In this blog post I analyze the web site: 2famo.us.

Contents

A. General web site analysis (elements that can be applied to many pages)
A1. Idea generation
A2. Copywriting
A3. Design
A4. SEO (search engine optimization) analysis – basic tips
A5. Structure of information
A6. Usability
B. Analysis of the main elements in the homepage (cutting the homepage into pieces)
B1. Header
B2. Main content
B3. Sidebar
B4. Footer
C. Analysis of web site pages (the most important pages of the web site, analyzed separately)
C1. Advertisers page
C2. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page
C3. About us page
C4. Registration page
C5. A random web site profile
D. Conclusions

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A. General web site analysis (elements that can be applied to many pages)

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A1. Idea generation

This blog post was written with the main aim of generating some ideas for the web site; here goes:
1. I’ll start by a comparison between this web site and some major web sites (and thus, business models):
a. Google AdWords
The main revenue source of Google; very complex to use, there are dedicated courses in using it, there are people whose jobs is solely to put ads on Google; very clear motivation to get into (you pay => you get traffic);
How do you compare with it: your web site, in the current form, brings you no money; that’s a bit suspicious; why would I trust a web site which doesn’t make money out of itself? What do you want from me? Oh, you want me to come back daily and do a click; still, the extra traffic brings you no extra money; I would understand if you asked me money, asked me to do something to help you get traffic (and please, do consider that my time invested in clicking your web site daily is very expensive; I would much rather pay dollars than invest my time daily for visits; it’s also a very frustrating task – each day, boring; surely, you have copied some of Google’s complexity; very complicated system, hard to grasp; I don’t see what my motivation should be for visiting you; why should I invest my time to get no visits out of it? I’ve seen web sites with zero site profiles view and 10 displays on the homepage; now that’s discouraging;
b. Million Dollar Homepage
You know the story – a guy creates a page with a million pixels, sells a space of 10×10 pixels for 100 dollars;
They – have received a lot of traffic; created a lot of buzz offline (are famous); can bring their clients a lot of traffic; costs to be used;
You, on the other hand: don’t provide information about your traffic (which is a bit strange, considering that this should be the main motivator); are nowhere to be found on Google even for your own name (see below); despite being called “Famous”, actually, if there is such a thing, you are “Too famous”, well, despite this, you are rather unknown (104 results displayed on Google for your domain name, out of a total of only 2,010 results – quite like the year, heh?); you are free to use; you do require for an action from the user, but it’s an illogical requirement – it’s like asking the viewer to make a photo each day with an apple on his head; sure, he can do this, but why? It brings you no extra traffic, you don’t get famous with this action;
Let me develop on this, because this is important – the persons who use your web site have an expensive time; don’t make them waste their time for an extra visit to your web site; ask for money; with this money you can get some Google AdWords, or do SEO, or a banner campaign, and drive traffic to the web site; now that’s an incentive; want to keep it free? Force the companies who want to enter your system do something: invite 10 friends via email to join your system; for each friend, they get some points; or make them promote their page on Facebook, and for each “Like” they receive, the receive some points on your web site; or for each ReTweet they’ve got, they get points; or make your visitors a badge – “This is X web site on 2Famo.us; we’re soooooooooo über good”; and make them put that badge on the homepage; still want to make it free? No action like these required? First of all, get rid of the current action, it’s a non-sense; in a world of automating things, you should ask for manual tasks; then use the word “Free” more obvious; put it in your logo; write it bigger; then explain why do you do it for free; put it in the “About” section; what do you get out of “Free”; then, focus on delivering results; you know, the cost of entry in your system is really not that relevant; if it’s free, if it’s 1,000 dollars per day, if it forces me to put a big banner on every page of that web site, that doesn’t matter; what it does matter is what do I get of this; what will you bring me?
I’ll develop on this some more – you currently offer nothing; you have a web site that seems deserted; being at the beginning it would have been better – you had an excuse; now you’re a fully launched web site with no conversion, no visitors turning into repeating visitors; people don’t come back, they don’t promote your web site; this is what you should get – visitors who visit your web site and click on those banners; I am a visitor of your web site; I have visited your web site quite a lot these days; what’s my feeling:
- You offer me nothing; you tell me (and scare me a bit by forcing things) that each day a new set of web sites will be on the homepage; why, why on Earth would I want to see any of those web sites? Do you offer me some reasons? Are they chosen web sites? Do I get a reward from visiting them? Are they great web sites? Do others than their owners recommend them? If I say a site is worthless, will you get it out of your system? I have no reason to visit some web sites which: aren’t editorially chosen, are nothing special, can appear on the list of top sites by doing some clicks each day and that’s it;
- The idea of voting is great; unfortunately, you do it poorly; if you want your web site to be a collection of top web sites, then the ones who should tell you about this are the users; if a site owner visits 2famo.us each day or not – this doesn’t matter; on the other hand, if 100 visitors give a 5 star rating to a web site – now that’s something; unfortunately, there are some problems with this: the idea of a list of top web sites voted by viewers isn’t new (Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Reddit, to give just a few top examples); then your cost of entry (registration by the web site owner) is big (it’s really complicated to submit a web site, it should be really simple – no registration, just submit an URL and you should fetch description and title from the web site); finally, most of the top web sites have a much cooler solution for marking a web site as nice (for me to tell you that a web site is great, I have to: create account with captcha, click on confirmation web site, add web site with captcha, send it to others to vote; on any of the top web sites for recommending web sites to others it’s usually either a browser plugin, or a simple bookmarklet; that’s it; compare the two);
- Your most important asset are your viewers; unfortunately, you give all the options to the advertisers, nothing to the viewers; the viewers can’t create an account, for voting it’s a total mess, they can’t visit a web site without first seeing the web site profile, and the whole web site is built with the advertisers in mind, not with the viewers on top of mind; all the help, all the information, everything is for the advertisers;
- You can’t have a community if: an user can’t register, when leaving a comment you don’t even care to know what the user’s name is, users don’t have profiles; a social networks presence would only help in building a better community, but you lack this fully;
c. Twitter – I think this is the model you resemble the most, and yet you are so far from it;
Twitter has – a community; options for making my page really my own; a simple web site (more complex with the latest update);
