Comments on my website

[Mitchp]

Hi Guys,

I've been working on a site with a friend for a fair amount of time now.

I am trying to get the site ranked much higher in google, with some success which was then followed by a dramatic drop!!

Anyway, just wondered if some of you guys could pass comment on design readability etc and also if anybody has any experience in search engine optimisation can you see some obvious 'tricks' i'm missing.

Hope you all had a great christmas by the way

Thanks in advance.

Mitch

Edited by Mitchp on Tuesday 15th January 22:23

Edited by Mitchp on Thursday 31st March 09:36

Edited by Mitchp on Thursday 31st March 09:38

[hawkaye]

Mitchp said:

Volunteer Africa, Volunteer work in Africa, Volunteering in Africa, Voluntary work africa, Volunteer with Wildlife in Africa, Wildlife Projects, Volunteer Medical projects, work on medical projects in Africa, Volunteer gap year, Volunteer jobs abroad, Volunteer project, Volunteer travel in africa, Volunteer work abroad, Volunteer work south africa, Wildlife Volunteer, Africa Volunteers, Gap year volunteers , Gap year africa, Volunteer gap year projects, Volunteer organisations, volunteer organizations, Volunteer overseas, Gap year south africa, Career break africa, Namibia volunteer project, Namibia medical volunteer , Zambia medical volunteer , Lion project africa, wildlife project africa , Volunteer in south africa , Volunteer in Namibia, Volunteer in Zambia , Volunteer in Kenya , Conservation Africa , Medical volunteer, Medical Volunteer Programmes , teaching volunteer, volunteer conservation work abroad , volunteer conservation work africa , Volunteer education south africa, Teaching volunteer projects in Africa , Teaching abroad, Work with children in Africa , Help in Africa, Volunteer abroad , gap year travel , gap Year, career breaks , adventure travel , adventure expedition , adventure, expedition , sports expedition , sports adventure , working holidays , medical volunteer

tut tut, Google will not like that..

Just had a quick look, like 30 seconds, and this will pretty much guarantee low rankings.

Edited by hawkaye on Tuesday 15th January 22:27

[Mitchp]

oh right, thanks, I will remove that right away!! although that did seem to help initially.

One thing that strangely had a big impact was the installation of google analytics. Three days after setting it up we dropped from page 4 to page 18 on some search terms!!

[hawkaye]

I'm not too sure how google analytics work, I'll speak to the marketing team at my work tomorrow and see if there's any obvious problems.

As for your site dropping in rankings, I know google have upgraded their pigeons recently. I also know that google likes clean, valid, html. Your homepage (that's all I checked) is not far from it and it shouldn't take too long to correct

[Mitchp]

yes, I hear google have recently upgraded to wood pigeon!! lol, thanks for your comments and if you do manage to talk to your marketing team.

Cheers

Mitch

[slapmatt]

I have installed Analytics on several Web sites and never seen an adverse effect on ranking. To be honest, there isn't much difference between page 4 and page 18, as 99.9% of users don't go past the first page of search results.

What keywords are you targetting?

[LordGrover]

Just a quick comment, most of the orange text is clickable, except on the right; 'Why Amanzi?'.
I expect pages to be consistent so it's a bit odd when everything orange is a link except those that aren't - iyswim.

[Mitchp]

slapmatt said:

What keywords are you targetting?

Keywords are pretty much as removed from the hidden div
- Volunteer Africa, Volunteer work in Africa, Volunteering in Africa, Voluntary work africa, Volunteer with Wildlife in Africa, Wildlife Projects, Volunteer Medical projects, work on medical projects in Africa, Volunteer gap year, Volunteer jobs abroad, Volunteer project, Volunteer travel in africa, Volunteer work abroad, Volunteer work south africa, Wildlife Volunteer, Africa Volunteers, Gap year volunteers , Gap year africa, Volunteer gap year projects, Volunteer organisations, volunteer organizations, Volunteer overseas, Gap year south africa, Career break africa, Namibia volunteer project, Namibia medical volunteer , Zambia medical volunteer , Lion project africa, wildlife project africa , Volunteer in south africa , Volunteer in Namibia, Volunteer in Zambia , Volunteer in Kenya , Conservation Africa , Medical volunteer, Medical Volunteer Programmes , teaching volunteer, volunteer conservation work abroad , volunteer conservation work africa , Volunteer education south africa, Teaching volunteer projects in Africa , Teaching abroad, Work with children in Africa , Help in Africa, Volunteer abroad , gap year travel , gap Year, career breaks , adventure travel , adventure expedition , adventure, expedition , sports expedition , sports adventure , working holidays , medical volunteer

[jagnet]

Don't try keyword stuffing, especially with hidden text. It a) won't help you, and b) will likely get you banned altogether -- if the search engines don't spot it algorithmically, you can be certain your competitors will. You did the right thing in removing that.

