More site reviews from WMW Boston, continued from HERE

6. eomega.com 

27 years teaching Tai Chi and other personal enrichment technniques. Want to rank better for terms like Tai Chi since they are a key resource.

Tim: Not clear from site what you actually do at the institute. Write more about your key focus which helps both people and SEs figure out the site. Put "Yoga" and "Tai chi" keywords on home pages!

Bruce: Look at competitors Static pages with more decriptions would be better. Send more NON volatile content to home page. [By Non Volatile he means less flash, dynamic, changing material which can confuse the indexing process]

Matt: A good site map is important. If you use java mouseover navigation FIND ANOTHER WAY.

"Treat Search Engines as dumb little kids with short attention spans"
(do a separate post on this concept which is important)

Change your huge URLs to more intuitive reading like /carol-anderson/. Weird or long URLs can fool the search engine and you have a lot of them.

Thomas: List of workshops is WAY too long – cut it up into sections with better categories which will spider better. (Matt nodded that this was a good idea).

Jake: All Title tags in the site appear to be the same! Bad.

7. Shopping.com [this is one of the largest shopping portals]. They appear to be having big ranking problems though they have a huge number of indexed pages. He said 80% of their server load is from SE crawling(!).

Matt: Mouseover problems? Always use DASHES as separators rather than underscores. Underscores will be treated as connecting the two words.

Jake: Load balancing at the servers can lead to duplicate content filtering.

[Shopping.com said they had som latency (slow loading page) issues. Matt indicated this is UNlikely to cause problems with Google but might with MSN.

Users have complained about empty epinions.com pages – get rid of them.
Use more user friendly URLs – more for users than for Search engines.

8. CorporateCasuals.com. Now in top 60 for most terms but can't rank for "embroidery".

Tim: More descriptive anchor text needed.

Matt: 3 parameter URLs are not good. DO NOT use ID=. Best to use NO parameters but keep to 1-2 if you must do it. Stop using nofollows on (internal?) links. These prevent the SE from following internal navigation and beefing up the site.
Think about attracting attention to the site to get more inbound links.

Bruce: Descriptions are NOT unique and that is bad.

9. Arcamax.com "We syndicate content. Site Tips wanted. Comics are top read at the site. They send out joke of the day. 30-40 subscribers per week from home page and position of subscription box on home page does NOT appear to affect this. 40-50% leave home page without going in to site.

Matt: I see irrelevant ads and a toolbar download that might scare people. Focus on other things like jokes and cartoons.

Tim: Leverage RSS power. Need content surfacing [more readily available?] Make more specific calls to action.