Twitter is free and helps my web site with traffic and social ranking;
2famous.com – doesn’t have a community of neither advertisers (people submitting web sites, like on Twitter), nor users (the Twitter followers of advertisers); on your web site I can’t really personalize too much, but this is relatively minor; more important is the complexity of your web site, which shouldn’t be; in its current stage, the web site should be simple to use and understand; complicate it after a while, leave it simple now; also, you have no reason to make it complicated right now; I mean, all the login each day, and bookmarking, they all make the web site confusing; right now I should have as cost of entry the registration and perhaps some money; that’s it;
Your web site is free, like Twitter is; but it brings me no value;
2. You do poor SEO (see below); for traffic, this is a problem;
3. 2famous.com tries to scare people; a lot of exclamation points, a timer, bolded things, aggressive texts; really scary;
4. Your main asset should be traffic; right now it’s one of your biggest problems;
5. The usability is strange – for once you try to make it easy for the viewers, by explaining with “?” what a thing does; but you overdo it, and explain in too much detail, and explain everything, and it gets overwhelming; on the other hand, you put CAPTCHAs everywhere (see below), ask for terms a lot of time (see below), don’t allow me to either vote or visit a web site from the homepage (see below); confusing thing, this usability;
6. Website’s colors are too dark;
7. You’re not good with the calls-to-action (detailed below);
8. If I were you, I’d create a page dedicated to the newsletter, instead of having the option right in the sidebar; why the need for a dedicated page?
a. In the sidebar you give me no warranties – what will you do with my email address, how will I unsubscribe, how often you will send me emails, in what purposes you will use my email address; in a dedicated page, my advice would be to have all those details;
b. Also, a tip to you would be to register to Data Protection Romania, and get an official act which allows you to use email forms;
c. Right now I can’t see any of the previous newsletters; this would be an important function – I would like to know, prior to subscribing to a web site, what other newsletters have you sent; have a list of previous newsletters in a dedicated page;
d. Also interesting to have would be the option of displaying the current number of subscribers;
e. Also, still about the newsletter box, I would include the options to subscribe via:
- classic newsletter (email);
- RSS feed (you can specify this for a specific section in your web site);
- Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / other social network account in which to announce the most important events; you have to be where I, your visitor, already am;
9. I reach the footer area; give me something to do; scenario: I visit your homepage, read what it is to be read, I reach the footer area; here there are more options:
(i.) I can click one of the links in the footer, if there are any;
(ii.) I may leave the web site;
For (ii.) scenario not to happen, you should have some interesting links in the footer; top pages on your web site would be a good place to start;
Right now you have almost nothing on the footer, very bad; put some information in there:
a. Contact data;
b. Links to top visited pages; newest companies? etc.;
c. Pictures with your employees / store / map location – helps me build trust;
d. Link to a sitemap of your web site (which you lack);
10. What answers I’d love to receive from the web site:
a. Value Selling Proposition (VSP) – answer me the question: “What value does the web site bring? What are the benefits of using it?”; you should have a dedicated page the answers to these questions; tell me why your business field is good;
b. Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – this question is “What do you have and others in the same field don’t have”; what makes you different? Why you, instead of others? This is a key-question, which deserves to have an answer;
c. Guarantees – let’s say I buy from you, I don’t like your service; what happens then? Tell me what my guarantees of using the services you provide are;
d. Testimonials – what others clients who bought from you said; a long page, with name of persons, photographs and company names assigns you a lot of trust; do you have a lot of clients? Let me see them;
e. Case studies – this one is even better: you take one person and present the whole process; he was looking for a service in your field; he did a little research, he got to you eventually, and picked you because …; the result was that …; six months later he’s still satisfied because …; after he has recommended you to others, they reported him that …;
I would love to see all of these been linked-to on the “About us” page;
11. I’d love to see on the About us page:
a. The company history;
b. Financial data about your company, which I could find out myself from the Finance Minister web site, or some extra data;
c. Data about the web site traffic (I should feel that I am part of a community);
d. The USP and VSP from above;
e. Mission, values, objectives, aim, motto; I would advise you to see a video by Guy KAWASAKI, or, if nothing better, read one of his articles;
f. Details on the structure of the company;
g. (cool!) Videos with the company from the exterior, interior, with the employees, with your clients; give me some videos and I will love you;
h. CVs of the management;
i. A press release section (it helps the visitor trust you);
j. How do you care about the planet? Ecology and your company; Amazon.com’s example;
k. Why, if I buy your products, I support Romania and the Romanians?
l. Clients testimonials (you can also put less-than-pleasant impressions);
m. Case studies – detail me, how mister X, from Y town, with Z job, wanted to promote his web site; he first went to the local web site where … (important!), but she decided to buy online because … (important!); he studied the market, and picked you because …; 3 months after the acquisitions been done, his impressions are …; if he were to recommend another friend to promote online, he would tell him …; the study should better contain some before & after pictures;
12. Give me some information about your clients; let me know what your portfolio is;
13. I would love to see a video presenting all of your services;
Also interesting to see would also be pictures for each of your services;
14. What else would I expect to see on the contact page?
a. I would love to see on the Contact page also an outside photo of your building; there are also some 3D maps (see Norc, for example) which could help me get to you faster;
b. Also interesting to see on the Contact page would be some photos of your employees, it would make me get a better understanding with whom I communicate;
c. You give me a form to fill-in on the Contact page; yet you give me nothing about the protection of my data, how will you use my email address, when will you phone me if I leave a phone number, what do you do with the list of persons who contact you? Help me get a glimpse on what’s behind a contact form;
d. Wouldn’t it be nice if on the Contact page there was also a link to the Frequently Asked Questions page? I would love to see such a link;
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A2. Copywriting

+You use a pretty good English, nice!
1. You use mixed persons in the homepage; sometimes it’s “you”:
“Be the one in charge with the Internet marketing and your website promotion and increase your web site traffic today.”,
sometimes it’s “me”:
“Register me famous”;
I’d keep one person only;
2. On your homepage there are three occurrences of the word:
“web site”;
There are also 9 occurrences of:
“website”;
Can you explain the difference?
3. I’ve seen a company profile with a SPAM comment:
“DEAR CUSTOMER [...] BRINGS U NEW PAKAGE JUST SEND …”;
Why do you not check for these?
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A3. Design

