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Please tell me what you think

donnafdonnaf subscriber Posts: 1
edited January 2008 in Website Critique
My website has been up for about three weeks now. I am not getting the traffic or sales I thought I would. Any suggestions? www.cutecribs.com

Comments

  • WebsitesUnleashedWebsitesUnleashed subscriber Posts: 4
    Three weeks is a short period even with active SEO and SE submissions. It could take a few months before you start seeing SE traffic.
    From a brief look at your site, none of your pages have meta information (Bad). There`s a bunch of pictures in place of text on the left (Bad). Your pictures have no alt text. You also have minimal pictures supporting your content besides your site design (Bad). None of your pages seem to be designed for search engines. The page outline and division of pages don`t fit a distinct keyword/topic besides designs, order, and about us. Try making a few pages about your cribs rich with content so search engines can index you.
    Your looking at a slow path to traffic if you don`t have an active SEO plan or website marketer working on your website. Definitely advertise your domain name off-line to compensate for the slow indexing of SE`s. It`s a great domain name! I think the domain name will definitely help the branding of your site and business.
    You do have a page rank of 2 which seems odd if you say your website has only been up for three weeks. Your time line would fit with the last PR update but it makes more sense if it was up for awhile before that. I`d assume you`re getting little traffic, which makes it extremely hard to analyze your conversion rating.
    After a quick froogle search on cribs, I was wondering if you researched your prices. Your cribs seem high in price without enough information to justify them. I can understand buying a high quality and high priced crib but your website leaves me wondering how you can charge so much. Give the visitor reasons. My suggestion is instead of having a single page about every crib with a tiny few sentences, make individual pages for each crib with a main page listing them all with that short description.
    Despite your SEO issues, your overall appearance looks on-par with any other small business site in your industry. I`m not your target audience but I think it would look good to them. Just be careful about using the pictures in-place of text.
    Regards
  • donnafdonnaf subscriber Posts: 1
    Thanks. That gives me some idea of where to start with some changes. I did do alot of comparison research most hand painted cribs go for about $1800.00 to $2500.00. I guess I need to justify the pricing. I am not much with the lingo for websites (I paid someone to do the layout but now I am on my own) but any more suggestions I would greatly appreciated.
  • WeblineWebline subscriber Posts: 13 Bronze Level Member
    Your code also has no doctype, and several validation errors. The small black text on the left is almost too small to read, and you have too many different fonts on your page.3 weeks is not much time to achieve traffic, as was stated, unless you are doing a lot of advertising. Build inbound links, submit to niche/related directories, etc., to help increase traffic.
  • XpressPrintXpressPrint subscriber Posts: 0
    Donna,
     
    My initial reaction to your website was to think cute and girly, i assume based on the images and style of your pieces that would also be your theme.  I`m a novice in web design and/or SEO, however there are a couple things i do know that i`ll point out.
     
    #1.  MetaTags (as Colin pointed out) - you need meta tags and keywords that describe your website.  Since spiders look at this information to help list your website - its very relevant information to include.  Use words that potential customers might base a search on and use that information to create your title, description, and keyword base.  That alone would help draw traffic.
     
    My recommendations: 
    title:  Cute Cribs for Cute Kids - Buy Custom Baby Cribs Online!
    Keywords:  Cute Cribs, Cute Baby Cribs, baby cribs, baby beds, cribs, cradle, custom cradle, custom baby furniture.
     
    #2.  Delete image "Welcome to our website" on homepage - replace with text "Custom Hand Painted Baby Cribs" - make it a Headline and Bold it.  Search engines will see that and it will help place emphasis on search engine placement.
     
    #3.  Revise the homepage text.  For example, "Welcome to Cute Cribs. We specialize in custom hand painted baby cribs." could read "Cute Cribs (or CuteCribs.com) specializes in custom hand painted baby cribs."  Revising the text into an informative style will also help with your SE rankings as well as possibly increase your traffic.
     
    #4.  Tag all of your images with relative words that might be used in a search.
     
    This would be a start.  I hope this helps, if you need further assistance feel free to email me.
     

    Full-Color Printing

     
    XpressPrint1/22/2008 8:14 PM
  • donnafdonnaf subscriber Posts: 1
    Thanks Jimmy,
    That is exactly the feedback I need. I was not to sure about the content when I wrote it, and as I said I know nothing about websites or spiders and such. Any other suggestions are greatly appreciated.
  • NuevolutionNuevolution subscriber Posts: 30 Bronze Level Member
    Three weeks is a short period even with active SEO and SE submissions. It could take a few months before you start seeing SE traffic.
    After a quick froogle search on cribs, I was wondering if you researched your prices. Your cribs seem high in price without enough information to justify them. I can understand buying a high quality and high priced crib but your website leaves me wondering how you can charge so much. Give the visitor reasons. My suggestion is instead of having a single page about every crib with a tiny few sentences, make individual pages for each crib with a main page listing them all with that short description.
    Despite your SEO issues, your overall appearance looks on-par with any other small business site in your industry. I`m not your target audience but I think it would look good to them. Just be careful about using the pictures in-place of text.
    Regards

    First of all, That is not true... Aside from all the coding errors, once they are fixed and the Keywords, Description and content is added to the web site, the web site can start ranking within 32 to 48 hours. There are a few things that need to be added but over all the web site has potential.
    My suggestions would be to have all the errors fixed and submit the web site to all search engines. Another suggestion would be to add a sitemap and a robot.txt file to the web site.
    As for the price on the cribs.. I am assuming that you do not have any children of your own, but when you`re a parent to be the price is the last thing you look at... I paid $2,700.00 for my first child`s crib. Ask me if I`d do it all over again... Yes
    Best Regards,
  • vwebworldvwebworld subscriber Posts: 40
    Hi,
     
    As noted above you certainly need to have a unique description for each web page and use h1, h2, h3 tags for important heading/keywords.
     
    In addition to the suggesstions above, I also suggest not to repeat the same flash animation on every page. You could replace it with  static image or even eliminate it and free up some valuable space for important marketing text.
     
    I also agree, that it does not take long to get the search engines to react to your targeted keywords..after you mkae the appropriate changes. But depending upon how competitive those words are...will affect where your site will appear in search results (1st page...10th page...etc).
     
    You are on the ist page on Google for "cute cribs", which I would expect because it is your domain name. You do not need to use cute cribs in you web page titles (because it is your domain name), instead focus on your other targeted search terms.
     
    To help with your search results you also need to work on off-page SEO like links form other sites (in-bound links).
     
    ~Roland
  • donnafdonnaf subscriber Posts: 1
    Thanks. I am working on new content, this gives me some great advice of what I need to put in there.
  • MrbusinessMrbusiness subscriber Posts: 8
    Tough to read, but love the concept.  Maybe a sharper looking site might attrack more high end buyers.
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