SEO Review... Expert Assistance?

[slwebsolutions]

I was hoping to have my site reviewed by some of the experts that use this board.

I am the president of Secure Link, our site is:

http://www.slwebsolutions.com

I was hoping to get some tips, opinions, and suggestions on improving the sites overall performance in search engines. We are aggressively building links but are looking for ways our site itself can take full advantage of our link building investment. Currently we are ranked well for many keywords in MSN, but not as much as google or yahoo. Please, anyone that can offer any useful information, your feedback would be appriciated.

Main targeted keywords on index:
Business Website Hosting
Free Domain Registration
Secure Link


Questions:

1. I am interested in compressing images/flash further to make pages smaller, anyone have any useful tools?

2. I am also interested in the best optimal keyword densities.

3. Should I use alt text on images? Mention Keywords? Some places say yes, others say no.

4. How do my Meta tags look?



Please share your success!

[Kevin3824]

I am far from an SEO expert but I can answer a couple of your questions you posed. I am just a coder so my opinion of your site is through the eyes of a coder not really that of a graphic artist.

You do however offer web design as well which is the business I am currently starting on my own.

First off I believe you should always use alt tags on images to describe the image. The alt tags themselves if left blank or omitted from an image will fail validation on the W3C. Screen readers and search engines cannot read images. They can however read alt tags on images.

Your web page lacks a DOCTYPE and fails W3C validation on 23 points without it.

It also failed validation on css as well with 9 errors in that. If you are using CSS then why are you using tables for positioning?

The use of Flash objects on your page requires IE users to click the object to activate it. There is a work around for that with JavaScript which is freely available.

If the search engines cannot read or interpet Flash or images then why would you want to go down that road in the first place. Flash is very bandwidth intensive as you probably know already.

Overall the site seems pretty well organized in general though even if it looked like it had one of those sitepals on the top of it. I cannot understand why anyone would want one of those except to read the content of the page to a person that cannot see it in the first place.

As far as content goes I did not see anything on the site that implied a level of security of data on the servers or emergency recoveroy if something catastophic should happen.

I did see the standard 99.9% gauranted uptime and 24/7 support. That would not make me feel my data was secure if the datacenter got flooded for example.

I saw no mention of how often the servers are backed up or if they had UPS on them all or if they had Halon protection from fire or even if they were in a temperature controlled environment.

I saw no mention of how many websites are on a particular webserver or the specifications of those servers either.

It seems to me in fact that you not only have your packages broken down by transfer and storage space but also by how many domain names a person has. My current host would not have a problem with me parking several hundred domain names on one account. In fact they would allow me to have them all open the same web page if I wanted it that way.

They have actually created a virtual domain for me at no extra charge where I had one account and two separate websites hosted on it.

There is no mention of what level of SSL is included that I found or who the SSL provider was. Does that mean if I open an account with you I can tell you who I want my SSL from and what level of security I want on it for 5 dollars a month to you. Hmmm might be interesting.

Which commercial shopping carts do you support?
Do you provide any shopping carts if so are the limited in anyway?

All these thing should be covered in your website.

I believe your site needs some more attention on the infrastructure of it as well as the SEO side of it.

[trackerm]

The number of results from a Google search
Business Website Hosting 79,500,000
Free Domain Registration 31,200,000
Secure Link 144,000,000

Unfortunately your key words are the most popular on the net! And nobody is going to put in 'secure link' unless they are looking for your company specifically.

Look, I'll be honest. I dunno how you optimise for those generic sort of key words. I remember last time I was looking for a domain host... searching on Google was a waste of time. The one thing I needed that was different to a lot of domain hosts was one that had servers in Australia so I could use those key words. As for a domain host in the usa thats basically the same as a few thousand others... maybe you have to pay lots in advertising. Maybe SEO is too difficult in your case.
Perhaps it might be better to spend more on advertising and more on making your site hold people once they stumble onto it.

Thats an area that I might make a suggestion or 2

The picture at the login point is a computer. The help desk Live 24/7 is a cartoon. Maybe you could change them to photos of real (not models) people. It might make your site more 'friendly'.

You need to find what will diferentiate your site from thousands of others that are not similar but exactly the same... except for a few cents per month contract price...


Mark

[slwebsolutions]

I am aware of the w3c compliant issues and the CSS issues. These are 2 things we are working on solving right now. This is the type of suggestions I am looking for. Not as much toward my offers. I am handling my traffic well and turning good numbers in ROI. I am simply looking to improve the amount of free traffic that makes its way to our site. My customers are happy, and my shoppers are buying.

This is the business I choose and love and have been doing great as far as being competitve in the market. I am asking if there is any experts that have any tips on improving my situation, not changing it. My keywords will remain and my link building is agressive. I just need to improve my site reacts to search engines. I figured many SEO experts would be interested in chatting on this board given the PR of statcounter and the fact there links can be followed from the board.

[howard]

I almost didn't post this because:

1. I'm not a SEO expert
2. I don't always follow my own advice

I did post this because:

1. I'm not big on flash
2. Someone should let you know about the flash

For reasons off topic in this thread, I do most of my surfing with flash disabled. Because of that, the top quarter of your page is blank in my browser window, with no explanation as to why (no "to view this site properly, please enable flash on your browser" or some such).

I would drop the flash from your front page completely. Your flash is, by the way, nice to look at, but even on my dsl connection, takes ten seconds to load. That translates to a minute and a half on my old dialup connection. Replace it with a 100px tall image banner with your logo or something.

The "meat" of the page is what's below the flash, and I want to look at it first. Your thread topic mentions SEO review. I don't know a search engine that reads flash content. To paraphrase Vincent Flanders, people come to websites not to view your beautiful content, but to solve their problems.

What to do with the flash? Put it in a section on "we do flash" and make a link to it (so the visitor can decide or not to load the flash). "We build websites with flash content. To see an example of that, click here (opens in a separate window)."

As to keywords, I've heard that if a keyword appears in the meta (google will disregard it) that it should appear in the text on the page. One way to do that is include it in alt tags. Alt tag "stuffing" with excess keywords is supposedly bad, as is hidden text (same font and bg color).

Matt Cutts says (paraphrasinig) if you build good content, they will come. Check other sites offering what you do and see what they do.

You already know all this I hope, and are just seeking confirmation. I also hope I have not tread too heavily on your flash. I just thought you should know.

[slwebsolutions]

I do understand, but our flash has brought many web design projects and hasn't seemed to penalize us since it is only a portion of the page. All links can still be reached without flash. I appriciate your feedback but the flash stays!


Anyone else, please comment!

[mascot]

Google bots now are efficeint enough to crwal flash links ,so dont you worry bout that

[webado]

Originally Posted by mascot

Google bots now are efficeint enough to crwal flash links ,so dont you worry bout that

Not true. They can only find text and links in flash if it is built using external text files - maybe xml . If it's plain flash like what you can build with Coffeecup Firestarter that's just as if it were an animated gif - a binary file that robots can't read. Text, links appearing it it, forget it.

Don't you count on bots being able to read flash and make useful sense of it.

Build the site to work without flash FIRST for the purpose of having text and basic navigation, then add flash as an embellishment if you like, for human visitors. The same way you'd be adding javascript bells and whistles.