+I like the contrast, easy to notice colors;

1. I don’t like the dark colors of the web site, I would prefer a web site with lighter colors;
2. Very small font sizes, hard to notice things;
3. From time to time you bold some things; it’s rather chaotic, in the sidebar you bold your name company; do you think that this is what the users want to read?
4. Some people like free spaces, perhaps due to the ease on the eye; you seem to don’t;
5. The company banners are very small; 86×52 pixels? Smaaaaal;
6. Your web site has good calls-to-action as texts (“Register me famous!”, “Register my vote!”, “Publish comment!”); a bit aggressive and rather unconventional, but fine; on the design part though, they don’t stand you but by their length; in my opinion, you should either make them larger, or use distinctive colors for the calls-to-action;
7. On the homepage the sidebar is much larger than the content area;
8. You have written in such a small font in the footer, yet you left plenty of space in there;
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A4. SEO (search engine optimization) analysis – basic tips

+I like the fact that you redirect the www. version to the non-www. version of your web site;
1. The anchor text for a web site in your database is, always, “Visit website”; why don’t you put as anchor text the name of the company? For SEO purposes, this would really mean a lot to your customers;
2. The title of the homepage:
“2famo.us – Internet Marketing Website Promotion Increase Web site Traffic”
is crowded with keywords; yet, the important keywords should be placed first, the title should be smaller, and at first it would be better to focus on keywords on which you can really rank on Google;
3. Your meta description tag looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”Be the one in charge with the Internet marketing and your website promotion and increase your web site traffic today”>
Problems:
- You don’t mention the company name;
- You give no call-to-action (it’s very vague);
- You don’t end it with a dot;
- You give no incentive to visit; “Oh, I should visit your web site to get a new responsibility … Now that’s great … Wait, there’s more! I can increase my traffic today … Only today? How much will you increase it? How much does it cost?”;
4. You have no sitemap.xml, no link to a sitemap in your robots.txt;
5. You have 725 results indexed by Google,
Considering you have about 150 advertisers and not too much content on the web site, it’s relatively fine;
6. I can ignore that you don’t rank in the first 50 results on Google for any of the terms you have optimized your homepage for:
[Internet Marketing]
[Website Promotion]
[Increase Web site Traffic]
But not to be found in the first 50 results on Google.com, English results, for your own brand name, now that’s a problem:
[2 famous];
Sorry, if I can’t find you by your own name in the first 50 results, you don’t know much about Internet promotion; how can you spread fame if you yourselves don’t have it?
7. It seems to me you don’t know much about Keyword Self-Cannibalization;
These pages: Privacy policy, Contact us, Advertisers – page 11 have the following titles:
<title>Privacy policy – Internet Marketing Website Promotion Increase Web site Traffic</title>
<title>Contact us – Internet Marketing Website Promotion Increase Web site Traffic</title>
<title>Famous websites – Internet Marketing Website Promotion Increase Web site Traffic</title>
As you see, they all suffer from:
- Keyword cannibalization (solutions);
- Lengthy titles (they should be 70 characters, with spaces, long, at most; see why);
8. All of these pages: 1, 2, 3 (and it goes on until 11) have the same title:
Quote:
“If pages have duplicate titles or duplicate descriptions, that’s almost never a good thing.”;
Read more;
9. By looking at the links that Open Site Explorer sees about you, I can say that:
- You have only 208 links in total;
- Most of the links come from web sites which are related to you, sites that are meant to bring traffic to other web sites, which is fine;
- You anchor texts are very poorly optimized:

http://2famo.us

2famo.us
website promotion
www.2famo.us
- Only 19 different domains link to you;
- Most of the links are to your homepage;
10. Your 404 page lacks the presence of top pages on your web site, a search box right within the page, and a friendly message (“Error 404 – Page not found” is not friendly);
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A5. Structure of information

+I like the fact that each advertiser has his own page;
1. The “about us” link in the top menu should be right after home; this is where it’s most commonly placed on web sites;
2. There should be a link in the top menu with “Contact us”;
3. One of the most important pages in your web site is the “Advertisers” page, from where I can see the list with all the advertisers; it’s very poorly promoted;
4. No search function?
5. The help functions are everywhere; they’re usefulness it’s not as comprehensive;
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A6. Usability

1. Your web site URL is this 2famo.us; you might notice this: “del.icio.us”, in July 2008, changed their domain to “delicious.com”; why is that?

We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.

This doesn’t mean that no one can use a URL trick for their web sites; but it does show that it would be recommended to have a traditional-looking URL, rather than an innovative, yet hard to remember and type, one;
2. The same goes for “2″; sure, you can have a domain like:
“www.mydomaindotcom.com”;
But this isn’t the way most domains are; sure, it looks funny, it amuses you the first time; the problem is remembering it, typing it correctly, and telling it to someone via phone; these all are, in my opinion, good reasons to stick to a regular domain name; not “2″ regular; just regular;
3. The fonts are ridiculously small; for someone who wants to be popular, reach everybody, you sure found ways to make a lot of viewers, with reading problems, stay away from you;
4. How come I can only vote for a company on its page only? Why can’t I vote on the first page, on the advertisers’ page, on the sidebar? Why only on the company’s page?
5. In order for one visitor to visit the web sites on your web site, it has to: go to the homepage, browse for them in 11 pages of companies in case they’re not listed on the homepage, view their profile, and click on a link called “Visit website”; this is very bad usability; let me view the company profile right from where I see it; you should allow the visitors to view other web sites fast; right now it’s slooooooooow;
6. You put a “?” on the clients profiles; well, it’s a bit too much; by explaining everything, you get to make it all very complicated;
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B. Analysis of the main elements in the homepage (cutting the homepage into pieces)

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B1. Header

+The logo is clickable, very good for usability purposes;

