Hello all,
I need help with my web site. I am not a professional designer, not even a designer. I would appreciate any advice and tips. I fumble through. I started selling home spa products at home shows and it was very successful. I decided to sell them on the internet to see if that would be successful. I soon added wedding favors. I hired someone to build a site for me and told them that I wanted a shopping cart. They made a brochure site. I hire someone else and they bought a shopping cart software from USA Sat, which is really easy to use and I am able to use my established merchant account. I try to read the numerous emails that I have signed up for about web development, but some of it is overwhelming. So, I am asking for reviews for my site specifically. I need help with search engine rankings for wedding favors. This is an item that not many people search for specific items. They usually use the general term, wedding favors. I don't know how to compete. The software uses an index, which I think is what the search engines crawl. There is no content in the index, except for the information that allows customers to order. I am not certain of this. Again, whatever help would be appreciated.

That is a very nice looking site!

One comment based on my immeidate impression is that the text in the most part is very closely spaced (too close in my opinion). It means some of your links occur severally in a small area of screen and could lead to problems for some users.

Your small thumbnail images are also a bit on the large size byte-wise. About 10kb each (though some of the smaller ones are 12kb or more) - you could get those down to well under 5kb I think.

I had a look at your keywords and you use the word 'favors' a lot.

I must admit I never heard of 'favors' in this context, but a Google search indicates that there are a lot of similar sites (at least, 'wedding favors' throws up many hits), the UK included, where 'favours' is the spelling. Bear that in mind for your keywords :)

Basically, you don't really need more than about 25-30 meta tag keywords (I saw just under 2,000 on someone's site a while back!) so you need to make sure the ones you choose are optimised for what you want to do. At the moment, you are trying to list a lot of your entire inventory :)

Example: Aromatherapy candles aren't necessarily anything to do with weddings, so why try and compete with people who might be selling aromatherapy candles and nothing else, and so will be pushing that aspect hard?

You also need to submit your site to the relevant SE databases - I guess you did that already.

There are experts in the relevant forums on this site who will be able to better help on that issue, so why not post in one of those? ;)

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Sualdam

Thanks,
I will look at the other forums. I will change my keywords list. You are correct about the candles. Most people come to the site for wedding items, and buy the pampering items in addition to the wedding items.
I guess that I would have to speak with the software designers about changing the text. I don't know how to change that. The software does not give an option for that. It does give an option for image size. Most changes have to be manually for each item. The designers do help me with items that they consider small. Some things they say will require a new template to be designed. It is a new company and I think that we are their test market and they redesign the software as we make requests or report problems. Thanks for the tip on the UK keywords.