Website comments please

[shags38]

Hi all,

I would really value any comments and advice regarding this site - I thank you in advance.

I threw this site up for comment about 3 months ago and made some changes based on some feedback, so now I am looking for phase 2 feedback .
The site is now about 5 months old, is made up of about 250 pages & 680 images. The product is Jewellery (costume) and accessories, target market(s) mainly women 16-70 however men also do purchase these items as gifts.

The site has an average of 60 pages crawled daily by googlebot (about 25% of site total pages) and the last 30 days has had 2,348 Queries, 40,000 Page Impressions and 600 Clicks and generates about 30 UV's daily - inbound links are a bit over 17,000 (NONE are paid links - just many, many hours of hard work) - internal links are about 3-4000. From these figures you will see that CTR is the main issue. SERPs vary, ranging fro #8 to #110 with the average for about 30-40 terms being about #30-35 dependant on category or sub-category of jewellery item(s) - the site covers jewellery over a broad spectrum - trying to get page 1 ranking for mare than a couple of specific items is proving difficult (e.g. the word Bracelet has about a dozen search terms, gold, silver, charm, friendship, chain, bead and myriads of cross-bred variants however each individually has few searches - Bracelets has 60,000 "phrase" monthly searches and only 1,300 [exacts] - drill that down to a specific type of bracelet and the exacts can be counted on one had almost.

Anyway I am prattling (again).

The main issues are: 1. not attracting enough visitors and then, 2. low conversion to sales rate.

So I guess structure and other aspects need a lot of work so again I look forward to any comments at all (be brutal please).

site is http://www.dazzlers.net.au
Cheers,
Mike

 

[payattention]

Huge improvement over your last website Shags but as with any website, there a few things you can do to improve it even more.

Firstly, almost ever single page has the same title. You can see this by going to Google and typing in site:http://www.dazzlers.net.au

Each title needs to be unique and specific to each page. Don't keyword stuff unrelated words into your title. If it's a page about bracelets, don't mention earrings or necklaces. You need laser focus for every single page.

For example www.dazzlers.net.au/Bracelets/ has keywords in the title which are unrelated to the content of the page as well as being too long (70 characters max).

Jewellery | Pandora style Bracelet | Necklace | Silver Gold and a meta..

A better title would be
[quota]
Bracelets - Pandora Style Bracelet - Sale Now On! Shop Online & Save
[/quote]

Remember, your title is prime real estate, don't stuff it with unrelated keywords. My targeted keywords are are the beginning of the title but I also have something to compel the visitor to click.

Next is your meta description for each page. They need a little work but lets continue with the bracelet example.

Dazzlers extensive range of handmade jewellery includes Pandora style Bracelets in gold or silver with colourful beads and silver charms - excellent quality ...

Again, your meta description is too long and is being cut short. You only have 150 characters to work with, so make them count.

A better metascription for your bracelets page would be as follows

Looking for bracelets? Dazzlers handmade jewellery include a range of pandora styled designs in gold, silver with colourful beads and silver charms.

This is the sort of thing I wished I understood much sooner when starting out online. Getting to the top of the search engines is only the first step. You need to give searchers a compelling reasons to click you. If it speaks out to them and addresses their search, you'll often get extra visitors who skip past the first result and click you instead.

Next, your header image needs to be a clickable link back to the front page of your website. Don't frustrate your visitors and making navigation too hard otherwise they will leave.

You might also want to make the image smaller as to bring up a lot of your products from beneath the fold. You could quite easily save and inch or more by getting rid of the dead space.

You might want to also consider reducing the size of your pages as I'm getting the scroll bar on the bottom. Users don't mind scrolling vertically but scrolling horizontally is a royal pain in the ass. Your site design should target people who use laptops or small monitors as the vast majority of people are not using 24" or larger or 1920x1200 resolution.

Lastly, I would remove the unrelated links to your 3D websites if you intention here is sell your products instead of just showcasing them. To a potential customer, they might get confused.

 

[payattention]

Definitely need the edit button back to fix up these early morning Engrish mistakes.

 

[coreyg]

a couple of suggestions....

change the colour scheme - grey/black, or green, or blue
Front page should be 2 Pg Dn (Page Down) in length
and less is more

Cheers
Corey

 

[shags38]

Huge improvement over your last website Shags but as with any website, there a few things you can do to improve it even more.

Firstly, almost ever single page has the same title. You can see this by going to Google and typing in site:http://www.dazzlers.net.au

Each title needs to be unique and specific to each page. Don't keyword stuff unrelated words into your title. If it's a page about bracelets, don't mention earrings or necklaces. You need laser focus for every single page.

For example www.dazzlers.net.au/Bracelets/ has keywords in the title which are unrelated to the content of the page as well as being too long (70 characters max).