1. The logo:
- Regarding the motto:
“Book yourself famous”;
To me, this makes little sense; had it been an exclamation:
“Book yourself, famous!” (something like “Book yourself, gorgeous!”),
or had “famous” been a substantive:
“Book yourself fame” as in “Book yourself some fame”,
this would have made sense;
I did a Google search for:
“book yourself” (with quotes)
and only found “solid” as an adjective, which makes sense; your motto doesn’t, at least to me;
2. The name itself – “2 famous” (as in “too famous” / “to famous”); let’s have a look at it;
- First of all, the “2″ can be either “too” (as in “I’m having a problem with too much fame” / “I’m actually too famous”; in this case, this is a negative thing; why would I want to be too much of anything; how wants to be over-the-board happy?), or “to” (as in “This web site is your path for being famous”; this is grammatically wrong, so I’ll just ignore it) or “two” (as in “you will be famous alongside with us, we’ll both be two famous companies”); I think that out of the three options, you want the viewer to understand “too”; though even this game of figuring this out is bothering; why should your viewer have to force himself to understand what do you mean by “2″? Make it dead simple;
From the above description, you may understand that “Too famous” is actually a negative thing, not something that would attract me;
- This is 2011; who uses “2″ as in “too”/”to” for a professional marketing web site? Sure, “2 Advanced” was a hit; there are also Romanian web sites who use it; but the use of abbreviation “2″ for “two”/”too”/”to” is used generally by the very young generation; your target are businessmen, marketing professionals, site owners; sorry, I don’t see the fit between the two; or should I say “2″?
- I like the mirroring effect in the logo; not sure if it’s in the target audience, but it is Web 2.0 and rather nice looking;
- The text “book yourself famous” is hardly visible; for something that’s the motto of the company, it should be more easily readable;
- I can understand the star; “OK, we’re famous, we’re stars, everyone knows us”; it’s nothing revolutionary, not that much of a great idea; I can, though, appreciate its simplicity; I don’t get why the stars needs a tail; is it a running star? Is the fame temporary? The tail of the star reminds me of two things:
a) Sports cars, illegal racing;
ß) Glamour girls; popular, yes, without any real substance, also yes;
Sorry, the tail doesn’t fit in my image;
2. The block thing:
- First of all, the block message is ill-placed; it refers not to the menu below, but to the block of ads below the menu; if you wish to explain what time does the next block appears, this message should be place right near the block itself;
- The block has a message like this:
“I know you can barely wait to see the next block of ads; surely, the advertising companies paid for these blocks; surely, to get in there a company usually just has to pay for the service, nothing more; despite the fact that it’s just advertising, you are probably so eager to see the next block of ads, that we’ll publicly announce when the next batch of ads will appear”;
OK, let me put it like this:
a) The ads are of no interest to the regular viewer; he simply does not care when the new ads will appear;
ß) Right now it’s 15:12 Romania time (GMT+2); you tell me the new ads will appear in:
“17 hrs 47 min 38 sec”;
i. Do you think I want to know this with a precision of a second? Gmail uses approximations; in this case, it would be something like: “17 and a half hours”, or, even better, “tomorrow”; that’s it; simple;
ii. Also, do you think that I would prefer to know that it’s 17 hours from now or that it’s tomorrow at 6 AM, Romania time?
γ) This:
“next block in”
has no verb in it; what will happen within 17 hours?
δ) You show this tooltip:
“::Whenever the timer runs out, a new block of websites is shown. The block contains the websites booked for the time slot that starts when the timer is reset. The websites are shown in the order they were booked. These websites benefit from free Internet marketing, free website promotion and are increasing their web site traffic”;
Some ideas:
i. Why won’t you show me in the tooltip the list of the new web sites? This might actually interest me;
ii. Let me put a logical affirmation:
A web site is a form of Internet marketing; you say that the web sites that the web sites that appear on the block “benefit from free Internet marketing”; but all sites are, by themselves, a form of Internet marketing; just because they exist; your affirmation makes little sense;
iii. You say this:
“These websites benefit from free Internet marketing, free website promotion and are increasing their web site traffic”,
but you give no real stats (how much does an average web site increases its traffic, if that web site shows his ad for a week?), no timeframes (for how long?), and no incentive to take an action (how should I benefit from this myself? What should I do to get this?);
iv. Your paragraph doesn’t end with a dot;
3. The Login/Register box:
- I’m used to filling forms vertically, not horizontally; I’d change the form if I were you;
- I like the star on the registration option;
- Again, “Register me famous”, makes little sense; it’s either:
a) “Register me, gorgeous” (see the comma), or:
ß) “Register me some fame”;
- You use mixed persons in the homepage; sometimes it’s “you”:
“Be the one in charge with the Internet marketing and your website promotion and increase your web site traffic today.”,
sometimes it’s “me”:
“Register me famous”;
I’d keep one person only;
4. The top menu:
- No underline links? Why not?
- What’s the difference between the menu on the right and the web site title box on the left? Bolded or not? Font size? That’s too small of a difference; I would focus on making the differences more prominent;
- The “about us” link in the top menu should be right after home; this is where it’s most commonly placed on web sites;
- There should be a link in the top menu with “Contact us”;
- You say this:
“Internet marketing and website promotion”;
It’s like saying:
“We have ice cream and chocolate ice cream”;
OK, the second is already included in the first one;
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B2. Main content

+I like the fact that you use images for the title, very nice way of explaining with graphics the contents of a title; good job!

