http://www.fix-it.org

Tutorial / hardware site.
Any suggestions ?
Ideas ?
Are the colors okay?
Layout okay?
Anything that needs to be changed?

Graphics colors are a bit hard on my eyes. I prefer more contrast. Text stands out well in most cases which is the important thing.

Looking at your source, you have way to many repeats of the same words in keywords. For example, "fix-it" is repeated several times as a stand alone word. This is as opposed to having "fix-it" and "fix-it stuff" which the SE see as two different but related words. You might be penalized for spam for the repetitions. You might also want to add some keywords and phrases with "fix it" without the dash. i.e. "fix-it,fix-it stuff, fix it, fix-it stuff" would be considered four relevant but not duplicated keywords/phrases. Home repairs, computer repairs, are others you might want to look at.

I like that you let people look at the forums before registering. I hung around a few minutes and checked some out. I didn't try to reply but even if you have to register to reply (which I would require in your case since you obviously have a lot of posters); you've still given a casual surfer enough info to hook em into signing up.

I would add the following to the header:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
Some say it isn't necessary, I don't argue one way or another but I include it in my pages just in case it helps even a little bit.

There's another discussion elsewhere here about relative vs fixed links. I believe the general outlook is that fixed is preferable. I use them and they seem to work for the bots.

JohnF

Oops.

i.e. "fix-it,fix-it stuff, fix it, fix-it stuff"

Should say

i.e. "fix-it,fix-it stuff, fix it, fix it stuff"

JF

i am lost... what does that tag do?

I already have made a robots.txt and added modrewrite on within my .htaccess. I am trying to work on making it SEO friendly, but that is not my primary concern. There are many large sites out there that are not SEO friendly, but are spidered due to popularity.

It just tells the bots to index the site and follow links. It's an additional or primary permission for the bots to explore your site. Very few SEs use it nowadays as most look for the robots.txt. However, I include it in the case of some bot that doesn't understand robots.txt showing up. I don't use a robots.txt since the biggies; Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. show up and if no robots file go ahead and index everything they can find. The tag has very minor if any benefit, but like I said, if it helps at all I'm willing to add it.

Another good page to add is a site map. There's a lot of debate over "sitemap" vs "site-map" so I use both in my text links. I added one after Google started crawling my site and found that the bot crawled twice as many pages at a time. Maybe coincidence but in this game why bet? There's also some major discussions in other parts of this forum. Bottom line to all of them is to have a sitemap.

JF