Would any kind soul care to offer a critique of my site?

http://www.SearchBoise.com

I think I've done everything I possibly can to optimize the site, but I'm still languishing with a PR of 3 and I'm nowhere to be seen for the keyword 'Boise'. Thanks in advance, and if there's anything I can do to return the favor don't hesitate to ask.

Well... it's not very exciting to look at, is it? It could really use a better logo (i.e. something specific to Boise, not just a magnifying glass with a question mark...) and some photography. There must be something photogenic in Boise, no? A photo that changes weekly, monthly, or seasonally could make the site look more inviting. Or... you could feature an ever-changing gallery of local Boise children's artwork. Or...

Moving up in PR and in keyword ranking both take time... but I don't think you should be surprised that you rank poorly for the keyword "Boise" because you're not very well optimized for it. Try plugging your URL into the ranks.nl keyword density tool. ( http://www.ranks.nl/cgi-bin/ranksnl/...ider.cgi?lang= ) The word "Boise" only appears seven times on your entire index page, for a density below two percent. It doesn't appear in header text or bold text. (Incidentally, the word "Idaho" is conspicuously missing. It only appears in a Google ad.)

Your home page has basically zero content, except for hyperlinks. What tiny, tiny little bit of copy you have isn't very strong. For example, "Not bad for simply adding or updating their free SearchBoise.com listings during August." does NOT stand alone as a paragraph. (It's not even a sentence.) Someone who starts reading at the beginning of that "paragraph" will get confused and tune out...

The URL's you link to have names like "http://www.searchboise.com/subcategory-63232760683.html " It would be far more search-engine-friendly if you renamed them with keywords in the URL (e.g. "http://www.searchboise.com/Boise-communications-and-media.html ") Note: when you re-name them, make sure you set up the appropriate "re-directs".

Each of these sub-pages needs a distinctly different title and description tag. On those sub-pages you've got lots and lots and lots of listings with no text in between them. That's nearly completely useless, and it's unattractive. I'm no big fan of directories... if you must be a directory, maybe you could at least narrow your scope to a few categories and cover them well. Right now, your site is an eighth inch deep and a mile wide.

When you use an image (like "logo.gif") at the top of every page as a link back to the home page, you probably should add a title attribute to the anchor (<a>) tag... the title attribute functions like anchor text, so it should contain your keyword (preferably in a complete title sentence, like: "Search Boise, because it's more convenient than Siberia.").

What's up with all the blank lines in your source code? I have to scroll and scroll. That's very annoying, and wasteful.

The good news is that your site doesn't seem to be buggy. Congratulations on that!

Wow. Thank you for that detailed critique. I am taking it all into consideration. I will respond to your points, if only to give you some insight into my thinking, since you asked.

I made a decision when I first built the site that I wanted it to load extremely fast, thus the decision to not include many images. Furthermore, I don't see how a prettier logo or the addition of photos will help with search engine rankings, unless I'm missing something here (like maybe the numerous 'alt' tags that would accompany the images).

I used to have 'BOISE' before the category links, but removed them for fear that it made the page 'spammy'. I've added them back and will watch and see what (if anything) happens to the rankings. Regarding the word Idaho, well, I thought it was redundant since I'm not dealing with, say, 'Troy' or 'Springfield' which many states have. When one thinks of Boise, they are thinking of Boise Idaho. When you search for Boise, you are given Boise, Idaho results. i don't know of any other Boise's do you? Correct me if I'm wrong.

The site is highly dynamic and I pull 'pages' from the database(s) by parsing out the numbers in the url. The site actually has very few actual pages, rather 'container' pages that I plug content variables into. I have given some serious thought to changing the url structure from "listing-122345.html" to "boise_category_subcategory_listing name_listing-122345.html... maybe now is the time.

As I said, the site's dynamic so those blank spots are where the server-side stuff happens. Spaces don't mean anything to the browser, and it only annoys humans, not robots, so I don't really care ;) Removing the spaces would have to happen server-side and I weighed the wastefulness of extra server processing overhead vs. annoying humans who decide to view source and well, you know what mydecidion was ;)

Thanks again very much for your detailed and insightful critique.

We have a site in Westmoreland County, PA (http://www.InWestmoreland.com)that's very similar to your site. It's been online since 2002. The home page doesn't do well in rankings, but many of the internal pages do incredibly well in G, Y, and MSN.