1. Regarding:
“Be the one in charge with the Internet marketing and your website promotion and increase your web site traffic today.”;
- How do you know I’m not in charge already?
- How will the web site help me be in charge? If I leave a note on a desk of a colleague saying I fire him, or give him a salary increase, that this gesture makes me the CEO? How could the gesture of promoting a web site on the Internet via 2famous.com make me in charge with Internet marketing on that web site?
- Will I only increase the web site traffic today? Or did you mean to say “starting today”?
- This:
“Be the one in charge with the Internet marketing and your website promotion”
is very vague;
Do you mean within my own company? For the web site I represent? Or for the whole Internet? The text doesn’t specify;
2. Do you see a space missing?
“today.2famo.us”;
3. This rather funny:
“2famo.us offers a free and unique Internet marketing service: booking websites on the home page of 2famo.us.”;
In other words:
“Only on 2famo.us you can book web sites for 2famo.us. And this is our competitional advantage.”;
4. You start the paragraph with this:
“increase your web site traffic today”
and continue with this:
“book your websites”;
Make up your mind – is it one web site or more?
5. “stardom” is a rather unusual word, I would avoid using it and go for something more commonly used;
6. You say this:
“Increasing web site traffic and becoming famous has never been easier!”;
Well, “easy” is a rather vague word;
Is it easier to reach 1,000 visitors on your web site or to pay some money and get them via AdWords?
Is it easier to use your web site every day or do something revolutionary which will bring me on TV?
What if I do SEO and I’m on top of Google for a very competitive term?
If I SPAM other, is it easier to get more traffic?
I would define what “easy” means;
I’d also avoid saying “has never been easier”; there can be thousand of counter-examples;
7. Regarding this:
“No charges, it’s absolutely FREE!”;
You basically yell at me; don’t do this; don’t write in CAPS with exclamation points; instead of yelling at me: “FREE”, wouldn’t it be better to tell me more about my advantages of joining your web site? How will my traffic increase? By how much? What’s my required effort? What do other clients say about you?
8. You say this:
“start advertising your websites by booking them on the home page of 2famo.us”;
I’m on the homepage and I can’t book any web site;
Oh, you mean that I can book a web site to appear on the homepage? Well, that’s a rather different affirmation, wouldn’t you agree?
9. If a company has no votes, I’d make the stars appear differently; right now, just by looking at your homepage, I can’t tell if a company can have zero stars or not, and for each company I see that has zero stars, I have to check the number of votes; don’t do this; make it simple for me to understand this;
10. Rank 2 … well, out of what?
11. You say this:
“1,184.67pts”;
Do you think I care the exact decimals? Do you think they’re relevant to me in any way?
12. The fonts are ridiculously small; for someone who wants to be popular, reach everybody, you sure found ways to make a lot of viewers, with reading problems, stay away from you;
13. You use a small description in the companies box; unfortunately, you don’t use full words (or even sentences) when cutting things; you just cut at 140 or so; this is a rather unfortunate solution, I’d avoid cutting words automatically;
14. You have a web site in English; why do you allow Romanian companies in there? How does this sound in English?
“Monturi crap”?
“Monturi crap profesionale Montura Plumb Pierdut sau Montura Safety Clip, Montura Inline, Montura Culisanta, Montura Elicopter… “?
If I visit your web site and see this, I tend to leave immediately;
Stick to English and do check your companies; in this case, just checking the name would be fine;
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B3. Sidebar

+I like the contrast, I can easily read the texts in the sidebar;

1. On your homepage there are three occurrences of the word:
“web site”;
There are also 9 occurrences of:
“website”;
Can you explain the difference?
2. Instead of:
“Famous Websites”,
I’d write:
“Famous web sites” (no initial capital, space);
3. You say the web sites in your sidebar are famous web sites; surely you can explain how storemywork.co.cc, which is an unregistrated domain is famous web site;
The same holds true for:
“Ravings of a Madman”;
4. You have in the list of “famous web sites” three web sites which got 2 visits from you; how are they famous?
5. I think it’s best we explain what famous is;
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary,
famous means:
a: widely known;
b: honored for achievement;
I understand – you want to show in the list web sites which are honored for their performance as advertisers; unfortunately, to me this is not an achievement;
Also, most people, when they hear famous, refer to the first sense, that of widely known; I look in your list and I see no widely known web sites;
Thus, the title “Famous” is rather untrue;
6. You say this:
“Top advertisers deserve extra website promotion and increased web site traffic!”;
Why is that? Why do they deserve it so much? Because they fill-in a form? Because they visit your web site often? What is their effort that makes them so worthy of a prize?
7. What do you mean by that?
“benefited most efficiently”;
How can you benefit in an inefficient way? Is it a benefit or not?
8. You say this:
“our free Internet marketing”;
I’m sorry, this isn’t free; you require me to waste some time, and my time is not free; you also require some effort from my part, and this is also not free;
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B4. Footer

+It’s very simple, clear, easy to understand;

1. The “About us” menu entry is found on most web sites right after “Home”;
2. I’d try to put the “Privacy” and “Terms & conditions” on a single page;
3. Too many numbers in here:
“2010 2famous”;
4. This:
“2008 – 2010″
should be written without any spaces;
5. 2010 should be, in fact, 2011;
6. I’ve noticed a glitch in the way the left and right parts of the page combine:

I think the upper combination should be the same as the lower one;
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C. Analysis of web site pages (the most important pages of the web site, analyzed separately)

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C1. Advertisers page

+I like the fact that you list all of your web sites, since creation;

1. You say this:
“Everyone who has an account on 2famo.us is an advertiser!”;
Well, in most cases, advertising is perceived as a paid effort; so, usually, in advertising, people pay some money; you say that by creating a free account, I am an advertiser; let me just say that I can be considered one;
2. You say:
“try to promote them to stardom”;
Although I don’t agree that by using the web site, one can bring a web site to stardom, using the word “try” is generally considered weak; I’d look for a stronger alternative;
3. Here:
“the ones most recently registered being the first ones”
this sounds wrong:
“the ones [...] being the first ones”;
4. You give me the hour of registration of a web site; besides spying on my competition (which is not a very nice thing to help me with), why else would I be interested in the exact hour a web site has been registered?
I’m a visitor of your web site, you don’t need to prove me anything;
5. How does this look to you:
“0.00pts”?
Why the need for “.00″?
6. Why do you allow web sites with description like this:
“This is a awesome website you should really check it out and become a member!! thanks!!.”?
7. I would prefer to be able to sort the web sites; you present them sorted by date; how about other criteria (number of votes, average vote, number of views, traffic provided to them)?
8. How come I can only vote for a company on its page only? Why can’t I vote on the first page, on the advertisers’ page, on the sidebar? Why only on the company’s page?
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C2. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page

