Advice on Website Problem Needed PLEASE!

[jamesbiggin]

Hi, sorry about this begging letter, but I have no other ideas.
My website www.steel-city.co.uk (http://www.steel-city.co.uk) is experiencing problems. I have tried to coordinate the webdesigner, the company that provides my hosting and my SEO company to resolve and everyone is blaming each other and nothing is getting sorted.
I am blogging every day on www.steel-city.co.uk/blog (http://www.steel-city.co.uk/blog) and this blog is being pulled into 2 pages (see the very bottom of each page) - the homepage (http://www.steel-city.co.uk) and the pen page (http://www.steel-city.co.uk/shopdisplaycategories.asp?id=10&cat=Pens).
Since the feed was sorted, the loading time of the pages above has been around 17 seconds, way too long and ruining my personal efforts in terms of the progress of my site.
1. My webdesigner has mentioned that the blog shouldnt be fed in using iframes - but the SEO company has done this. I dont understand how the blog should be fed in to the homepage?
2. SEO company have suggested putting the blog on a sub domain but the web designer has said this wont do anything.
3. Webdesigner has suggested moving the site to a dedicated high quality server, but it isnt like my site is getting 10K visitors per day!!!

The error that seems to happen for the blog feed is copied in below - I am DESPERATE to get this resolved..


Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'
Script timed out
/shopdisplaycategories.asp The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.

[scudulike]

Ouch - first things first, get that rss feed taken off your homepage now while the issue is sorted - I waited the 17 secs for it load, but most people won't

Once it's off, setup a dummy homepage to test & figure out what's taking so long - that way, it won't affect your homepage visitors

[UKSEOAgency]

Good advice from scudulike!

Also a ifram input of an rss feed is doing nothing for hte search engines! Get it integrated into the code to pull the data!

[scudulike]

Taking your homepage & the other page out of the equation, your RSS2 feed in your worpress blog that these pages are calling on it's own is not working:

http://www.steel-city.co.uk/blog/index.php/feed

So you would have this issue whatever method you use to display this feed

[jamesbiggin]

Cheers, I have just asked the SEO company to take the feed off (I thought my SERP progress might be affected if I did, but now I just want it sorted).
I am pretty certain it isnt the host (as I say, we are not PC World in terms of visitor count).
SEO company have just come back with the following, does anyone recognise this code?? Does this sound like the cause?

have used a tool called “http watch” to find out what’s causing the slowdown on the site and it returned that the 17 second slowdown is coming from a url called http://sb.google.com/safebrowsing/lookup (http://sb.google.com/safebrowsing/lookup) you can find more information on this at: http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/developers_guide.html (http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/developers_guide.html)
do you know if you have this experimental API installed or used on your site or blog ? as it might be best to remove it.

[fisicx]

Not really sure what you mean. The site loaded just fine as does the blog. I can't see any iframes nor the split you mention. There are other problems but not apparently the ones you have identified.

Biggest problem is the blog integration into the site. Once on the blog there is no way back to the main site. The actual blog posts themselves don't have the sidebar so navigation is almost impossible for someone landing on those pages to get to the other posts or your main site.

Any why are you blogging? It's unlikely to bring in many new custormers since the people who would find a blog post on lanyards intersting are not going to be the same people needing promotional items.

I'd also have a word with your SEO - looking at your page titles, they aren't doing a very good job.

[streetslocal]

Few points:


Try compressing the size of your images on your website they seem rather large and will cause load delay.I WOULD STRONGLY RECOMMEND THIS...
Also consider reducing the amount of images.
Also taking a look at the coding behind the css style sheet it could be reduced by around 14924 bytes.
So to sum up you should ask your designer to amend the css template to compress this a little.
Reduce the image and compress them.

If you want me to take a look drop me a private message.:)

[jamesbiggin]

Fisicx

Just checked again and the page still takes 17 seconds to load. I am just about to have the feed taken down to see if that helps the load time.

Blog wise, a redesign, with nav bar and tabs is being put together.

We are seeing some good traffic via the blog and it is showing some good results - appreciate your comments, but from what people are searching for - if the want promotional lanyards - they are finding us...

[scudulike]

James,

Two quick checks on Wordpress, things that can break RSS feeds:

1.) Try changing the theme back to the default theme temporarily & testing RSS - could be a theme issue.
2.) Try disabling all plugins - if it then works, enable them one at a time until it stops working again & you've found your culprit.

Hope this helps

[fisicx]

We are seeing some good traffic via the blog and it is showing some good results - appreciate your comments, but from what people are searching for - if the want promotional lanyards - they are finding us...

But if the lanyard info was on the actual product page then your chances of conversion increase....

As to the load times. It takes 17 seconds to get the server to respond, once a connection is made the page loads like lightning so the problem seems to be server access rather than the site itself. Unless of course it's the connection this end.