We've worked for years to build content. We sell web pages to businesses that don't have a site or we sell links to websites. We also include a free listing, but it does not include a link.

The best things we've done for the site:

• Content on parks and recreation in the area. - This brings in many readers.
  A series are articles called "Great Places InWestmoreland" - These articles are written by two professional writers. They weren't originally intended as "keyword rich copy", but they've performed that way. We also print out a certificate that is displayed at the business...giving us even more exposure.
  Association with a local magazine, Inspiring Times - 20K issues are sent out with our address on the cover
  A Community calendar - We're working on improving this, but the items in this calendar have done well in searches.
  General Information on the area - We've decided what to include based on the things users typed into search fields

Your site would likely benefit from a "less technical" design. It doesn't look friendly and I expect your average user is a lot like my average user. Not a high end technical person - more like my mother. A few pictures, some nice text...might warm users to the site.

Local promotion is also very important. A cable TV message channel, local magazines, newspapers, movie screens - even a regional Google campaign.

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Jane Noel
http://www.InWestmoreland.com
Westmoreland County PA's Business Directory

In that paragraph I was suggesting ways to make the site more attractive to humans... but you shouldn't discount the importance of that. If a site is attractive, people stay longer, read more, and click on more links. They're more likely to bookmark the site, link to it, and refer friends.

Example: when you paste a child's artwork on the site, your URL may get e-mailed to all of mommy's friends. That's a good deal for the cost of adding a 7 or 8 KB gif image!

I have a children's toy site with a "children's art gallery" - and I get thousands of referrals from Google image search, Yahoo image search, and Picsearch. (Mostly Google, of course.)

What I think you really need is some editorial content. "Boise" will be a fairly competitive search term... you'd look a lot more authoritative (to Google and to humans) if you had an article about Boise history, life in Boise, or entertainment in Boise. You don't. You send people to other websites. That doesn't make you an "authority". No child will ever cite your website in a research paper... IMHO, Google has become sophisticated enough to know when sites don't have much to say, and their rankings generally show it. Even if you're unwilling to put real content on your index page, you should consider putting articles on prominent sub-pages.

Do be a little careful about that! There's some debate about whether underscores behave as well as hyphens... but there's consensus a penalty exists for stuffing too many keywords into one URL. (Four to five seems to be okay.)

As robots get more sophisticated, it's hard to know what annoys them. For example, it's widely reported that robots read the first line of a meta tag, stopping when they got to a carriage-return whether the tag is closed or not. People who spread "description" tags over two or more lines hurt themselves! Who really knows how many consecutive carriage-returns a spider will read before they wander away from a website?

For sure, the engines seem to reward sites with higher ratios of "content" to "code".

Thank you all for your great suggestions and help. I have implemented much of what you've pointed out, and anything I haven't implemented yet I'm considering. Fingers crossed :)

If I can return the favor, please don't hesitate to ask.

"For sure, the engines seem to reward sites with higher ratios of "content" to "code"."

Is it a local Idaho Directory? Is it even restricted to Boise? The name says so.

Information that should be on the front page?
"Boise is the capital and largest city of Idaho, a state in the United States of America. As of the 2000 census, it has a population of 185,787. It is the county seat of Ada County, and the primary city of the Boise metropolitan area. Boise's elevation is 2,842 feet".

I have never heard of Boise.

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But then can you name any other town/city in Idaho? I know I can't :D
Site looks ok but as mentioned by previous posters theres no real content. While you're at it you might clean up these errors and maybe these too.

How are your incoming links? You may want to work on building these too.

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Wow! I'm really impressed. I don't think I've ever seen someone take suggestions from this forum and implement them so quickly and to such striking effect.

Watch your statistics and let us know if http://www.searchboise.com/city_info.html doesn't quickly become one of the most popular pages on the site - with lots of search engine referrals!

To keep more of that traffic, and share it with your advertisers, you might want to eliminate a few outbound links. For example, do those new photos of Boise really need to be links that siphon visitors away to the Wikipedia site? Wikipedia is competing with you for visitor attention!