+You answer quite a lot of questions

1. It’s too much; too much text, reduce it as much as possible;
2. You say this:
“there is no way you can quickly attract traffic to your website unless you know some website owners whose websites have huge amounts of traffic and they write about you and/or put a link back to your website on the home page or on any other very visible area of their website”;
I’m sure you know that with money, the above statement is false; also, I can do an unique product and benefit from TV coverage; if I’m famous offline, I can be famous online; your solution is not the only one;
3. Instead of:
“SEO friendly”,
I’d write:
“Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-friendly”;
4. Regarding:
“how to to write your META tags, URLs, keywords, etc”
- After “etc” you should put a dot;
- Before “etc” there should not be a comma;
- “The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. How does this help you? Well, for most major crawlers, it doesn’t.” (quote from here);
- “to to”?
- What meta tag, besides “description”, should I write?
5. You say this:
“somewhere between two and six months – that is how long it takes some search engines to give your website a page rank”;
Sorry, but as far as I know, the first link that gets to your web site gives it a Page Rank; if you mean the public PageRank displayed by Google in the toolbar, yes, that was updated about 4 times an year (not anymore) – “The displayed value is not the actual value Google uses so it is only a rough guide. ‘Toolbar’ PageRank is different from Google PageRank because the PageRank displayed in the toolbar is not 100% reflective of the way Google judges the value of a website” (quote from here);
6. “somewhere between two and six months – that is how long it takes some search engines [...] to properly index your website”
If I have a one-page web site it will be indexed from the first valuable link I get to my web site;
If I have a presentation one web site with 6 pages only, it only takes a few links to my web site;
It’s really not correlated with time, but with indexation problems and with links to me;
7. You say:
“On the other hand, everything that you read related to website promotion might simply not apply to you!”
… and your guide differs from this … how?
8. Now that’s an argument:
“link exchanging sucks;”;
Riiiiiiiiight;
9. Do you think I’ll remember this after reading your manual?
“make sure you enter a valid email address because the registration process requires you to activate your account by clicking on a link that will be emailed to you immediately after you submit the form”;
Don’t say to me – “when you reach the castle gate, ring”; instead, put me a sign to ring the bell right at the entrance; why should I remember this information here?
10. The same applies to this:
“Once you set the correct time zone for your account you will see all the date/time related information translated in your local time. This is important so that you know exactly when you are booking your websites on the home page of 2famo.us.”;
11. Whaaat?
“an 86×52 pixels JPEG, GIF or PNG image, having no more than 100KB”
- Can you show me a 86×52 JPEG / GIF / PNG image larger than 100 KB? If so, couldn’t you save it with a better compression and leave this out of my head?
- Can’t you resize it for me?
- Shouldn’t you allow me to do a crop?
- What’s with the exact size? Do you realize that I don’t have such a picture on my hard drive? Make it easy for me to upload it;
12. Comma missing:
“the better the position the highest the score.”;
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C3. About us page

+It’s great that the page exists in the first place;

1. Comma missing:
“If you ever launched a new website you must know how hard it is to promote it.”;
2. I don’t like the problem of duplicate content; the “About us” only repeats texts from the “F.A.Q.” page; I don’t like this, and the engines don’t either;
3. I think that both of these titles should end in an exclamation mark:
“Increase your web site traffic.
Do your own Internet marketing and website promotion.”;
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C4. Registration page

+You ask for the password check, great, avoids errors;

1. Have a look at this logic:
“The email should arrive in a few seconds. If it doesn’t, please check your Spam/Junk folders.”;
Hasn’t the email arrived, even if it is in the Junk folder?
2. “Note that the link in the email is valid for only 24 hours.”; why? Why would you put such a condition?
3. Dot missing:
“If you do not click on it in the next 24 hours, you will have to start the registration process all over again”;
4. Why the exclamation mark in the subject of the email? Why scare me?
“Confirm your account on 2famo.us!”;
5. What if I don’t receive the email? How can I receive it again?
6. On the registration page, you don’t specify which fields are mandatory and which are not;
7. What do you mean by that?
“Please specify a valid email address”?
What’s a “valid” email address?
8. This is very passive:
“An email will be sent to the specified email address with a link that needs to be clicked in order for your account to become active.”;
I would use active verbs:
“We will send an email … you need to click on the link … your account will be active”;
9. Comma missing:
“the correct time zone but the time shown”;
10. What are these?
“contain only alphanumeric characters”?
Why do you need this restriction?
If my password is better than your required condition, why can’t I use it?
11. Do you think an average user understands this?
“If the image has different measurements, it will be automatically rescaled, maintaining the aspect ratio, so that it will fit a 86×52 rectangle. The image could also suffer from quality loss in this case.”;
12. You are probably dealing with customers’ logos; do you think that your users would prefer:
- To have their logo scaled (and deformed) to 86×52;
- To have their logo scaled to fit in 86×52 without any deformation?
13. If you have a description limit of 600 characters, wouldn’t it be nice to have a character counter on the page?
14. What’s with this button:
“Register my famous website!”?
- No space at “web site”?
- If it’s already famous why does it need to be registered here?
- Why the exclamation point?
15. If I register a web site, why, when editing the web site, do I have to agree with the terms & conditions again? Actually, I only have to agree to them once, when I register to the web site in the first place; that’s it;
16. I create a username, and insert a CAPTCHA, so you know that I’m human; for each site I register, you ask me again to submit a CAPTCHA; but to you it would be simple to delete all of the web sites I have inserted, so why do you need, again, a CAPTCHA? It’s bad usability;
17. What do you mean by this?
“If your local time is way off 16:37:31, click here to fix this issue”?
If my local time was close to this, I shouldn’t fix it?
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C5. A random web site profile

+Pretty nice graphics;

