Could someone look at our site?

[anniev]

We have been up and running for about 3 months now.. we have some affliate links and recipocal links..... we get around 350 hits a day.... so far we have gotten 3 orders....We arent out on the web searches like we need to be and we do google, overture, and knoodle pay per clicks..Our SEO is salesboost.net..and we have direct submitted to inktomi, fast and askjeeves...If someone could look at our site and see it from a different angle.. maybe this will help us...thanks.and I am so glad I ran across this forum. Our site is www.outdoorfuntimes.com

Please feel free to look at our code...and design

[ihelpyou]

Hi Anne, Nice site!

I don't believe they are a SEO at all. They sell 'tools' etc, but I don't believe they can do SEO. I've never heard of them.

Anyway, you need a SEO copywriter to re-write pages. You cannot target 'one' word keywords. Your title tag needs work. Much work needs to be done. :)

[TechEvangelist]

Hi anniev

Your site has some pretty severe performance problems for any user on a dial-up connection. I ran it through Dr. Watson at http://watson.addy.com/.

Your home page contains 373k of code and images. The practical limit if you want a page to download and render on a 56k dial-up modem in 10 seconds or less is 60k. You can stretch that to 100k, but anything beyond is going to stress your users. Dr. Watson estimates your home page download time on a good dial-up connection at 106 seconds -- much too long.

You need to strip most of the images from your home page and perhaps do a better job of optimizing any that you keep. The Pocket Chopper image is 28k. The California Chopper image is 38k. And so on, and so on. . .

Without even looking at the SEO issues, I suspect your biggest problem is user abandonment.

I hope this helps. Bloated page weight is the one of the most common issues I deal with.

By the way, it is a nice looking site.

Craig

[Quadrille]

You are placing large pictures in small spaces - so the visitor gets the worst of both worlds ... they must wait while the large picture downloads ... then they get to see the small one!

Resize all your pictures for the space they are to fill, and optimize the file size too - most of yours will end up as 10-20% of their current download times. Also, the picture size must be included in the code, or loading will be uneven and unreadable until the last image has arrived.

No great shakes to fix that, but it is a major issue ... what does your site look like to your customers?

Too many designers have beautiful huge flat screen broadband macs, while many potential customers have small, old, dialup PCs.

Every designer should be forced to work on such equipment, until they take an oath not to disrespect potential wage payers! ;)

[TechEvangelist]

You should ALWAYS test a site using a dial-up modem connection. That is the only way you will get a chance to see what the majority of users will see regarding performance.

Make sure you clear the browser cache between tests, because images and pages will get cached, which distorts the test results. You want to focus on the first impression a user gets when visiting your site.

The first impression a user gets is site performance. If they don't stay long enough to get past that, you never get a chance to impress them with design or content.

Craig

[anniev]

Everyone suggestions are very good....I need to check the other forums out to see how to do all that was suggested..Our trouble is i think we are on a templete that some of our web hosts other clients are on and if they change ours they have to change everyones...(which is what i found out on the robots txt.file..and the shopping cart problem)....As far as our so called SEO we thought we paid for..... They do give us the tools.. we apparently dont know what we are suppose to so with them.. any suggestions for a good SEO out there.. and one that is reasonably priced..This SEO submits our site every first of the month ( which is coming up) so we dont have much time.. And I dont know how to fix what you all are talking about....I thought your title tag works if you have your main keywords in the title.. which we do.. " Outdoor gear for Fun Times" As far as the image size... is that a matter of going into our image program and resizing them there and then reloading or changing the size in the html img source...? Thanks again for everyones help.. and bring it on...if theres anymore... but make it understandable for a novice like me............annie
www.outdoorfuntimes.com
:confused:

[ihelpyou]

They 'submit' your site where exactly? Every first of the month? LOL Too funny.

No need to submit it at all. That sounds like what they scammed you into paying for. There are tooo many scams out there. You must be careful.

Further; If you think a true SEO expert is cheap,... another thing coming. You get what you pay for Anne. This has almost zero to do with submission of any kind. What do you need 'tools' for? No tools are necessary. A true SEO does all of that for you.

[anniev]

We really got scammed.. both on our web hosting..etc..We fell for an informercial on selling on ebay and then a sales call...paid over 5,000 for them to do our web site,showcase, banners etc.... they failed to tell us about the hidden costs.. advertising...merchant acct fees.. so many fees...and then we were left to be on our own after 6 coaching calls....We are going to try and pull ourselves out of this tho.. and it looks like it going to cost some money....whose the best out there.????..I am so leary of anything now. But i think we have a good web site....took everyones advise about our images being to big... going to work on getting those under 5,000 bytes and then they should load faster....thanks for all the advise , annie
www.outdoorfuntimes.com

[ihelpyou]

I think most of us have been scammed Annie. Don't worry about it. Just do your research/homework first the next time. :)