Hi,

I would love any feedback on my site. It has been a long road to development and I fear that I am sometimes too close to the work to be objective in reviewing the sites useability and value. I would really appreciate comments on those subjects. Thanks in advance for your time.

Here is a little information about the site...

www.outdoorattractions.com A travel and vacation planning directory for outdoor enthusiasts that provides trip planning resources, unbiased peer ratings and discussion forums. We provide links to over thousands of attractions and dealers with intuitive search options to help you find the attraction best suited to your needs. Attraction types include campgrounds, bed and breakfasts, inns, theme parks, zoos, ski areas, museums, theaters, lakes, ponds, streams, rivers, parks, rv trailer information and trails.

Hello!

You've done a great job. It's very useful and ambitious.

One thing I want to point out is, similar to your posts, On your About Page, you need to break up that large paragraph more...

About Us

It makes it difficult for people to read when you have a large, mashed together paragraph. You want to break your ideas apart.

You may also use a technique I use a lot. Bold your main ideas within the paragraphs to draw attention. That way if someone does glance down the screen out of impatience, it'll catch their eye...

Otherwise the layout is good and it's easy to navigate.

Good Luck with Your Endeavor!

__________________
Matt Levenhagen - Affiliate Marketing & PPC Training | Niche Marketing Resources, Tips and Advice | Niche Marketing Memberships

Thanks for the tip. I have been accused of getting a little mixed between being informative and being wordy. I will be addressing the long descriptions on the site.

Thanks again.

Visually the site looks pretty good, IMO, but from an SEO standpoint there are some problems.

First, the image map code for the country image is pretty massive, and is positioned toward the top of your document source. There is some searchable text, but because it is enclosed in Javascript, some search engines may have trouble seeing it. The map could be moved lower in the code.

Second, your search form includes a hidden field called __VIEWSTATE with an enormous chunk of what looks like gibberish. I suspect it's a key of some kind, or perhaps its helps to identify visitors, but it seems to be absurdly big.

Third, your table-based design is quite bloated, with lots and lots of repetitive styling code.

This all adds up to very low keyword density; also, search engine crawlers have to wade through a huge amount of extraneous stuff before they get to good searchable content.

For all I know, your site still ranks pretty well, and I can't claim to be an expert. But if were to focus on SEO for your site I would begin with the structure of the HTML code.

Regards,

Joe

__________________
Copley Internet Systems
creator of www.oldhouses.com

Two questions:

1. How are you going to make money?

2. Are you kidding? I went to my state (CO) and clicked on my county (Denver) and found almost nothing.

,dave

P.S. And nothing aggravates me more than clicking on About Us and Contact Us and finding zip/nada/nothing about where you are located. No city. No state. No phone number. No nothing.
If you won't cough up contact info, why should I believe that you are anything other than a disgusting spammer/phisher ?

__________________
Dave Barnes
+1.303.744.9024
http://www.marketingtactics.com
sitting in my basement with my iMac

It works opposite for me Dave.

I don't put my contact info on my website(address, phone number) because I don't want to be the one that gets spammed. Although I do have an 800 number for my insurance business... I can't remember if I kept it on the site.

I do put my address in my newsletter since that's law. And I would certainly be happy to give that information to someone on an individual bases if there is a legit reason...

I understand your concern though. It's a rule I break all the time. I always tell people that is an indication of legitmacy... but then that locks out 90% of the opportunities online...

It sort of can be compared to Real Estate. A friend of mine has been a Real Estate Developer for over 35 years. It's a regular practice with guys with a lot of property. You keep your personal information under lock and key because you don't know what kind of lunatics might show up at your door.

That's the feeling I get online.

Maybe it's because my target audience are those shady interent marketers:)

So I can't judge OutDoorAttractions on that bases. And he may have a plan to make money. Build the website first then add advertising...

Just my thoughts; nothing personal.

__________________
Matt Levenhagen - Affiliate Marketing & PPC Training | Niche Marketing Resources, Tips and Advice | Niche Marketing Memberships

I'd seriously look at all of the META tags and take out the Microsoft stuff that's not necessary.

Description is too long, S/Es will truncate it and it probably won't make sense after they do.

Too many keywords. Build keywords into your body text, not in your META.

Link to an external page for all of your JavaScript.

All that coding is to do with ASP.net, I suspect. See if you can somehow link to it on an external page.

Other than that, the site is attractive and laid out nicely.

jcopley -

Thank you for the feedback.

I am relatively new to the SEO aspects of the business and you make some great points. Now that we have the site functional I am looking at the usability and optimizing the design for SEO.

You have provided a couple of more areas to focus.

Cheers,

Chris

DaveBarnes,

Thanks for your comments.

I will try and answer your questions.

1. How are you going to make money?

Well, because you asked this question, I should infer that the linking to the "partner pricing page" is not getting the attention I intended. Attached is a direct link with a complete list of the partner types http://www.outdoorattractions.com/PartnerPricing.aspx

2. Are you kidding? I went to my state (CO) and clicked on my county (Denver) and found almost nothing.

No I am not kidding. As was mentioned earlier in this list of comments. This is an ambitious project and we do have over 20,000 attractions listed. However, as you point out, we do have some gaps to address. If you are knowledgable about organizations or groups that might be able provide us details of attractions in the CO area I would love to beef up that gap.


Thanks for the feedback. Any further thoughts are appreciated.

Cheline@outdoorattractions.com

Hi Dave,

I forgot to respond to your last comment about including my address or other contact information in the About Us or contact us section of the site.

We do not have a print or brick and morter aspect to our business and are nation wide therefore the feeling was that it was not important to include this information.

mlevenhagen also has many good reasons why we do not post more traditional contact information.

If others have opinions on this subject I would be happy to hear them. We are certainly legit and want to appear to be professional.

Thanks,

cheline@outdoorattractions.com

Thanks Freddie,

I will get rid of the MS meta tag items. As you know that is placed in there by the MS Visual Studio IDE. Just Mr. Gates trying to get his name in there.

What is the limit on the description tag? I seem to get "good" ratings when I have them reviewed by online tools. I could be wrong though and will take a closer look at that.

I will look into stripping out the code and puttin the keywords into the page and not hiding the indexable content in the code to improve indexing.

Thanks for taking the time to provide some feedback.

cheline@outdoorattractions.com

Thanks for the feedback. I have gone in and made some of the edits which have been suggested. I will continue working on some of the others. Changes made include adding a site map, adding a links page with html for easier linking and adding a community page for reciporical linking.

Please keep the feedback coming.

Would anyone use this site?

The length of the Meta Description usually should not be more than 200-250 CHARACTERS in length. If the S/Es truncate it, it may not make much sense.

You then need to be sure that the keyword density in your main content text is about 2-3 times, so if you have the phrase "outdoor attractions" in your description you then need to repeat that 2-3 times in your main text, so compose the text of your Description very carefully.

The JavaScript definitely needs to be in an external document and linked. How about all of the ASP.net (i suspect that's what it is) code, can that be linked to from an external file?

I think the site is good and has the potential to creat a good income for you.

I'm in Australia, so I wouldn't use it unless traveling to the USA, but when completed I think that it will be a very useful tool for the traveler.

Cheers