1. How come an advertiser has 0 profile views from 10 campaigns?
2. Why can’t I vote right were the vote average is displayed?
3. To vote on your web site, I need to:
- Self-determine if one star is lower than 5 stars (it says nowhere what 1 star vs. 5 stars means);
- Select my target vote;
- Click on “Register my vote!”;
- Wait for the page to reload;
It seems to me you really want to punish those trying to vote; really making it hard for them to vote;
4. I’m on the page of a random web site; I click “log out”; I’m taken to the homepage; huh?
5. Your comments ask for nothing, no name, no email, no web site; if you were to take responsibility to everything that your users entered, it would be a problem; I can say bad words on an advertiser and I can’t be accounted for; you only know I’m human via the captcha; you can only know some things about me via my IP address; that’s it; I’m anonymous; this shouldn’t happen, I can’t just say things on the Internet about a company; I don’t mean to force users to create accounts, just ask for an email address which meets the criteria of a an email address (something@something.com), and you’re fine; also at least ask for a name or pseudonym; if this were a chat, it were fine; this is not a chat, it’s a business promotion technique;
6. You write “2 famous” with a space in the title of the page, differently than in the rest of the web site; why is that?
7. The company banners are very small; 86×52 pixels? Smaaaaal;
8. You have this “Report broken link”; you should check for these links automatically;
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D. Conclusions

_________________
Bottom line: 2famo.us is a very well made web site, with very good quality services.

Some initial notes:
- If you wish to print the current review, it’s best to print the PDF version, it has the biggest chances for both the images and special characters (diacritics) to show up correctly;
- I will repeat the most important things at the end of the review;
- (+idee) – This text shows an idea, something new, original, which can be implemented in the web site; it’s a novelty for the web site; I will repeat them at the end of the review;
- (+important) – This is how the points which I consider very important start; I will repeat them at the end of the review;

Contents:

A. Detailed SEO analysis
A1. First impression
A2. Accessibility and navigation ease by the search engines’ spiders
A3. Checking the web site in search engines
A4. Checking the hosting server and the domain
A5. The URLs
A6. Web site titles
A7. Content
A8. Meta tags (meta description, meta keyword)
A9. Redirects and localization
A10. Links from you to yourselves (internal links)
A11. Links from you to others (to exterior)
A12. Links from others to yourself (links from the exterior)
A13. Analysis of the traffic and of the searches
A14. Semantic HTML
B. Other good practices, other bad practices
C. Conclusions – important things + final conclusions

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A. Detailed SEO analysis

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A1. First impression

A1.1. Usability
Theory:
The website usability is important for the user experience, in general; there is also a secondary importance – if the search engines consider that you have a web site that doesn’t offer a pleasant experience to the users, this may have a negative influence on the positioning on search engines results pages; you should remember that, as a general rule, if you ensure a pleasant experience to the viewers, the engines will appreciate this;
It’s best when a web site has a sitemap and a search function; these are two very good elements to help navigation; by sitemap I mean something like this: Apple’s sitemap;
It’s best when any page of the web site can be accessed via a menu, or via a different page, or, at least, through a page like “Sitemap”;
Breadcrumbs are also a valid option;

Practice:
Search function – it’s present in the upper part of the web site, even though not in the upper-right corner;
Sitemap – you don’t have an HTML sitemap, see the theoretical part for solutions on that;
Accessibility – any page of the web site can be accessed via the categories, this if fine;
You don’t use breadcrumbs, it would have been better if you were;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): minor problems only;

Things to do next:
Create a sitemap in HTML format, perhaps implement breadcrumbs;

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A2. Accessibility and navigation ease by the search engines’ spiders

A2.1. Navigation without JavaScript, cookies, Flash, CSS, forms, login, frames, splash (intro) pages
Theory:
Why is it a problem if some parts of the web site can’t be accessed without JavaScript? You can see here – W3 Schools browsers statistics – that the percentage of the visitors who don’t use JavaScript is around 5% of the total visitors of a general web site – this is a huge number! 5% of your visitors can’t navigate properly in the web site, if you use JavaScript for this; but from the search engines’ perspective, the problem is even bigger, there are real problems at navigating a web site which is based on links generated via JavaScript Google’s solution to crawling via JavaScript;

Also, the engines don’t generally use cookies; details on this on Google’s web site;

Although Flash can be indexed, my suggestion is to avoid using Flash for navigation elements (menus, links); details, again at Google’s;

CSS can be used adversely to hide elements in a page; in other words, you can write a text portion just for the search engines and hide that text to regular users, by using CSS; this is a negative behavior; you can read more on Google web site; the search engines don’t interpret very well CSS; thus it’s best to have a web site that can be browsed without CSS;
Read Google’s guidelines for details;

Also, a web site should be possible to navigate without using forms – for example, if my web site is a dictionary and on the very first page there is a form which forces me to insert a word to find a definition, there is a problem; the engines will not insert, randomly, words in the form to find all the possible combinations; you can use, in this situation, alternative solutions to navigate the web site (links to words, a sitemap), and navigation by filling out a form should be just an option out of more possibilities;

The same goes for the login option – if my web site is a social network and all of the site contents is “hidden” behind a login page, the engines will lack the option of browsing the web site;

Frames (displaying two pages, with different URLs, within the same browser window) are a web development solution which can make the browsing by the search engines difficult;

Intro pages are pages displayed prior to entering the web site; a lot of times they are used for purely esthetic reasons, ignoring functionality; their main problem is that they move the web site content to yet another click away from site entry, forcing you to wait for the page to load and click on it to be able to visit the web site; I advise you not to use this for reasons that are SEO related, mainly, but also for usability reasons (the first time you see a intro page may be interesting, the second time you are already annoyed by it);

To test a web site without JavaScript, in FireFox go to: Tools => Options => Content => Enable JavaScript (uncheck); after you test it, you should return to the initial settings;

To navigate the web site without cookies, Tools => Options => Privacy => Use custom settings for history => Show cookies => delete only the cookies on your web site, by doing a search => Close => uncheck Accept cookies from sites; after you test, you should return to the original settings;

A web site can be seen without Flash this way: Tools => Add-ons => Plugins => Shockwave Flash => Disable; don’t forget to set Enable after testing;

How does a web site look without CSS? I recommend you to use FireFox and choose View => Page Style => No page style (you will choose Basic Page Style to return to the previous setting);

