barclaysauction.com

Name of Site/Business: Barclays Auction

Site's Main Purpose: Fun/Leisure

Please Review the following:
Does the home page sufficiently convince people to go further into the site?

Does/can the site achieve its main purpose?

Navigation. Is it clear and easy to understand?

Appearance/Attractiveness

Is the Contact, Privacy and Legal information adequate in relation to main purpose of site?

Search engine marketing. Can the pages be reasonably well indexed by search engines?



Additional Comments/Notes
Im am new at all this, just bought a auction website, purchased a host plan, and bought a Domain name, I also submited my site to yahoo, msn, all the free search engines. My site is still not showing on any of the search engines, and I submited to many search engines in the last week.
Dont know what im doing wrong.
Like I said, im new to all this.
Im adding new catagories today, is there anything else I can do, besides paying money, to attract more people to my site?
Or will I only be in msn search, yahoo, etc.. if I pay big bucks?
Thanks for any advice you can offer me, it will be very appreciated.

Linda

e-Bay have pretty much got that market covered.

If you wanna get rid of something quick and be guaranteed a very large number of potential eyeballs then that is the place. That said, if you can find a market niche then you might be able to make a living at it.

Bear in mind that you don't want visitors, you want customers.

Point well taken about trying to run a very general auction site. I do think there are lots of niche opportunities available though. You probably want to pick one and concentrate on it. Be a big fish in a small pond, so to speak.

Keywords - you have 25 total keywords. Not bad. But ...
- You used the word "auction" or "auctions" (seen by googlebots as the same word I think) 8 times, That may well be seen as keyword spamming.
Most of the remaining keywords are so generic as to be useless to you.
- You instructed search bots to "INDEX/NOFOLLOW" so you have told them to make note of your home page but nothing else if I understand the ramifications of NOFOLLOW.

Title will be of more help with search engines if it contains more than your URL.

Can't give any more information since for some reason none of your pictures will load for me. Could be the firewall I'm behind at work. Hard to tell since you've disabled right-click so I can't get details. FWIW, when I'm on the net for real I will absolutely not remain on any site that does that. You need to think carefully about exactly why you have it blocked and if aggravating some potential users is worth whatever gain you expect.

Design is good and clear, navigation is very easy although I would add a link to registration to that yellow/orange image in the upper left corner ("registering is quick & easy etc.)

"Add us to you favorites" and "Make us your home page" options at the bottom look a little too "pushy"... Surfers know how to do that themselves.

The counter at the bottom says nothing about time period - 3000 viewers since when?

And I have to admit that disabling the right button functions is VERY annoying and inconvenient.

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX,NOFOLLOW">
The NOFOLLOW is really hurting your Internet presence. The site has good subpage content, let the search bots read them.

The pages do have naturally good optimized content. If you are allowed to edit the page titles, you can compete. "MP3 Voice Recorder 256MB" might only get 5 searches a month, but thats still 5 potential sales a month.

Hi,

And thank-you all for your replys.
I have asked my web designer to remove the right click disable, also I do have the buttons on the right hand top corner of the homepage, to "register", site map",etc..
I do own the site, but it is very hard to add or change the content of this website because its all FTP, I have to usualy get the web designer to take care of that for me.
Although I did get a offer to upgrade my website from my web designer, and the new site would cost allot extra money, but then I would be able to change and add anything very easy.
Im thinking about taking that offer, I wouldnt lose my members, and wouldnt lose all the present auctions.

My counter on my website was working great, I had a little over 8000 hits in the first week, then my website went down when I tried to upload items using the FTP editor, and my website had to be reloaded.
I then lost all my hits on my frontpage counter.
This happened a few times, and now my counter will reset itself to 0.
Im trying to get the counter fixed, but it just doesnt seem to work right.
Like I said, its not easy to add a differant counter or reload it.
This is why im thinking about upgrading my website, although the only thing I dont like about the new auction site, is the graphics!
They are blue ice look folders.
Not much color.
Thanks for all your suggestions, I have already contacted my web designer to take care of a few of them.
I too dont like the right click disable, and have already contacted help to remove it, although it still isnt done yet.
Sorry about that.
I now get about a average of 500 hits a day, but like I said, my counter keeps reseting itself, and I think that the counter needs to be removed.
Thanks everyone for your helpful sugestions, I really appreiciated them all.

Take Care

Linda. ( Barclays Auction ).

Linda - I normally dislike hit counters on web pages. A basic feeling of, "Why should I care how much traffic you get and I know you can see detailed information without that stupid counter thing".

HOWEVER, with your site I think it may be a real selling tool for potential customers, both buyer and seller. If I have items for auction with you, I'm very interested in seeing if anyone is visiting or not. In fact, you might want several counters to display, for instance, hits the past 30 days, hits the past 180 days, hits since Noah launched the Ark.

Have you considered making a strong attempt to get yourself known is one more niche markets? For instance, I sell pottery. If your auction site became known as a good place to list pottery and attracted some buyers, I'd be inclined to list pieces with you.

I think it would need to be a niche (or several) where you were knowlegable and maybe even did newsletter articles or contributed on specialty forums so it should be things you enjoy learning more about and had something to contribute to the online community that shared the interest.

If anyone requires assistance in optimizing their website meta tags for search engine recognition, I would be happy to help. ...meta tags can be VERY effective, and I've had a lot of success with them.

[ Message was edited by: OAC 09/08/2006 05:18 am ... Reason: All help to be made through the forums ]

>> Bear in mind that you don't want visitors, you want customers. >>

Remember, customers were once 'visitors'. No 'visitors,' no customers.

[ Message was edited by: T. J. Daniels 09/06/2006 12:18 pm ]