Website, from zero to hero

[Pap_sak]

Hey Pap Sak

Done nicely with word press!! Like it a lot.

Chuck in my 2 cents. I dont know what darts are??? But soccer boots i do.....

In the landing page "soccer boots" is not mentioned, boots yes but not soccer boots. If content is king then should you not consider soccer boots, or athletic boots, track boots etc. If i was to google then i would google IE "soccer boots" for my son.

Just constructive please, if i a have missed the boat, (which i normally do born in Zim ) then so be it. Good luck with a great site

Yup, you are right Garthu - trying to get the "home" page (which uploads the latest content), to my "about page", which is static - and I can load it with keywords - might have to add a contact page if it gets too long.

My wife knows, she has www.321design.co.za, but now I am being "man with map", and not asking for directions...

[Pap_sak]

First sale done!

The grand sum of R87. Good thing I have a few other things in the burner! Will now start playing with a few prices, at the moment they are the same as in store, they might need to be tweaked a wee bit down to start seeing steady sales.

[Dave A]

Where there's one, there's more.

The grand sum of R87. Good thing I have a few other things in the burner!

At least it's the sort of thing you can develop part-time. Aren't you glad you didn't bet the farm and give up your day-job?

[Dave U]

Site looks nice. Some SEO tips:

Is it possible to remove the phrase "Powered by CubeCart" from your page titles? It's a waste of title words. That leads me to a more general problem: shorter titles are better. Here's the title for one of your product pages:

Dartsdirect : : Darts, Flights, Shafts, Dart accessories and equipment from Harrows and Datadart - Harrows Assassin (Powered by CubeCart).

Now, in this case, you may hope to get some long tail traffic from people searching for the actual name of the product, Harrows Assassin. So ensure that's the first word in your title and strip out some of the other words when it comes to products pages. E.g. someone may search for "Harrows Assassin Dart", so definitely keep dart in the title. But can you imagine someone searching for "Harrows Assassin Equipment"? I do realise that there may be limitations in the software you're using, which force you to keep long titles.

Since your site is very niche, you can get very far with some proper on-site optimisation. That, combined with some inbound links, will result in a very good search engine placement.

Please let us know if you tried changing your titles and if it had positive results.

[Dave U]

I had another look. Here's another SEO tip:

The headings on your pages are not actual headings. For example, this is the heading your one of your product pages:

<p class="txtContentTitle"><strong>Harrows Assassin</strong></p>

Now, even though this gives the appearance to users of being a heading, search engines don't know. You need to use proper heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) before search engines will know that it's a heading and therefore very important.

Once again, some might say that inbound links are more important, but especially for a niche site you can get a lot of mileage out of these kinds of optimisations.

[Dave U]

One more tip:

Hopefully your software has some kind of "Friendly URL" facility. Instead of using http://www.dartsdirect.co.za/index.p...od&productId=5 as a product page URL, it should be http://www.dartsdirect.co.za/Harrows-Assassin, for example. In my experience, google does give some weight to keywords in URLs.

[Pap_sak]

Cheers for those comments dave's.

Dave U - unfortunatly cubecart is not very seo friendly and cannot do anything about the unfriendly URL's. I have to pay to remove the (powered buy Cubecart) - at the moment I am still very much trying it out. Darts and dart equipment are the main keywords I am looking at hitting, with a minor in Harrows! Searching in google (za) it seems to have worked or at least I am up there or thereabouts. I was very interested in your comments about headers - I have always just used font size and not <h1>, will start to do so in future on other sites, unfortunatly this backend does not all that.

There will be more sites, next one I want to experiment with is wordpress with the shopping cart plug in.

[FreelanceZA]

Hey Pap_Sak

Well done! I had a look at your maxsport.co.za website. You have a good selection of products. Have you thought about making it easier for your shoppers to purchase via your website?

[Pap_sak]

Hey Pap_Sak

Well done! I had a look at your maxsport.co.za website. You have a good selection of products. Have you thought about making it easier for your shoppers to purchase via your website?

At the moment I am just playing around - but the idea is the maxsport website is just for the shops, highlighting products that I feel are good value..but then would link to the direct websites for specific sports and for people to buy online.

I have been pretty lazy latley, but will hopefully get more up this week...

Still not sure if one "big" website is better than many small - sports specific websites - is better. I settled on the latter - any ideas?

[Dave A]

Still not sure if one "big" website is better than many small - sports specific websites - is better.

Given the cost of an extra domain, why not do both?