Please can i have some comments?

[chezlouise1980]

I started my business on 25th April and as yet got no sales. Not expecting any for a few weeks as i'm only just being hit by search engines. Can you have a look at my site and give me some comments? Honest critiscism welcome!

www.gorgeous-lingerie.biz

Thanks in advance,

Cheryl

[Ian J]

The most popular search engine is Google and they tend to "sandbox" new sites for a few months so they would have to be exceptional to get anywhere in page searches in that period.

I'm not a lover of black on red text as whilst it may be glamourous and suits the image you want to portray, it's also more difficult to read and this morning with the sun shining through the window I had to highlight the text to read what it said.

I also don't like using the domain name as the company name as it doesn't seem to give off the right vibes to me and implies exactly what you are and I think that when relieving people of money it is always preferable to give off an established sizeable image.

Search engines place great store by the site's title and description and the important keyword(s) should be placed as early as possible in both.

More effective use of exactly the same wording would be achieved by changing your site title from "Gorgeous-Lingerie.Biz - All your lingerie needs met online" to "lingerie online with all of your needs met by Gorgeous-Lingerie.Biz"

The title is about the correct length but contains far too many non essential words which I would prefer to see cut out in favour of more useful keywords. The following could be more useful as a title to attract search engine placement :-

lingerie, keyword2, keyword3 from Gorgeous-Lingerie.Biz

The Meta Description allows for more characters than the title but the same ideals should prevail, cramming a few keywords in early in the description at the expense of "non useful" words. I would also incoprporate the phrase "at discount prices"

The only other point that I would make is to be careful of capitalisation. In your picture descriptions many of the the words begin with capital letters incorrectly.

If you site is going to be "sandboxed" by Google you can use the time to build up a series of inbound links from other sites. The search engine filters will pick out a website that develops loads of links at once and they may well ignore them but if you have a three month wait you could usefully try and build up two or three links per week.

Good luck as you have picked a congested market to sell into with Google having indexed over 3.5m webpages with the word lingerie in them

[MikeH]

Just to elaborate on Ian's point about Google's waiting time. Another argument is that G applies an ageing filter to new sites and also to newly aquired links. This wait can be as long as 10-12 months. Use MSN and Yahoo as a good guide to how you are performing in SERP's and be patient.

Oh Yes and like Ian said get building those links from as many places as possible. However another argument is that relevant links are more important? Welcome to the world of SEO

Mike.

[c2webdesign]

Good post by Ian with lots of good advice.

Looking through the site there are things I like and things that could be improved.

First Glances: A little on the amateur side (and IMHO Im not the greatest lover of osCommerce sites. Not too keen on the colours. Do like the fact that you have brought some of your products to the home page but you have the same product in your main area and in your Specials area - don't waste space. Bring another product in to immediate view.

Delving Further: With a site like this you are going to find difficulty with search engines pbecause each of your category pages contain '?'. Seach engines have a very difficult time picking up any pages with additional characters, e.g. =, ? etc.. This means that really your main page is the focus in optimising and you will lose potential visitors that may have found you through your category pages. Other than that it is easy to navigate and move through your pages from one category to another - but I do not like the change of colour to yellow for adding products to shopping cart. Plus the shopping cart box shows red text on peach background - this is very difficult to see at the best of times.

Search Engines: A lot covered by Ian, and point above, other than that the first page needs the primary work. More keywords needed because I would think 'lingerie' is going to be too generic for a new site to gain anything within the first 12 months (at least). You should be targeting for visited products and bring that to the home page. Lastly I would never recommend a .biz domain name. If you do a search on most generic terms how many .biz domains do you find in general? Not many. This is not because there aren't many .biz names but simply these are not as recognised as .co.uk, .com and .org names for UK search engines.

It's good you have added ALT tags, but why use osCommerce as the ALT tag on your logo - change this to your keywords.

Last of all, and I know I have said before, but PayPal can lower the professional impact of a site. I know it is the cheaper option - and you are able to get hold of your money quicker than WorldPay, but it's not a professional option and sometimes turn people away (which at this stage is the last thing you need).

Good luck with everything though and let us know how it goes.

Dean
C2 Web Design
[url]http://www.c2webdesign.co.uk[url]

[chezlouise1980]

Thanks to all who have had a look at my site. There is a lot of helpful suggestions there. Am constantly changing things and hopefully i will soon get it the way i like it as well as of benefit to me in search engines.

I have recently had an option to purchase without account installed and just need to find a minute to do all the minor code changes. I had previously change the ALT oscommerce to my own keywords, however had forgotten to FTP my editted file!

This is a massive learning curve for me and a very steep one at that, however with the support and encouragement i am receiving, i will get there!

Thanks all,

Cheryl