A better title would be
[quota]
Bracelets - Pandora Style Bracelet - Sale Now On! Shop Online & Save

Remember, your title is prime real estate, don't stuff it with unrelated keywords. My targeted keywords are are the beginning of the title but I also have something to compel the visitor to click.

Next is your meta description for each page. They need a little work but lets continue with the bracelet example.



Again, your meta description is too long and is being cut short. You only have 150 characters to work with, so make them count.

A better metascription for your bracelets page would be as follows



This is the sort of thing I wished I understood much sooner when starting out online. Getting to the top of the search engines is only the first step. You need to give searchers a compelling reasons to click you. If it speaks out to them and addresses their search, you'll often get extra visitors who skip past the first result and click you instead.

Next, your header image needs to be a clickable link back to the front page of your website. Don't frustrate your visitors and making navigation too hard otherwise they will leave.

You might also want to make the image smaller as to bring up a lot of your products from beneath the fold. You could quite easily save and inch or more by getting rid of the dead space.

You might want to also consider reducing the size of your pages as I'm getting the scroll bar on the bottom. Users don't mind scrolling vertically but scrolling horizontally is a royal pain in the ass. Your site design should target people who use laptops or small monitors as the vast majority of people are not using 24" or larger or 1920x1200 resolution.

Lastly, I would remove the unrelated links to your 3D websites if you intention here is sell your products instead of just showcasing them. To a potential customer, they might get confused.[/QUOTE]

Jonathan,

thank you very much for your comments - some really excellent advice. I very much appreciate the time and effort you have put in to assess the site and offer such great comments. I will get to work on these things as soon as possible. I have included "Dazzlers Jewellery Online" in just about every page title because I have that domain registered (.com.au) and intend to move this site to that name as it contains "jewellery" obviously the major keyword and "jewellery online" which is the most searched term after jewellery and is a growth search term according to google insights - not sure if that is a good idea or not as I am yet to have anyone explain how I can move the site without losing all my link juice I have no issue with .net extension of the current site however I think it may be better to have a name with keywords in it. Yes/No ?

I have one question - I agree with the page title comments however I have many of those pages with inbound links - what happens to those links if I change the page title?? Can I redirect a page within a site for inbound links so that the existing links to the current page title automatically get redirected to the new page title?? How is such a redirection done effectively, can it be done in a CMS or does it have to be via ftp? I have many pages I wish to make page title changes to now knowing a bit more about SEO and particularly in light of your comments - the existing titles seemed a good idea way back then

About the page to screen size issue - with the variety of screen sizes out there what screen size would you set your site to? Reducing page width is going to cause a huge problem in layout of the site is it not?

Again many thanks - great stuff

cheers,
Mike

 

[shags38]

a couple of suggestions....

change the colour scheme - grey/black, or green, or blue
Front page should be 2 Pg Dn (Page Down) in length
and less is more

Cheers
Corey

Hi Corey - thanks for your comments. Why is it that you suggest a colour scheme change and why those particular colours? The site initially was black/grey/silver

I will work on the home page length.

cheers,
Mike

 

[shags38]

Definitely need the edit button back to fix up these early morning Engrish mistakes.

wot iz dis edert botoon ov witch u szpeek? I fort mi spellink wus ohkay

 

[payattention]

You don't have to change the URL, just the title. That won't have any impact on your IBL. It may possibly impact on your rankings in the short term but it will give Google (and users) and better indication of what each page is about. In other words, it'll drive more traffic in the long term.

If you move the site, you can simply 301 the old pages to the new ones. A 301 is done in your .htaccess file regardless of your website using a CMS or not.

As for screensize, you don't necessarily need to go and change it now but it's something to keep in mind for future websites you develop. I design my sites with 1280x800 (13" laptop uses) in mind because they won't need to scroll horizontally and people on 24", 27" and 30" monitors don't mind because the human eye comfortably reads about 12 words per line anyway.

The design should also be congruent throughout the entire website. Your home page is OK but other pages blow out in size even at 1600x900 on a 21" monitor. For anyone using anything smaller or on a laptop, they're seeing even less of the website than I.

 

[shags38]

You don't have to change the URL, just the title. That won't have any impact on your IBL. It may possibly impact on your rankings in the short term but it will give Google (and users) and better indication of what each page is about. In other words, it'll drive more traffic in the long term.

If you move the site, you can simply 301 the old pages to the new ones. A 301 is done in your .htaccess file regardless of your website using a CMS or not.

As for screensize, you don't necessarily need to go and change it now but it's something to keep in mind for future websites you develop. I design my sites with 1280x800 (13" laptop uses) in mind because they won't need to scroll horizontally and people on 24", 27" and 30" monitors don't mind because the human eye comfortably reads about 12 words per line anyway.

