Website help!

[emol]

Hi all!
Am pretty new to this site always read everyone elses posts but never post myself lol! My problem is my web site have just created one with microsoft office but am not able to find it when i go to google or even when i type in the whole address?! :cry:Help! Will TRY & post a link for it (not great at all this technical stuff) so you can have a look and give me your opinions of what you think too bear in mind it is still a work in progress! Hope link works sorry if not. Thanks in advance Emmaxx :lol:

http://www.beautysourceni.co.uk

 

[Ruth Mills]

Have just had a quick look, and have noticed a couple of things in particular:

(1) There are no "meta" tags. A website should use meta tags to give information for search engines.

e.g.

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> will tell search engines to index your site.

<meta name="description" content="Beauty Source - Beauty &amp; Body Works, Ballymena &amp; Antrim, Northern Ireland" /> will give a brief description for search engines.

<meta name="keywords" content="Eve Taylor Facials, Indian Head Massage, Hopi Ear Candles, Reflexology" /> etc... any keywords you will want people to be able to search for should go here.

(2) The site is failing W3C validation, [Invalid] Markup Validation of http://beautysourceni.co.uk/default.aspx - W3C Markup Validator - ideally the site should conform to standards set by the W3 consortium as this will guarantee the best compatibility between browsers, and will help search engines index your site easier.

(3) The title of your page in the browser bar is just "Home" - you'd be better changing this to "Beauty Source - Beauty &amp; Body Works, Ballymena &amp; Antrim, Northern Ireland" - as the title tag carries quite a lot of weight for search engines.

Hope that helps

 

[Terese]

Hi ya

A nice website, easy to follow and read,

For me I wanted to click on the light pink to take me to where and what it was describing, also, if you mention being qualified since 2001 could you get away with not having the 8 years in there too?


But a good website and all the best

 

[Vanish]

go on your Microsoft home page, choose "Web site" and you'll see a list of all your pages, after each page's name you'll see options Edit | Delete | Properties | Save as template... choose "properties" ...in the opened window choose the tab "Search Engine Optimization " and tape the key words for your site there... if you're making pasta, tape "best, pasta, souses, Italian,eggs, and so on... " give it some time to "digest" the information (in my case it took about 2 days I think)
hope it helps...x
P.S.: nice web site...would you like to swap?

 

[emol]

Thanks girls,
will give this a try as i said not great with computers! Thanks so much for taking the time to look xx

 

[emol]

Hi Ruth,
sorry to bother you i went to the link you posted about validating and it says about errors and warnings all sounds a bit scary lol! Should i choose the option of clean up mark up and re validate. Sorry but i have no idea what it means lol!
Thanks in advance x

 

[sweets_kay]

Hello

My boyfriend is a computer geek (lol) and he was telling me that it can take up to a month for Google to get your details on their system. He said its call caching.....don't know how long your site has been up but that might be a contributor....

I've had a look at site....lovely colours....made me feel relaxed.

The only thing I'd mention - because I'm a stickler for detail!- is to watch the grammar to make sure you use capitals where needed, full stops etc. Also try and make your spacing symmetrical because its easy on the eye, especially from the clients point of view.

Hope this helps....good luck!

x

 

[Ruth Mills]

Hi Ruth,
sorry to bother you i went to the link you posted about validating and it says about errors and warnings all sounds a bit scary lol! Should i choose the option of clean up mark up and re validate. Sorry but i have no idea what it means lol!
Thanks in advance x

Is that an option that Microsoft gives you or the W3C validator? Am a bit confused now. I just use that validator for checking that I've got the syntax right when I design websites - but I'm in the habit of doing them from scratch in plain old XHTML lol.

If a lot of the HTML has been generated by Microsoft, then there is probably not that much you can do to tidy it up without re-writing a lot of it by hand. In which case, if the site displays OK in Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, etc, then I wouldn't worry too much for the time being, as the vast majority of people should be able to see your site OK. Although ultimately it would help a fair bit with accessibility and browser compatibility if you were able to make the page comply with the W3C standards.

You should get the most benefit by changing the title of your site and adding the meta tags.

 

[emol]

Think i will just stick with the meta tags for now then
Thanks for your help x

 

[siteforsoreeyes]

The biggest mistake I can see with your site is that you are using tables for your design, Tables are used for tabular data, CSS is the way forward, I noticed someone mentioned the wording not lining up, this is down to using tables.
I dont know if you have checked the site in different browsers but you need to as in internet explorer 7 the site is out of alignment but in firefox its fine
I always recommend you use
www.browsershots.org
This will give you snap shots of what your site will look like on the different browsers out there.

 

[Ruth Mills]

The biggest mistake I can see with your site is that you are using tables for your design, Tables are used for tabular data, CSS is the way forward, I noticed someone mentioned the wording not lining up, this is down to using tables.
I dont know if you have checked the site in different browsers but you need to as in internet explorer 7 the site is out of alignment but in firefox its fine
I always recommend you use
www.browsershots.org
This will give you snap shots of what your site will look like on the different browsers out there.

That browsershots.org site is funky - thanks for the recommendation! I tend to test on at least IE7, IE6 (which is evil), Firefox and Chrome on Windows, and Firefox on Linux.

 

[roseblanc]

it can take up to a month for Google to get your details on their system.

This is accurate. With google (and all other search engines) you need to have the proper <Title> and <Meta Tag> and <Meta Descriptions> in place before you can even be considered for proper listing. Without those, generally your site will only be found if your URL is typed in (and if they knew your URL they wouldnt need to search you right? lol). Then, with good tags it can take a month or two before the listing even shows in search results. If you want, you can PM and I can help you out. I am a web designer by hobby and my hubby is a web designer by profession.