[jamesbiggin]

I cant change those pages in a bespoke way, it is a VPASP CMS and we have the ability to add details into descriptions etc, but there is nothing where we can add wording like in the blog - without really breaking the page up into something ugly.

[streetslocal]

I cant change those pages in a bespoke way, it is a VPASP CMS and we have the ability to add details into descriptions etc, but there is nothing where we can add wording like in the blog - without really breaking the page up into something ugly.
You can change the backend using ftp if you have accesss.

[IainW]

Hi James,

Hope you're well.

I like blogs and I believe they bring in a different kind of traffic, when you write a lot of content that you possibly don't feel is suitable on your main site then blogs are great, the words in your text will bring in visitors to your blog - you then have to send them directly to the product you're talking about or to your main page.
I have a blog for my hols company and a blog for my SEO company, they're not pretty (very plain actually) but they bring in customers and convert well.

As mentioned before, your SEO is poor and gets less and less as you browse your site.

Regards
Iain

[jamesbiggin]

I am not an FTP kinda website owner....I dont know it, understand it or have the nerves of steel to go for it...I know my limitations!!!

[scudulike]

I am not an FTP kinda website owner....I dont know it, understand it or have the nerves of steel to go for it...I know my limitations!!!
You sure you live in steel city? ;-)

[jamesbiggin]

good one, that has cheered me up no end!!!!

Just glad I can laugh, or the frustrations of trying to hit page one of Google would make be sob like a baby!

[wood1e2]

I don;t know if anyone else has experienced a "HTTP Error 500 - Internal server error" when looking at this site, I did using IE7 then tried checking the W3C compliance and got a Error 500 as well.

I would check that your hosting server is up and running. This may have something to do with the long display time.

Get you SEO guys to remove your name from the titles, Get them to remove all the Javascript from the HEAD of your pages, if that is possible and it doesn't effect the workings of the webpages.

I would also get your developer/SEO guy to place at least home/about us/contact us menu on your blog. No point having visitors there reading away and then going off to a competitor because they can't get to you shop.

There are probably a few other things I could mention!!! But I do suggest you look into the HTTP 500 error, you are going to loose a lot of business because of it.

PM me if you want to chat about anything else off the public forum... :)

Get your developer to check as to why there is a "Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113' " Which is a timeout error, something on your webpage is taking more than 60/90secs(ish, default time given) seconds to run...

Dump the quick links, or re-desing them, get rid of "Promotional merchandise" element, and the steel city feed. No-one really scrolls down further than they have to look at such things.

[jamesbiggin]

Blog feed disabled - and the site is loading how it should....now need to work out why the feed is the problem - any thoughts - could it be as daft as an old post that has a large image loaded onto it or something...as the blog still loads slowly.... www.steel-city.co.uk/blog
Someone mentioned disabling plug ins and then adding them back in one by one....could this be something else that might cause the homepage feed to slow?

[fisicx]

Just glad I can laugh, or the frustrations of trying to hit page one of Google would make be sob like a baby!

And the very first thing you need to prevent the blubbing and keep Google happy is.............FIX THE PAGES TITLES!

You can blog yourself to death but it's not going to help you get those products onto page 1 until you FIX THE PAGES TITLES!

[jamesbiggin]

what should be done to the titles?

[wood1e2]

The titles...should reflect the keywords your SEO guy told you would be good ones to have as they pay. ie the keywords he/she has researched. Obviously these should then be reflected in the content and not a just a list of words but grammatically correct content.

[scudulike]

Blog feed disabled - and the site is loading how it should....now need to work out why the feed is the problem - any thoughts - could it be as daft as an old post that has a large image loaded onto it or something...as the blog still loads slowly.... www.steel-city.co.uk/blog (http://www.steel-city.co.uk/blog)
Someone mentioned disabling plug ins and then adding them back in one by one....could this be something else that might cause the homepage feed to slow?

See earlier suggestion, it's not your homepage that was slow, but the whole RSS feed itself....

James,

Two quick checks on Wordpress, things that can break RSS feeds:

1.) Try changing the theme back to the default theme temporarily & testing RSS - could be a theme issue.
2.) Try disabling all plugins - if it then works, enable them one at a time until it stops working again & you've found your culprit.

Hope this helps

[jamesbiggin]

Yep, going to do this tonight - thank you for the advise on this.

[fisicx]

Page title change example:

Current:

Begravia Keyring - Steel City Marketing Limited

Suggestion:

Classic metal promotional keyring and fob from only £1.51

[jamesbiggin]

Graham,

That does seem like a bespoke page title that would need each individual product page sorting - my SEO company will never agree to that...and I have 1500+ products and no FTP experience.

Shouldnt the page titles just concentrate on what I am optimizing for and go deep into the site in that way - pulling in product info as you go deeper?

[fisicx]

If you want to be found through an organic search then you need to work on those page titles. Adding info like the price helps clickthroughs.

If you can't manage the bespoke then you can generate meaningful titles from the DB fields - again this is all stuff the SEO company should have been advising before they did anything else.

