Hi, I was wondering if you good people on WPW could review my site and let me know what your thoughts are on it and any possible areas for improvement. What do you think of the on page SEO? Is the site easy to navigate? I'd like to be sure I've the site as optimised as possible before continuing to focus on other areas. I currently feel though that it's a case of not being able to see the wood for the trees. A fresh viewpoint might help to give me focus.

www.luxury-french-property.com

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Search Engine Optimisation uk French Property Voucher Codes

The design is clean enough, which I like. I feel there are too many properties listed on the home page though.

It looks like you have tried to do something with the urls to make them seo friendly, but they could be prettier.

Nice looking site caravan, i agree with Jeremy though, probably a few too many properties make it look a little bit too busy, but overall really nice. I especially like the banner, whats the site made with wordpress? If so, is it based on a particular theme?

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The thumbnail pictures should be optimised. Some of them are >100Kb and there are 30 of them on your index page.

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Thanks for the comments.

Hi Nobby, I designed the site from scratch, no wordpress this time I'm afraid.

I'm afraid there isn't much I can do about the images. They are being pulled from the main mother site so 1 large image has to fit all

I'll look at removing a few properties but the idea was to display a selection of properties that were based around some USP's such as proximity to the sea, golf courses, city locations and try to get deep links from the home page straight to property details level. I probably went a bit OTT. I might replace a selection with some content about French Properties and services provided.

Regarding the url's I'm currently looking into these and have posted a question about it on another forum.

The sites url's have been re-written using htaccess. Two of the parameters that are passed in the url are built from the database content but in a few instances the parameters are made up of maybe 2-3 words resulting in spaces in the url. For example: luxury-french-property.com/First parameter here/second parameter here/

Do you think is it possible that the spaces in the url could cause the site to drop in the SERPS? Would it be better to replace the spaces with dashes or underscores? Or would html encoding the parameters surfice so that the spaces are replaced by + symbols (something I've added in the last couple of days)?

I know that dashes or underscores would probably be preferable and most likely down to personal taste but do you think the spaces or html encoding options could cause problems?

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Search Engine Optimisation uk French Property Voucher Codes

Very nice job, i have a site crying out for a green version of a template like that, shame!

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I read

and started to feel sorry for you, but then I remembered

Your pages feel slow and bloated because of the unoptimised images. A very ordinary 'save for web' with Photoshop reduced the size of a randomly picked large image by 75% so... if the images are truly outside of your control (I can see you pull them from home-hunts.com) then maybe you should look into "php thumbnails on the fly". Lots of examples out there.

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Purely from an aesthetic point of view not an SEO perspective:-

Pages look good but I would suggest more of a luxury theme, front page loads slowly and is bloated... maybe a brilliant shot of an eternal pool overlooking the sea, something that screams luxury.

Also the photos are too small, thumbnails should be click through links and option to see big rich luxurious images.

Also if I could have a wish list when I visit these kind of sites it would be great to have click through option to open Google Earths to see exactly where the property is.... this way you see your neighbours, the woods, the seclusion etc.

Good job though.

Your headers and links are the same color. You may want to change the link color to eliminate any confusion of the two elements.

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Enjoyed the site. Generally easy to navigate. A couple of things -- I clicked on Marseille on the left. It took a while to load, then indicated done. But there was nothing to the right. I scrolled. Still nothing. Scrolled again and found the houses listed down below. This may be a function of the pc I am using but you should be aware of this as some visitors may not scroll twice. After going back to the home page, Marseille appeared so light that I could hardly read it. Tried Luberon. Same thing with the loading and scrolling. Back to the home page, now Luberon was extremely light and Marseille was back to normal.

Then I tried the quick property search in the upper right. For Aquitaine, the area Biaritz and pau did not appear though it is listed at left. I tired something else, then went back to Aquitaine -- same thing with Biaritz and pau.

As I said, I like the site. Just thought I should mention these two items.

Thanks for the advice guys. I've been sourcing an image thumbnail resizer to try to address the download issues due to the large file image sizes which I have no control of.

JXW, Out of interest what browser and version are you running? I have a horrible feeling it will be IE6. I've had a few problems with IE6 which I thought I'd sorted. It seems not. I'll also check out your comments about the search function.

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Search Engine Optimisation uk French Property Voucher Codes

You called it -- the pc I was using at the company where I do some work has IE6. I will look at the site this weekend from home. If have a problem with a later version (which I gather I should not), I will let you know.

You need to get someone to proof-read you site. Lots of incorrect English
Still very slow loading. One would expect from a web designer to know how to reduce images.