help please

emma huseyin said:

hello to all of you,this week i have just starter my own online gift website mygiftstreet.com ,however i know little on advertising the best way ,as i am new to this kind of business. please take a look at my web and give me some feedback and advice, kind regards emma.

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Since it an online shop you will have to bank on online marketing. Your could do Search engine optimization (a bit late to catch the Christmas season) or paid campaign like PPC to make your site visible to the target audience. Only when they know about you or see it, will they be able to come to your website to make purchase (s).

What's working against your: The domain name was registered in April and therefore the site is not very old I guess. Also you have a .com domain hosted in Germany, therefore it would be difficult rank on google.co.uk. I am presuming that your target market is UK and the audience is more likely to use google.co.uk. I can access both the www and non www version of the website so their is every reason that search engines would treat it as duplicate content.

The website could definetly do with some good quality content. The website also needs quility links with keyword rich anchor text. The title for each page could easily do away with "Welcome To My Gift Street 2008". It is repeated on all the pages. You need unique title tags for each page.

I could write a novel here but unfortunately now is not the time. Google comes to my rescue . They published a search engine optimization guide which can be found by clicking here (already being discussed in another thread).

For PPC, could steve and AdwordsPro and other provide options and their valuable inputs to Emma.

Hope this helps Emma.

hi emma, congratulations on crashing my firefox on one occasion. your site is very heavy to load and will therefore be a pain to use by someone with a slow computer.

generally your content seems ok.

with regards to coding, things could be improved a little by going fully tableless in markup, and making use of <h1> tags would help a bit also.

emma huseyin said:

hello to all of you,this week i have just starter my own online gift website mygiftstreet.com ,however i know little on advertising the best way ,as i am new to this kind of business. please take a look at my web and give me some feedback and advice, kind regards emma.

Click to expand...

You really should have thought about how you are realistically going to market your site before creating the site, especially in a competitive market like gifts.

The order should be:

1. Research your market, is it saturated, is there a niche, can I compete with others, how will I market my website, what will be the marketing costs, what realistic income and profit am I expecting

2. If you are happy with 1, only then create the website.

Only within the past year did someone else on this forum embark on a similar gift shop venture to you, and it is worth reading about their experiences, and the outcome, as well as some of the advice they were given along the way. In this particular case the website owner started off and continued with a better website than your current website, but still found it difficult.

If you have identified your niche and you think you can make a go of it, then my first suggestion for your site is before you even think about getting more visitors to it, check whether the site and your host can actually cope with those extra visitors, without grinding to a halt, falling over, or costing you a lot of money in extra bandwidth costs. The reason I say this is because your home page is 2.25MB (mainly due to the Flash), your gifts for him page is 1.75MB, your gadgets page is 1.7 MB, your Must haves page is 2.15MB (mainly due to large images that are being downloaded and then browser shrunk). With extra visitors, at best, your website will annoy visitors because of its slow loading, at worst your website might grind to a halt or cost you a lot of money in bandwidth fines (for going over your bandwidth limit) at your host.

Don't worry so much about the German hosting thing, it looks like your web suppliers may have addressed this issue (at least in Google) since you are appearing in the Google 'pages from the UK' results. It is worth checking whether this is the case with yahoo and msn live too.