heavychocolate.com

Name of Site/Business: Heavy Chocolate

Site's Main Purpose: Ecommerce/Sales

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

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



Additional Comments/Notes
I am having trouble understanding why this site doesn't come up in google under any search other than heavychocolate (?) I need help!

Steve

looks great

you don't have a title tag, great place for keywords

alot of your text is in graphics, SE's can't read pictures and pretty much ignore alt tags, which are missing.

I would also put more text near the top of the page with keyword or 2 in it

no robots index tag

how long since you went live, you might just still be in pergatory

....your pagerank is 3, the pagerank of the sites linking to you is 0, build more backlinks with higher page rank

you are indexed on the other se's , yahoo and MSN

[ Message was edited by: mj1256 07/20/2006 07:15 pm ]

Nice site, however, I can't help but think the main age may be a bit long, have you considered splitting it up a little bit into different pages?

Not too sure about the header, rather than the beans, I think chunks of the chocolate itself could be more appealing.

On 'our varieties' the bright blue background is out of the sites colour scheme, the layout is sound though.

Also, I like the 'tell a friend' part of the site

Thank you so much for the replys, I really appriciate it!

The site has been live for quite some time now, but it was recently re-designed less than a year ago.

Quick question in regards to what mj1256 said....how did you find out the pagerank?

Anymore recommendations are greatly appriciated!
Steve

evolutionyz, just do a googlemonster search for pagerank tool, i use the one that came up second in the results, hopefully its is the same position when you do your search.

I agree that the page could be broken up. I'm old school, 1995 is old school Ha Ha, but I try to stay away from the scroll on my main page. I put bullet points to get my purpose across and at least 100 words of text, then I link to other pages that have the detailed info in a sub directory. It used to help in the rankings, the spiders used to look for links and wanted to drill down into sub directories for content related to the upper levels. It used to give the main page more relevance. Don't know if this is still true, but I still think it works. ANYONE???,

Hi, try viewing your site via a text browser.

Problem one - redirector on home page.
Problem two - navigation (change to search engine friendly text links or, back it up)
Problem three - text trapped in graphics with no alt attributes
Problem four - waffle, be precise about what you are saying
Problem five - lack of chocolate! How can you even say the words:

Old Dutch Milk

French Vanilla Dark

Gourmet Bitter Sweet

High Sierra White

without adding CHOCOLATE!

and also, reflect the content of each page in the page title and meta area.

I'm not saying anything different than what others have said previously - I just couldn't resist posting in a CHOCOLATE thread!

Also, look carefully at the pages that are currently indexed in google with redirectors on them... they could be taken as "backdoors" - along with potential "duplicate content" issues, you might want to be cleaning up a bit.

Consider implementing a 404 error page to cater for errors and deleted pages and deleting files from the server that are not in use.

Thanks Excell for the advice, I will look in to all of it when I get back from vacation on Thursday. I was wondering about the last thing you said about the old pages being redirects to our new pages... I assumed that it would be best to keep them and have them re-direct to the new pages/site because they were still indexed by the SEs. But you are saying to compeltely remove them all together? You think the SEs might concider them to be "sneaky" and ommit them all together?

Also, you say to view in text browser...what do you mean? View--Source ?

If you look at redirectors from a visitor point of view you might agree that they are annoying, because they click on one thing and land on a page that quite often has info different from their search term...I cater for this by using a global 404 error page to inform them simply that the page may have moved or been removed with an invitation to click through to explore the website...in this case I use the robots "noindex, follow" tag and keep things as simple as possible so that the pages will drop out of the search engine index over time and the website will not lose the visitor.

An alternative way to handle this is to use 301 permanently moved set up via htaccess on the moved pages.

A search on google should put you in the right direction to find out about text viewers/browsers...maybe search for the term - lynxviewer - and go from there, you will gather much valuable information about search engines may be viewing your website.

Cheers!

to test in a text browser...
Download the opera browser, under view/style click on emulate text browser, it works great

you should be testing in different browsers anyway

Just wanted to thank you guys/girls for the reviews, I really appriciate it. I love this forum, I am learning sooo much!!

I have been getting a lot of other people (not on this site) that are saying that this type of chocolate is doomed to fail in the retail world. People are saying that this is more of a business gift than anything. I disagree with them, I think if I can get it nicely into the seaches that it will gain speed. There are only a small handfull of other companies that even sell the 10lb bars and they sell Ghirardelli and Hersheys brand chocolate....the Guittard is so much better quality! Maybe I can donate a bar to the forum, not sure how it's get split up though

Steve

i'm sure your aware of this, but here goes.

perishables and items that cannpt be subjected to extreme temperature changes do not make a good mail order product. During the summer your customers will get melted chocolate, even if it is marked perishable, keep refrigerated. Unfortunately, i speak from experience, sigh

This can be a customer service disaster.

i hope you fare better

mj1256,
What you say is true. Our best selling season is fall thru spring. Summer is pretty dead, although we have pretty much perfected our cold pack system. We have tested it by packaging a bar like it's being shipped, then putting it in the trunk of a car (hot), and keeping it there for 3 days. The bar survives just fine, in fact we've never had anyone get a melted bar! We always use a 2-3 day service. I think you are right about the web-order perishables, but I see tons of other chocolate companies on the web. I am going to look into maybe getting some affiliates to help for the rest of the summer. I am working with our web designer to fix the problems that you guys all mentioned. Thanks again!

I don't understand how we can have plenty of links on msn, yahoo but only 1 on Google.....are we still doing something wrong?

if your talking about pages indexed
its my understanding that on google you need separate title and meta tags on everypage and that they need to relate to the content of each page.

it looks like you have the same tags and titles on everypage

the other search engines don't care about this as much as google.

if your talking about sites that link to your site, google doesn't list them all


and you still have alot of important placement of keywords and content trapped in graphics as stated in a post above

Are you still doing something wrong?

Yes, you still have all links leading to yourdomain.com redirecting to yourdomain.com/index.asp. You are destroying your Google PageRank.

Your links within your site to your home page should be to www.yourdomain.com not www.yourdomain.com/index.asp and any calls to yourdomain.com should be redirected to www.yourdomain.com not www.yourdomain.com/index.asp

awesome thanks I'll have that fixed asap!

I fixed everything that you guys told me about, anything else that I missed? I seriously appriciate your help!

I had the /index.asp fixed on the main page, but do I need to have it removed from every page? Are there any resources that explain why it is bad to have the /index.asp?

[ Message was edited by: evolutionyz 10/07/2006 12:43 pm ]

"do I need to have it removed from every page"

Ummm, that is the most important thing of all.

If this is a problem for you then you may be able to do a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file from /index.asp to /.

This would fix all your pages in one hit.

"I had the /index.asp fixed on the main page". This is a waste of time. In fact, you should not have a link to your "main" page from your "main" page. You should delete it.

As to resources, do a search in Google for "Google Pagerank internal link structure".

Hope this helps

"I had the /index.asp fixed on the main page". This is a waste of time. In fact, you should not have a link to your "main" page from your "main" page. You should delete it.

I meant that when you are on any of the pages of the site and you click the home button you are directed back to www.domain.com instead of www.domain.com/index.asp like it was before.

I googled the 'internal link structure' like you said, but the only thing I can come up with is that by having .asp after the url, (ex: www.domain.com/ordering.asp).....the search spiders see that page as a compeltely different page than www.domain.com/ordering. It calls it a 'ghost' page because they are the same page but it is viewed by the SE as 2 seperate. So we should remove the .asp from all URL's on our site, correct?

Thanks!