Hi Garrett: I liked the review you did on Elke’s site. That’s what I am looking for. I wondered if a revision of how things are would ever bring us up in the PageRankings. I feel we cram to much information on the home page but I don’t know any other way to convey the info our customers are looking for.
Hi Jacki,
First off, who do you want to visit your site? What do you want them to do when they get there? Let these two questions guide both your site design and your SEO tactics. I don’t know the answers to these questions (I have some good guesses…) so I’m going to jump right in to the layout on your front page, and later offer some basic SEO ideas.
(Here’s their site, for those who’d like to see what I’m talking about here: http://www.hud-son.com/)
For now, since it’s working for you, I’d advise leaving all those links on the front page. But you’re going to have to organize them.
Get out a separate sheet of paper. Make a list of all the terms that link on your front page. Then organize all these links into categories. Actually, it looks like you have this organization already figured out on your product pages — there are four rows of links across the top.
Bring those links onto your front page as title headings, and then list the products beneath them. Since you already have pages for these categories, you can have the headings link to their product pages, and list your newest, or sale items underneath on your front page.
Which brings us to the links in red and green on either side of your front page graphic. Some of them are to specific manufacturers, while others are to what appears to be whole categories of product types. This is confusing to me, and I think the wily-nily links here are a result of wanting to push certain items.
This top portion needs to be more navigation oriented, a sort of index for the site so that I know what’s here.
Some of the basic links you appear to be missing from the front page are things like: “About Hud-Son Forest Equipment,” and “Contact Us.” Visitors look for these sorts of links at the top of the page, and that’s where you should put them, perhaps in a bar just beneath the row of pictures.
Also, bring some of the welcome text (which I found almost by accident — it isn’t obvious that the word “welcome” actually links anywhere) to your front page. The fact that the business has been in the family for 4 generations would give a great feel to the site. Don’t over do it. It will only take a couple sentences to give me the right impression.
The final step, once you’ve decided on how to organize your landing page, is to actually design it. For that step spend some time looking around at other forest equipment sites as well as sites that are highly regarded for their design and logical layout (http://www.w3.org/ is one example of clean, logical design. Notice the navigation bar at the top, with the 6 main channels, as well as the alphabetically listed navigation on the left column. I’m not so crazy about their navigation as you drill down though…).
Ok, those are some ideas for redesigning your front page. Be sure to bring some of your redesign elements through to all the pages on your site so that there’s a sense of continuity between pages.
Now let’s look at some basic SEO. Here’s what you’re doing right on your front page — your text links contain keywords. This helps. I don’t know how though.
Ok — there’s some text at the very bottom of your page that needs a little sprucing (heh heh) up too. It’s text that the search engines might like but that is not easy on your visitors. Check out this article on writing copy that’s both friendly to the search engines as well as your visitors: Styling Your Copy for Search Engines AND Visitors
Besides that I don’t see any SEO quick fixes. Nothing in solid SEO tactics is quick anyhow. So make sure that your site is linked to from all the major forestry equipment indexes, and as many other industry-related sites as you can manage. Those links pointing to your site will increase your page rank. I see you’re on sites like the “Sawmill Machinery Web Site Directory” already — that’s good. Try to find more sites like this (if there are any).
If your customers have websites, try to set up links from their sites to yours too.
One other idea — start writing a monthly newsletter. Your articles can be about machine maintenance or news on the logging industry. Then create an archive on your site. This industry-related information will keep you in touch with your customers and if it’s posted on your site it will boost your rankings.
I’ll leave you with one final thought — rather than make sweeping, all-at-once changes, make changes gradually. This way if you notice a major drop in your rank (and you’re certain it happened because of changes you made and not because Google’s having a bad day) you can change things back to the way you had them before.
Garrett French is the editor of murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
