How to Get More Visits to Commercial Web Site 6

[JohnBates]

hi web site designers,

I've built this little web site for my father's business

http://www.lonestartruckingsafetyconsultants.com

but we are not getting any hits.

I thought I did a good job of choosing good meta names.
The little web-hosting service assures me they have registered the site with google plus 2 unknown search engines.... 2 months ago.

Should I go ahead and pay to have my site registered with Yahoo or another good search engine?

Just looking for advice and suggestions. Thanks for any feedback. John


<meta name="Keywords" content="trucking safety consultant, trucking, driver safety training, simulated DOT audit, DOT compliance, commercial vehicle safety, trucks, truck safety, accident prevention, safe driving practices, insurance, loss-control consultant, loss control representative for insurance firms, risk evaluation, risk control, risk control services, loss control survey, on-site loss control survey, loss control engineer for commercial vehicles, commercial vehicles, surveys to prevent losses for commercial vehicles, Lone Star, Johnny Bates, Ft. Worth, Fort Worth, Texas">

<meta name="Description" content="We help trucking firms reduce their insurance costs by conducting on-site safety audits and implementing affordable safety programs.">

 

[ChrisHirst]

your hosting service is talking BS. you don't register with search engines. read the threads in here and you'll find lots of information and places to get more information.
Right now if you use PFI (Paid For Inclusion) or PPC (Pay Per Click) you would be better taking your wallet out and setting fire to it, because your site won't convert well when any visitors arrive.

ok I'll dismantle your site a bit and be harsh in the process.

the design is terrible. It doesn't portray a professional attitude. If that was a shop front door you were thinking of buying from would you bother going in ?
The navigation bar with red links on blue? it's almost impossible to read. The Logo style header looks very "retro" (70s) and your doctype (HTML 3.2) was superseded in 1997.

The copy (wording) reads as like a printed brochure you would hand out to prospective clients AFTER you explained the benefits.
It is focused on US and what WE do rather than how your services will benefit the client.
As the meta keywords are ignored for ranking purposes by the major search engines, the body copy is the place for your keywords and phrases, but used in such a way that the copy makes sense and helps conversion, not just stuffed into the text for the SEs.
Make more use of your client list and your certification. In there will be a valuable source of phrases that searchers will be using when looking for your services. A quick check for keyword suggestions comes up with about 20 or so decent phrases to target which should bring in at least 20 targeted visitors a day and I would guess converting 1 or 2 a week would show a significant ROI.

In short what I'm saying is to look at your site with the critical eye of a visitor NOT with the view of a proud father on graduation day. If it looks like "no expense was saved" when creating it, the same will be thought of the rest of your services. However it doesn't have to cost a million dollars to look like a million dollar site.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[JohnBates]

Thanks ChrisHirst.

"the design is terrible. It doesn't portray a professional attitude.....The copy (wording) reads as like a printed brochure." Knew that already. IF we can get visitors, I may redesign the site. It was done on the cheap ($0) and quickly; basically the only info I had was his printed brochure.

Anyway, your first paragraph actually addresses my question...have a star.

John

 

[ChrisHunt]

IF we can get visitors, I may redesign the site

How will you know that you're getting visitors if they don't become customers? As Chris says, they're very unlikely to do so on the basis of this site. They're unlikely to find you anyway without some copy for the engines to get their teeth into.

Redesign is your most urgent requirement, I'm afraid, advice available in forum828 when you're ready for it.

When it comes to submitting to search engines, take a look at

http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/index.php

- it goes through the whole process. To see how you're doing already, try the "SE Saturation" tool at

http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm

- it appears that you're listed in Alta Vista and All the Web, but not Google or Hotbot. That's easily fixed, it's your SITE that's going to take some work.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[Hondy]

The design does need a tweek, but i suspect you don't have the applications to help. If you can, have a look at MacroMedia Dreamweaver, the design element will fall away quite quickly.

Also you could consider using a template, try templatemonster.com, you can pick up a cheap templates for virtually nothing which removes 90% of the design phase.

Stick at it!

 

[hotfusion]

Other suggestions:
As each of your pages seem to be fairly small, why not create one sigle longer page instead, with an index and anchors to subtitles within the page if necessary? That way there will be far more content on that first page relevant to your company for the search engines to look at, and it would remove all that annoying and unnecessary clicking on the part of the visitor.
You could also look at removing the counter javascript from the page and linking to an external .js file instead to further increase text relevance.

The same idea applies to your meta tags - most are unnecessary, just keep the title one and the keywords one, and limit the keywords to about a dozen or so, and don't repeat any of your words. It seems, however, that search engines no longer look at the keywords meta tag anymore anyway.

Also you have no character definition, and the page won't validate using W3Cs service as there are many coding errors - I suggest putting the following meta tag within the header: (this is a fairly universal character set for sites written in English.)
*************

<meta http-equiv="content-type"content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1">

*************
Also I suggest using the more recent transitional doctype, as follows:
*************

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"

*************
I hope this helps a little.


Regards, Andy.
**************************************
My pathetic attempts at learning HTML can be laughed at here:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/andyspatch/index.htm

 

[JohnBates]

Thanks for the tips Hondy and hotfusion !

Thank you for giving some time to help this middle-aged beginner.
John

 

[Hondy]

No problem!
Hotfusion has some good points there, the headers that he refers to are put in by DreamWeaver too. I'm not on commission it's a good product, honest!

Most hardcore coders will tell you it's better to write the code manually, but the likes of you and me should stick to the wysiwyg editors like DW. I'm sure you could get hold of a free editor if you ask about, you'll need one to tweak your template if you buy one.

 

[hotfusion]

I would also suggest you learn to write HTML code, and the editor I prefer is Textpad - better than the old Notepad in as much that there is no memory limit, and the tags are colour-coded to help highlight coding errors.

Getting to grips with HTML, something I'm currently trying to do myself, would be useful in modifying or cleaning up the code produced by these wysiwyg editors, so if you are planning to do much work with web pages I strongly suggest you have a look at it. It isn't programming code, or anything hideous like that, and the basics are fairly simple to learn as long as you get a decent book on the subject.

Regards, Andy.
**************************************
My pathetic attempts at learning HTML can be laughed at here:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/andyspatch/index.htm

 

[Foamcow]

The latest versions of Dreamweaver actually produce pretty good semantic code if you don't make them do otherwise.

There is also the temptation to succumb to the allure of Dreamweaver behaviours and layer animations. This will bulk up your code too.

The trick is understanding what makes good code and using the editor of your choice, WYSIWYG or otherwise, to produce it.

http://www.foamcow.com

"I'm making time

 

[IBACFII]

ChrisHunt.

marketleap!! Thats very very cool thanks you get a star..

IBACFII

 

[Dollie]

Hotfusion:

The same idea applies to your meta tags - most are unnecessary, just keep the title one and the keywords one, and limit the keywords to about a dozen or so, and don't repeat any of your words.

I think the description meta is as important as the title. If your site gets indexed, if there is not description tag, miscellaneous text from your site will be picked up.