The design should also be congruent throughout the entire website. Your home page is OK but other pages blow out in size even at 1600x900 on a 21" monitor. For anyone using anything smaller or on a laptop, they're seeing even less of the website than I.

I cannot for the life of me replicate that extended page on my desktop monitors or on a 15 1/2" Laptop - and the URL is different - the page you are looking at is an old version page (try refreshing your browser maybe or cookies).

the url on the screen shot below is http://www.dazzlers.net.au/Pandora-style-Bracelet-Silver-&-Gold-Handmade-Jewellery.html


the new and active url (a few weeks old maybe more) is http://www.dazzlers.net.au/Pandora-style-Bracelet-range-from-Dazzlers-Jewellery-Online.html (because I changed the page title to include "Jewellery Online" keyword phrase.

cheers,
Shags

 

[payattention]

That link is on your front page on the 2nd horizontal navbar.

 

[shags38]

That link is on your front page on the 2nd horizontal navbar.

Apologies - it is not a superceded url - it is active however I cannot make it extend beyond screen size nor encourage a horizontal scroll bar - on my 15 1/2" Laptop it is showing well within the limits of the screen.

Don't Laptops and indeed desktops have a setting for how to show web pages - like size to screen or something like that?

cheers,
Shags

 

[payattention]

Ignore the front page, I'm referring to the deep pages. Are you using an old browser or something? I have the same issue on 13" Mac in 1600x900 (Firefox/Chrome) and Ubuntu desktop (Firefox/Chrome) in same res.

 

[shags38]

Ignore the front page, I'm referring to the deep pages. Are you using an old browser or something? I have the same issue on 13" Mac in 1600x900 (Firefox/Chrome) and Ubuntu desktop (Firefox/Chrome) in same res.

I have checked every page on the site - in this house we have 2 desktops and 2 laptops - and there is not an issue with any pages on any of them. Browser is IE9 in all cases. I will change my browser to Firefox and see what happens.

 

[Data Glasses]

maybe lose the 3d stuff on the front page ?

seems much better than before , you are getting there , are there any sales happening yet ?

 

[snoopy]

Hi all,

I would really value any comments and advice regarding this site - I thank you in advance.

I threw this site up for comment about 3 months ago and made some changes based on some feedback, so now I am looking for phase 2 feedback .
The site is now about 5 months old, is made up of about 250 pages & 680 images. The product is Jewellery (costume) and accessories, target market(s) mainly women 16-70 however men also do purchase these items as gifts.

The site has an average of 60 pages crawled daily by googlebot (about 25% of site total pages) and the last 30 days has had 2,348 Queries, 40,000 Page Impressions and 600 Clicks and generates about 30 UV's daily - inbound links are a bit over 17,000 (NONE are paid links - just many, many hours of hard work) - internal links are about 3-4000. From these figures you will see that CTR is the main issue. SERPs vary, ranging fro #8 to #110 with the average for about 30-40 terms being about #30-35 dependant on category or sub-category of jewellery item(s) - the site covers jewellery over a broad spectrum - trying to get page 1 ranking for mare than a couple of specific items is proving difficult (e.g. the word Bracelet has about a dozen search terms, gold, silver, charm, friendship, chain, bead and myriads of cross-bred variants however each individually has few searches - Bracelets has 60,000 "phrase" monthly searches and only 1,300 [exacts] - drill that down to a specific type of bracelet and the exacts can be counted on one had almost.

Anyway I am prattling (again).

The main issues are: 1. not attracting enough visitors and then, 2. low conversion to sales rate.

So I guess structure and other aspects need a lot of work so again I look forward to any comments at all (be brutal please).

site is http://www.dazzlers.net.au
Cheers,
Mike

The site is still a dogs breakfast. Too much text, too much crap, no clear sales pitch. Get some decent shopping cart software and start again.

 

[enjoi]

The site is still a dogs breakfast. Too much text, too much crap, no clear sales pitch. Get some decent shopping cart software and start again.

(Y)

 

[shags38]

The site is still a dogs breakfast. Too much text, too much crap, no clear sales pitch. Get some decent shopping cart software and start again.

Snoopy - it is OK, no need to be diplomatic, go ahead and express your thoughts openly & honestly

Seriously though, what exactly is it that you like so much about the site?

 

[shags38]

maybe lose the 3d stuff on the front page ?

seems much better than before , you are getting there , are there any sales happening yet ?

Thanks for your comments Spacey - I will lose the 3D links, they have done their job.

cheers,
Shags

 

[shags38]

(Y)

what does (Y) mean?

 

[shags38]

maybe lose the 3d stuff on the front page ?

seems much better than before , you are getting there , are there any sales happening yet ?

Spacey - left this out in my previous reply: Yes the site is generating sales - I am kinda pleased given that it is only 5 months old and Jewellery is so very competitive. I see the site as being at stage 2 of 5 stages of development so still a long way to go.