from your URL’s and replace the spaces with Hyphens. These links will be read or published as dead links by some directories and search engines.
Use H1-H5 for page headers and avoid using class to assign specific styles. You can modify H tags just as easily in the style sheets but it will tell the spider this is a header and this is what the page is all about.
Use <Strong> or H2-5 for sub sections of your content.
Ensure that you have a robots.txt file in your root. Even it doesn’t exclude anything, it ensure that your site stats shows real indexing errors and not a SE looking for the file not finding it. The same goes for a favicon.ico
Utilize contextual links from inside your site context to link to relevant external and internal pages.
There are more stuff here, but lets just focus on the basics first
Conversion strategies and usability
Enough said about your home page?
Lets look at the current page saying home in the page title.
* Ask yourself what is the conversion indicator. Is it a registration of some sorts, perhaps it is a booking? What would you define as a conversion
* Now look at a standard website’s hotspots.
- They normally run from under your page header top to bottom in a zig zag formation from left to right. So your most valuable information that will lead to a conversion milestone must be located at the top left under the page header.
- Your site’s page header is located in the middle which will cause confusion to the visitor. This would have been fine but you have a search that is very prominent on the left and a contact us which is very prominent on the right.
- Prominence of areas of your site is also very confusing. Almost everything is equally prominent meaning that the visitor is not guided specifically to conversion milestones. Although this is bad for conversions it is extremely bad for the visitor, who immediately feels overwhelmed by everything being equally important and there are so many of them, that he will choose to leave. I am sure that your site analytics tool will confirm this.
- Main navigation is located at the far top, this is particularly bad as it has major usability issues especially with the current design of the site. The visitors normally expect a main navigation menu underneath the page header and the contact us link at the far right corner.
- Left navigation menu is cramped and it seems like all the links are in bold. This plays a major role in terms of emphasizing conversion factors on the site. Make it softer and les intimidating.
- Avoid using bullets for the navigation. Bullets should exclusively be used to highlight conversion factors within content. Users normally scan through a page and would read bulleted lists with more attention. They should be short and act as the salesman would act in a shop. Highlighting sales pitches.
- The main content area of every page is the center part. Especially on a home page. This should summarize the main sales points to the visitor. Remember a visitor scans through a website, they do NOT read everything.
- Internal pages are loosing the framework of the site, this is particularly bad. A site cannot continuously change its appearance as the user needs to quickly be able to find his way. You will definitely loose your visitors after the second click, guaranteed.
- In terms of your refer a friend functionality, I highly recommend you place that up higher and to the right side of the page. Hiding it at the bottom right is disempowering it completely.
I think this is enough for now, I really do not want to make it tougher on you.
I would love to give you more information and there is a lot more that you can easily do, but I seriously recommend that you look at the above first.
In the mean time if it is at all possible also get approval from your boss to purchase article submission software and news and press release software. I also recommend that you submit your website to directories as soon as you have fixed your site. I seriously doubt it that your site will be excepted into Dmoz or similar human edited directories the way it is designed atm, so rather wait before you submit to them, only until you have fixed the issues I pointed out.
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