About that title attribute... it needs to be in the anchor tag, not the image tag. In other words, instead of this:
<a href="index.html"> [img]images/logo.gif[/img]
I think you want something like:
<a href="index.html" title="Search Boise Idaho with our Advertising Directory"> [img]images/logo.gif[/img]

Nice job!

~~~~~~~~~~~

If you've got time, I'd love to read more reviews on this thread: Children's Educational Toys

if you have

1. Contact info on a form. Also a postal address and telphone number. Perhaps not vital for a directory, but improves the impression.

2. Company info. Who you are and background.

3. A privacy statement.

4. A little note on how to get most information out of the directory. How to browse the directory effectively.

5. What about paid local Ad?

Yes it is much better.

__________________
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Learn object oriented programming where it started

Get rid of or move the google ads at the top of the site. Why have them in with your logo area? You seem to have a lot of wasted space in your code area. Might want to clean this up. Make the file smaller and load faster.

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Thank you all again for the help you've given me. As you can see i've taken much of it to heart and implemented it.

I just did a little experiment to see if my original thiinking about the subject held up:

The index page of my site as-is weighs in at 17k on disk. Without all the 'annoying' blank lines it is 16.5k. As I said earliert in the thread, the reason why the spaces are there is because that is where the server-side scripting takes place in the page, and it is a minor quirk of the language that I use to leave space like that. The solution is to comment out the line breaks, one by one, in the scripting itself. The problem with this is that each comment takes up processor power (granted, not a lot at all), and when you couple that with the PITA factor of adding all these comments it quickly becomes a no-brainer that it's not worth it to save .5k and not annoy SEO'ers ;) Believe me, if it would save me 1 or 2k, I might consider it.

Regarding the Google ads up top, well, I'm sure you're aware that the site is funded by Adsense, and while I can't tell at the moment whether it's the top ads or the body ads that are bringing in the cash, I can say that the site is more profitable than it's ever been and climbing and I'm not inclined to mess with that just yet. I'm sure you understand :)

Paid local ad is a possibility in the future, in 'phase 2'. Currently, the site is totally free and I've been spending the profit on local/regional advertising including Adwords, T-shirts, postcards, and contests/giveaways. When the site can afford it, I'll do some print/radio ads and I've been giving some serious thought to bustop bench ads. When I feel the site is popular enough, I'll phase out of Adsense and start selling space to advertisers.

Phase 3 involves copying the site and using other cities, and I have already registered 10 domain names for this purpose. I wanted to work out all the bugs and make this first one fly before taking that step, because, for instance, it would have been a serious PITA implementing all of your suggestions x10, if you know what I mean.

I can't thank all of you enough for your assistance. This forum is beyond great.

Thank you all again for the help you've given me. As you can see i've taken much of it to heart and implemented it.

I just did a little experiment to see if my original thiinking about the subject held up:

The index page of my site as-is weighs in at 17k on disk. Without all the 'annoying' blank lines it is 16.5k. As I said earliert in the thread, the reason why the spaces are there is because that is where the server-side scripting takes place in the page, and it is a minor quirk of the language that I use to leave space like that. The solution is to comment out the line breaks, one by one, in the scripting itself. The problem with this is that each comment takes up processor power (granted, not a lot at all), and when you couple that with the PITA factor of adding all these comments it quickly becomes a no-brainer that it's not worth it to save .5k and not annoy SEO'ers ;) Believe me, if it would save me 1 or 2k, I might consider it.

Regarding the Google ads up top, well, I'm sure you're aware that the site is funded by Adsense, and while I can't tell at the moment whether it's the top ads or the body ads that are bringing in the cash, I can say that the site is more profitable than it's ever been and climbing and I'm not inclined to mess with that just yet. I'm sure you understand :)

Paid local ad is a possibility in the future, in 'phase 2'. Currently, the site is totally free and I've been spending the profit on local/regional advertising including Adwords, T-shirts, postcards, and contests/giveaways. When the site can afford it, I'll do some print/radio ads and I've been giving some serious thought to bustop bench ads. When I feel the site is popular enough, I'll phase out of Adsense and start selling space to advertisers.

Phase 3 involves copying the site and using other cities, and I have already registered 10 domain names for this purpose. I wanted to work out all the bugs and make this first one fly before taking that step, because, for instance, it would have been a serious PITA implementing all of your suggestions x10, if you know what I mean.

I can't thank all of you enough for your assistance. This forum is beyond great.