Some suggestions for your on-page SEO:

Title -- your title element on the homepage is far too long. This is one of the most important on-page factors you have at your disposal, so don't waste it. General rule of thumb is no more than 6 words if you can avoid it, and don't repeat any of the words. Each additional word reduces the inherent value of the others, so keep it to a minimum. On your inner pages you often repeat the same title over and over. Create a unique title for each page, focused on the main keywords for that page.

Meta keywords -- does absolutely nothing for your rankings, so just remove them and save the bandwidth.

Meta description -- doesn't help your rankings, but is sometimes used by search engines for your description in the search results. With a well constructed page and good content you can often get better descriptions by not using the meta description and relying on the snippets created by the search engines instead.

Text in images -- don't. The main page heading "leading UK specialist in..." is currently an image with alt text. You would be much better off dumping the image, and include the text within an H1 heading tag. Keywords within heading tags H1 through H3 are given additional weight in comparison to standard text, which in turn is given more weight than image alt attributes. Same goes for your star5.gif and star7.gif images - there's valuable text hidden in there at the moment.

Entire paragraphs linked -- not sure what the idea there is with the linked text in your left hand column. Link the title above the text, not the text itself. That way you're maximising the value of each word in the link anchor text. Much like the page title element, more is not advantageous.

Non essential pages -- for pages which aren't going to rank well in the search engines (eg, forms, contact us, terms and conditions, etc) consider adding rel="nofollow" on internal links to these pages. These links will then be ignored, and thus any incoming link juice will be diverted to those pages that do count.


Above all, don't try to use your homepage to target all your keywords together. Use individual pages for each keyphrase.

[Mitchp]

wow, thanks jagnet, thats some really useful information there. I will spend some time implimenting that and see what happens! Thank you.

Cheers

Mitch

[Mitchp]

Hi Guys,

Those changes had a huge impact - we are now on PAGE ONE for many of our keyword searches! (so thank you very much for your comments)

One thing that really helped was to remove the map from the front page that used css (display:none) to hide details on each project (purely for functionality of the map)

I have read that display:none is a big no no when it comes to seo as it is assumed you are stuffing keywords. I have moved the map onto a sub page and dissallowed google from indexing it while i find a better way of making it work.

Instead of display:none i am now setting the containing div to 0px height with overflow:hidden. here -

Do you think this will now be okay with google? Can you think of a better way of doing it?

Cheers

Mitch

Edited by Mitchp on Monday 4th February 22:36

Edited by Mitchp on Thursday 31st March 09:37

[njsolutionsuk]

Good going for doing it yourself.

Just looking at the homepage , the length of the page going down is very long... think about the average user and how big their screen is along with their desktop resolution... 17" - 19" - 1024 x 768. Scrolling through reams of text can be annoying.


The fact theres three navigation menus all to different areas could confuse a basic web user - this too could be another area of consideration.

Personally i'd drop the Amanzi logo from the page footer - its branded at the top of the page theres no real need for it at the bottom. This will also shorten the page fractionally

Make the ATOL Protected image a link whether it be to a certificate from ATOL or to their website, something informative is always nice just incase the user clicks.

Theres lots of other areas heres just a few just to work on.

Edited by njsolutionsuk on Monday 4th February 23:05

[hawkaye]

Looking good Mitch, will give it a proper look over tomorrow night

njsolutionsuk said:

Just looking at the homepage , the length of the page going down is very long... think about the average user and how big their screen is along with their desktop resolution... 17" - 19" - 1024 x 768. Scrolling through reams of text can be annoying.

[pcwilson]

Hate to be a pedant, but there's a spelling mistake in the Thoreau quote on the Advice and Information page (or is that the Information and Advice page ;-)

Really like the site though btw.

[Mitchp]

haha, thanks

[Mitchp]

came up with a cunning workaround for the issue with the map by using an iframe. Seems to do the trick and it looks like google is ignoring it, which is what i was hoping for