Need your help on our website

[Dither]

Hi there,

We are a company that provides CD/DVD replication services. Don't have much of a budget to buy a lot of advertisment or banner ad to promote our site, just trying to spend our own time to playing around with the keywords, title and description; hoping to get a higher ranking on search engines

Please visit our site at www.hellmanproduction.com, any suggestion or input regarding how we could marketing/promote our site better will be appericate.

Thank you so much for your help.

[kjohnson5576]

Hi,

I took a quick look at your site. I like the design, it's crisp and clean and easy to navigate. I like the music on the artist of the month too. All in all a nice site. Here are some problems I did see though:

Since your URL doesn't have the words CD or DVD you are already slightly challenged. This means you need to really highlight those keywords on your pages. Although I like your site, I don't think it is necessarily ideal for search engines. You have very little text on your home page. The engines tend to look at the text, top middle and bottom of the page to pick out the words you are using to describe your site. Even if you need to put a scrollbar on the site and lengthen your pages to talk about your products, I would do it for the free advertising from the search engines. Also, a nice technical page about experience and what it takes to perfectly duplicate CD/DVD's would be nice.

I looked at your source code. Overall, your title and description are not bad, they maybe could use a little work, but I don't think this is as much of a problem as the text on the page.

You really ought to have a current customer and portfolio list so potential clients can see who you have worked for. Also, a testimonial page is a good idea.

You are now co-promoting works with your clients, which is good, however, have you thought about really co-promoting with clients? Giving away free CD's through a monthly contest would do 2 things for you and your clients: One you can list yourself on the contest sites to bring people into the site. A signup sheet will allow you to collect email addresses and names for future email campaigns and because your contestants voluntarily sign up, you will not be spamming. This also allows you to promote your client(s) at the same time, which is just good customer service.

Then of course, there is PPC campaigns through Google and Overture. These cost money, but may easily be worth the money if you get jobs.

[Dither]

Hi Kent,

Thank you for your advice, we're currently writing some new content for the site. I do have another question for you.

Our website has been up since last October. We have over 100 incoming links to our site and it didn’t take long for Google to find us. Now the problem is the other search engines (Inktomi, FAST, altavista and wisenut). If it takes less than a month for Google, why does it take much longer for the others? Is there anything else we could do?

Thanks again

[kjohnson5576]

Your big sites are Google and Yahoo. They currently cover about 70% of the search engine market. If you have good rank on Google, you have good rank on Yahoo, at least for the time being. Yahoo is dumping Google, so it's still to be seen who and how yahoo is going to rank.

For the smaller engines...they want money just to take a look. I would say if you have some spare change to give..it doesn't hurt. These minor search engines though all have top ranking sites based on Overture or Google Adwords...in which they get a cut...in other words they are PPC sites.

Your better move would be to work towards directories to be listed in. A lot of real small search engines use minor directory listings to power their sites.

So my advice..use paid directory listings for the ranking qualities they provide. Keep at getting your rank raised in Google and keep an eye on how Yahoo acts in the near future.

Kent