Can't stress enouigh that the page titles are problably the most important indexing element on the page. If you don't get then right you can forget any change of a decent ranking.

[jamesbiggin]

Cool, I will look into what we can bring in from the CMS and the DB....I am sure this can be done in a way similar to what you suggest....I am reluctant about messing with the site myself (FTP side) with no experience, this is a dangerous thing to do - would you agree? or is it a simple case of finding a specific file, opening it, changing it, saving it and exiting?

[streetslocal]

Cool, I will look into what we can bring in from the CMS and the DB....I am sure this can be done in a way similar to what you suggest....I am reluctant about messing with the site myself (FTP side) with no experience, this is a dangerous thing to do - would you agree? or is it a simple case of finding a specific file, opening it, changing it, saving it and exiting?

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0fTE0Mo43k16e/340x.jpg

:eek::D

Seriously ftp coding can be troublesome without a doubt and you can easily make mistakes if your unsure i would suggest getting a pro to look into it for you.
But if you really want to have a go yourself for whatever reason take a full and detailed back up of the site by ftp and keep this safe incase you detonate a bomb on the site:)

[jamesbiggin]

yep, cheers....I think I will leave well alone and tap into the resources (or the companies that I am paying) and get them to do it...looks like there might be a little bit of "taking the easy option" - but if I get a few pointers on what to ask them to do, then they should do it - I am paying them enough and even if it ends up being a bad call to have appointed them, I still want the max. out of them during this time.

[jamesbiggin]

Response received about page titles from SEO company :

Your homepage Meta contains all the keywords you chose as part of your campaign and is the most prominent page of your site. The title does not contain exact match key phrases as Google truncates the titles to 90 characters, but the exact match key phrases are present in the keywords and description as well as on page content and will rank for both exact match and broad match key phrases. Your inner pages have unique titles and are descriptive to the product pages. Google does not rely heavily on Meta information due to in the past webmasters used to spam the Meta information and use black-hat techniques to gain higher rankings so Google gave less relevance to the Mata section of a website. We still optimise the Meta information of websites as they still hold relevancy to the pages and are displayed on the Google listings. We mainly concentrate on optimisation of (content, code, sitemaps, rss, backlinks ect..) as Google Pays more relevancy to these and will gain you a better chance of gaining higher rankings and we perform these tasks as standard on all our projects.

[fisicx]

Response received about page titles from SEO company...

Mostly tosh. The meta data is not used for ranking by any of the major search engines and althouigh the meta description may be used in the snippet it needs to be uniqe on each page. The page titles are not descriptive of the product - all the do is take the product name field from the DB and add 'steel city marketing' to the end. And if they have been concentrating on the code then how come the homepage still has over 250 coding warnings? Not that it's going to make much difference to the SE, they are very tolerant of wonky code.

Sorry, but this company is taking you for a ride.

[jamesbiggin]

Scudulike - I could genuinely kiss you - I have found out what was slowing down the blog after disabling plugins and then adding them one by one...it was the SEO Smartlinks plug in on wordpress.
I am over the moon and really appreciate everyone's input as it has given me some other things to look at....
Best day in months..!!!

[scudulike]

Scudulike - I could genuinely kiss you - I have found out what was slowing down the blog after disabling plugins and then adding them one by one...it was the SEO Smartlinks plug in on wordpress.
I am over the moon and really appreciate everyone's input as it has given me some other things to look at....
Best day in months..!!!

Unless you:
a.) Look like Cheryl Cole or
b.) Are very rich

you can keep the kisses - glad to have helped. I always find with anything IT related, if you can narrow it down piece by piece it makes troubleshooting much easier.

[Ali-v-8]

Scudulike - I could genuinely kiss you - I have found out what was slowing down the blog after disabling plugins and then adding them one by one...it was the SEO Smartlinks plug in on wordpress.
I am over the moon and really appreciate everyone's input as it has given me some other things to look at....
Best day in months..!!!

I actually skimmed most of the other post but I assume you want results.

Basics are important before trying any thing else.

Domain not redirected.
meta titles (not targeted)
Meta key terms (not unique)
internal link is directed to the host domain (which need a permanant redirect (301))
EG http://steel-city.co.uk/shopdisplaycategories.asp?id=2&cat=Clothing

If your SEO guy is arguing over stupid thing instead of doing what is actually needed then I suggest changing SEO companies.

It took only 5 mins for me to see these problems and others.
PM me if you need help (which you do)

This is not a web designers fault as he has made you a functioning website,
If you paid an SEO company they should have spotted this.

[driansmith]

"I have tried to coordinate the webdesigner, the company that provides my hosting and my SEO company to resolve and everyone is blaming each other and nothing is getting sorted."

Therein lies the problem. Working in this field for over 9 years now and this sort of 'teamwork' does not work. Different people looking at the problem through completely different eyes.