Help Needed with Family Business Website

[Dan]

I have designed a web site for our family run business selling aloe
vera products. It has been up for roughly a week and has had very
little traffic. (30-40 hits). I have used the hosting company, 123-reg,
to submit the website to 10 different search engines including google.
I have also taken advise about meta tags in the pages (not sure whether
they are right). I registered with google adwords but have only got one
hit from that.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
The Website is www.aloe4life.net

Thanks, Dan.

[Chaddy2222]

Dan wrote:

I have designed a web site for our family run business selling aloe
vera products. It has been up for roughly a week and has had very
little traffic. (30-40 hits). I have used the hosting company, 123-reg,
to submit the website to 10 different search engines including google.
I have also taken advise about meta tags in the pages (not sure whether
they are right). I registered with google adwords but have only got one
hit from that.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
The Website is www.aloe4life.net

Thanks, Dan.

I had a look at your site.
It's not bad.
I would suggest running it through the W3C validator @
http://www.validator.w3.org and fixing any errors.
Also, I believe that what may be preventing your site from being
indexed by the search engines is the Flash Splash Page that you are
useing as an intro too your website.
It may also be the reason why you may or may not have recieved much
traffic too your site.
I would suggest dumping the splash page and taking your visitors strate
to the content.
After all, that's what you want them to read isn't it?
I hope that helps.
--
Regards Chad. http://freewebdesign.cjb.cc

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Dan wrote:

I have designed a web site for our family run business selling aloe
vera products. It has been up for roughly a week and has had very
little traffic. (30-40 hits). I have used the hosting company,
123-reg, to submit the website to 10 different search engines
including google. I have also taken advise about meta tags in the
pages (not sure whether they are right). I registered with google
adwords but have only got one hit from that.
30-40 hits in the first week is pretty good, actually.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
The Website is www.aloe4life.net

See: http://k75s.home.att.net/show/aloe4life.jpg

My default background color is purple. You've not assigned one in the
body { } of your CSS.

Page has horizontal scrollbar in my browser window. Look into fluid
design.

Get rid of the splash page. What does "IF PAGE DOES NOT LOAD CORRECTLY
CLICK ABOVE" mean? Above where?

Remove the HTML comment markers from your CSS, the <!-- and the -->

Much better, move all your CSS to one external style sheet.

Use a real email address instead of the AOL address; it makes you look
like an amateur.

You are using images for headings. Search engines don't interpret images
as text. Use <h1>, <h2> etc, properly styled with CSS.

--
-bts
-Warning: I brake for lawn deer

[Jim Moe]

Dan wrote:

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
The Website is www.aloe4life.net

I have Flashblock installed. So I see an almost empty page when your
site loads. Others will see even less if there is no Flash plugin, say,
for instance, search engines.
There is no content for a search engine to index. Certainly nothing that
echoes the <title>, keywords or description.

"IF PAGE DOES NOT LOAD CORRECTLY CLICK ABOVE"
Above what?

<sigh>"Click here..."</sigh>

--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

[RobG]

Dan wrote:

I have designed a web site for our family run business selling aloe
vera products. It has been up for roughly a week and has had very
little traffic. (30-40 hits). I have used the hosting company, 123-reg,
to submit the website to 10 different search engines including google.
I have also taken advise about meta tags in the pages (not sure whether
they are right). I registered with google adwords but have only got one
hit from that.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
The Website is www.aloe4life.net

Great to see you followed some advice and ditched the splash page. More
hints:

Validate your pages - especially add a doctype element.

You have empty script and style elements in the head - if they aren't
used, ditch them.

You have an onload attribute in the body element that calls a function,
yet you don't have the function defined anywhere. It does absolutely
nothing other than cause an error - remove the entire onload attribute.

Your products such as drinks do not list the net volume of the contents
- say 250ml, 500ml, 3litres. Why would I pay £18.00 for a product when
I don't even know how much I'll get? The 'info' button provides some
promotional text, no real information.

The pop-up images are pretty useless. There is no point in providing a
popup if all you do is open exactly the same image in a new window.

Cheers, :-)
--
Rob

[Chaddy2222]

RobG wrote:

Dan wrote:

I have designed a web site for our family run business selling aloe
vera products. It has been up for roughly a week and has had very
little traffic. (30-40 hits). I have used the hosting company, 123-reg,
to submit the website to 10 different search engines including google.
I have also taken advise about meta tags in the pages (not sure whether
they are right). I registered with google adwords but have only got one
hit from that.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
The Website is www.aloe4life.net
Great to see you followed some advice and ditched the splash page. More
hints:

Validate your pages - especially add a doctype element.

You have empty script and style elements in the head - if they aren't
used, ditch them.

You have an onload attribute in the body element that calls a function,
yet you don't have the function defined anywhere. It does absolutely
nothing other than cause an error - remove the entire onload attribute.

Your products such as drinks do not list the net volume of the contents
- say 250ml, 500ml, 3litres. Why would I pay £18.00 for a product when
I don't even know how much I'll get? The 'info' button provides some
promotional text, no real information.

The pop-up images are pretty useless. There is no point in providing a
popup if all you do is open exactly the same image in a new window.

I agree. To add to that:
Add alt text to your images, so that people useing Screen Readers and
or text only browsers, or people who have images disabled for faster
loading can still have an idea of what is in the image.
Also, on the page where you have the extra information, you could maybe
list information including how much the convertion rate will be, for
exampole, you could have the price of a particular product in USA $'s
and or maybe some sort of currentcy converter.
HTH.
--
Regards Chad. http://freewebdesign.cjb.cc

--
Rob

[Albert Wiersch]

As others have said, making sure you have good HTML is a good step to take
for search engine reasons as well as for your visitors. A quick check
reveals you don't seem to have a lot of HTML issues. There is one minor
issue of not using &amp; where you should have, though:
http://online.htmlvalidator.com/php/....aloe4life.net

--
Albert Wiersch
"Dan" <al**********@a ol.com> wrote in message
news:11******** **************@ f14g2000cwb.goo glegroups.com.. .

I have designed a web site for our family run business selling aloe
vera products. It has been up for roughly a week and has had very
little traffic. (30-40 hits). I have used the hosting company, 123-reg,
to submit the website to 10 different search engines including google.
I have also taken advise about meta tags in the pages (not sure whether
they are right). I registered with google adwords but have only got one
hit from that.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
The Website is www.aloe4life.net

Thanks, Dan.