I know there is always room for improvement somewhere on all websites. I am lost as to how I can improve or what I can add approaching our 2 year anniversary.

I am currently number 1 on google for kewords "Discount Salon Hair Products" and in the top 5 for keywords "Salon Hair Products" and number 13 for "hair products" and am afraid to make too many changes to my home page, but am up for attacks in general and overall on my site.

We do have many happy repeat customers and had great new traffic daily until the current google update hit. This update caused my inner pages to take a nose dive on the SERP's - This is a whole other topic I am currently addressing.

Please feel free. I will appreciate all comments. Thanks!

http://www.stuff4beauty.com

First of all, the site doesn't appeal to me. But then again, that's probably exactly what you want, since I'm one of those guys who can't walk into a salon or a spa or any of those places without having to gag from the smell. So I'm definitely not in your customer bracket.

As far as problems with your site go, here's some of the stuff I found:

1. Your meta description tag, on the surface, looks too long. This is especially true when compared with your keywords tag. Cut it down below 200 characters if you can.
2. Pick a default font for your pages. This is one of the few cases where Times New Roman or even Georgia might be appropriate.
3. Add a site map somewhere (on the bottom of the page). Your internal pages (at least the ones in the menu) aren't linked in a way that SEs can really crawl to them.

I don't want to give you too much more advice, like I said, because I'm not the kind of people you're trying to sell to and I don't want to tell you too much that will hurt your existing business.

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Toronto Web Design | Search Engine Friendly, Standards-Compliant Layouts | Walk on my Path (my blog)

Sounds like you have some good rankings but there are some design changes I would make.

1. I would get rid of the background.

2. I would move your menu under your logo

3. I would take of the W3C logo as most of your customer most likely want know what it is anyway.

4. I would move the don't forget to bookmark this site over smaller towards the op and on the left hand side of the page.

5. I would move the searc box to the left hand side also

6. I would try and make the page a little shorter

7. I would add some pictures on the home page

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Custom Website Designs | Rubber Bracelets | Silicone Bracelets

I suggest that the reason your site was No1 on Google was because your site is geared wholly for spiders, not customers.

Lets's say I want Bibo Skin Care products...I click on Skin Care in the navigation...select Bibo and then what? I get a page that clearly announces 'Graham Webb Bibo Skin Care and Cosmetics' but then there's 8 deep lines of keyword stuffing before I get to the Bibo products navigation, which is below the 'fold' at 800x600 (so have to scroll to find it). So, I click on 'Graham Webb Bibo Skincare' and go to a fresh page with the clear title 'Graham Webb Bibo Skincare' and another nine lines of keyword stuffing before I scroll down to find 'Lifes a Beach'! I click on the link and surprise, surprise another 8 lines of text with big gaps before I finally find a description but no photo, just some dead text saying 'Click for larger image'. Now at this point, being a discerning shopper, I realise that I have been taken on this click and scrollererama tour is because someone is more interested in getting hits than they are in getting my custom. I could be swayed by the discounted price but I think "Forget it, I'm looking for something to reduce my lines and folds, not increase them. I'll try somewhere else, where I'm treated reasonably."

I reckon Google et al have wised up to these old hat ruses and have instigated a 'cut the cr*p' algorithm that sees through them and awards sites that enable customers/visitors to get to the nub of things as quickly as possible. If that's the case, I'm all for it.

Added to this, I don't like the look of your site. It's dated and not at all stylish. Serif fonts invariably look bad on screen and unlike Adam, I don't think this is an exception. I think the logo is naff...neon pink! The flowery background grates badly with the bold, square border of the navigation and everything else.

I'm sorry to be so negative but this is how I feel. I asked my wife what she thought and she was even more scathing!

The site's a beach.

Thanks for the input. I asked for it, and I got it. My site is like I said earlier, 2 years old this month. I started out as a small paypal shop and to my surprise grew quite quickly. Instead of a redesign, I kept adding and adding on as we grew. We have many loyal customers and always getting new customers and short of a total rebuild, I don't think I have that many choices on chamging since I want to keep the same layout through-out the site. I have 900 hand coded pages on this site and all individual unique html URL's that are indexed by all the search engines and have been since they were built. A lot of these URL's have high rankings. I don't even know how redirects would work.


Anyway, I do have a sitemap I call a store-index linked to the home page and actually every page on the site. This page had the url's to all my internqal pages. I have the search feature in the menu bar at the top of every page.

I am reluctant to change the meta description tag at this point since I am holding the number one position in my sector for my keywords and have been for a year now. I have played with it.

I am currently working on some CSS fixes for the font.

I know not everyone likes the bg, but a lot of people do like it as I have received numerous compliments and the bg doesn't seem to stop people from ordering when they find us. I may try something different as that would be fairly simple to do.


I suppose someday I will need to looking into a total makeover! Until then, I am looking for things I could do to improve short of a total makeover.

Blimey, 900 hand coded pages! I feel for you. If you don't want to even tamper with the home page, you're left with tweaking the CSS but that's not going to effect your inner-pages SERP's nose dive. Surely, whatever improvements anyone might suggest, implementing side-wide changes is going to be a nightmare for you.

My key point was about the sub-navigation and making it more prominent and user-friendly. Clearly that's out of the question until you redesign, template and database the whole site. In the meantime my only 'user-friendly' suggestion is to make the search facility more prominent but this isn't going to address your main concern.

Good luck!