Practice:
a. Navigation without JavaScript – the search option no longer hides “Nume” and “Email” on the newsletter box; also, I can’t add items to the shopping cart; also, I can’t zoom in on images; the problems are pretty bad; other than that, the navigation was fine;
b. Navigation without cookies – I can contact you, use the search, browse the web site; I can’t login to the web site and I can’t add any products on the shopping cart; quite a bad solution for those who don’t have cookies activated – they can’t order anything on your web site;
c. Navigation with deactivated Flash – I can’t see the slider from the top; quite important part of your navigation;
d. Navigation without CSS – I can browse the web site without the CSS loading; it doesn’t look that good, but overall it’s fine;
e. About navigation using forms – although you do have a search box, a contact form and a login page for the WordPress blog, they’re all fine; I can navigate most of the web site content without forms;
f. About navigation by logging into the web site – I can’t send an order without filling out a form, but this is fine; you can still live without that content being accessible;
g. You don’t use frames;
h. You have no splash page;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problems;

Things to do next:
I’d look into the problems of JavaScript and the cookies; I should be able to order without cookies or JavaScript activated;
The navigation without Flash can be improved slightly if you use static banners, instead of Flash ones, yet it’s a minor issue;

A2.2. Presence of robots.txt and sitemap.xml
Theory:
I expect the file robots.txt: first of all to exist, and second of all to contain a link to at least one of the files:
i. sitemap.xml;
ii. sitemap.xml.gz;
iii. sitemap.gz,
so that the search engines know that you have an .xml sitemap;
You can read here about robots.txt files – robots.txt organization;
As a general rule, you should avoid using disallow without know very well what you are doing (example: reasons for site security – maybe you wish to change some texts on a daily basis, and you don’t want this thing to be seen on Google cache; or you may hide the login and admin pages completely secured and away from the eyes of the search engines);
On the other hand, used without precautions, robots.txt can create some problems;
A lot of people use Disallow for SEO reasons – Page Sculpting; I recommend you to read these articles: nofollow problems, Page Sculpting is nonsense before doing such things;
How to create a sitemap.xml file? You can find here – XML Sitemaps Generator – a sitemap generator for a regular web site, smaller than 500 pages; a best practice would be to run it from time to time, as you update your web site; also, here – Google Sitemap Generator – you will find a plugin for WordPress;
Depending on the platform of your web site, you can have an automated sitemap.xml generator, or you can develop one in-house (it’s not very hard); if your web site rarely ever updates its structure (new files, new pages), you can use the above generator for manually update the sitemap.xml;
If your sitemap.xml is very large, you can consider splitting your file into more pieces;
Also, it’s best that the sitemap elements contain priority of each file (thus, you can “inform” the search engine how important is one page) and the date for the last change;
Final note: don’t forget to use Google Webmasters Tools to add your sitemap.xml into it;

Practice:
Robots.txt – the file doesn’t exist, this is bad;
Link to sitemap.xml – no;
Disallow – you don’t have robots.txt, thus you don’t use disallow;
In the future, pay attention to how you use disallow, not to block any engine;
sitemap.xml, sitemap.xml.gz, sitemap.gz – none of these three files exists;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average;

Things to do next:
If I were you, I’d create a sitemap.xml file and link to it from robots.txt (which also has to be created);

A2.3. Navigation test (crawling)
Theory:
I will test the web site with Smart IT Consulting – Googlebot spoofer, with SEO browser and with JSunpack – JavaScript Unpacker; I will also do a test navigation using Lynx Viewer;
Also, you should note that if you follow the rules of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) you can be sure that the web site is well navigated (crawled) by the search engines; W3C rules are standards that the creators of Internet browsers – FireFox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer etc. – try to follow; if you follow those standards, in theory both the browsers (that display your web site to the users) and the search engine spiders (a basic aim for SEO) will navigate the web site very well;
According to W3C tests you can see the current status of how well you follow the guidelines of W3C; do remember that, although it’s optimal to have 0 errors, most of the times it’s better to have a look on the errors and solve only those problems that affect the navigation by the search engines in a significant amount; have you forgotten to put ALT attribute for an image? That’s very bad for image indexing, but the web site can still be indexed; have you forgotten to close a tag that affects the correct display of the web site? Perhaps you should correct this; remember, as a general rule, that permanently seeking to have 0 errors on W3C on any page of the web site will only help little, if you are talking about minor errors;
I will do the test of W3C for the main page of the web site; in the future, it might be a good idea that if you will have doubts that a page is not index, to check that page with W3C testing (in other words, you can test any page of the web site, not only the homepage, and it’s best to run those tests when you have a real need for it);

PS: More than the external testing, you can do a test yourselves; just check out the Crawl errors sections from Google Webmasters Tools – you will see there the potential crawling errors; other search engines have functions similar to Google Webmasters Tools: Bing and Yahoo! Site Explorer;

I will also test the CSS and the links from the web site;

Practice:
Testing with Smart IT Consulting – Googlebot spoofer: no major problems; some parts of the web site are missing (as interpreted by the search engines), some external elements in the page (JavaScript and Flash, for example), don’t load, but the navigation is possible;
SEO browser test: I could browse the web site very well;
Below some data which you should retain, they will be presented again in a different form later in the report:
Page loaded in: 0.644 seconds
IP address: 86.105.167.6
Country IP: Romania
Lynx Viewer test: no problem was fine, everything runs smoothly;
JSunpack – JavaScript Unpacker test: there are no malicious or suspect elements;
W3C testing: 15 errors, 0 warnings; I would have a look on the errors and fix the important ones;
CSS test: 4 errors, 0 warnings, it’s pretty OK, but do have a look on the errors;
Link checking: things look fine;

I have personally checked your Google Webmasters Tools, Bing Webmaster Center and Yahoo! Site Explorer – no problem found generally; I do have to warn you about these GWT errors and these other GWT errors;

No crawl errors on Bing or Yahoo!;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): medium gravity problems;

Things to do next:
I’d solve the W3C HTML and CSS errors (only the ones which are really important);
Very important is to have no pages on the web site which have problems with crawling, duplicate meta titles and so on, so log into Google Webmasters Tools and fix the problems;

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A3. Checking the web site in search engines

A3.1. The search [site:camasi.com.ro]
Theory:
a. Have most of the pages been indexed?
We compare the results from sitemap.xml (or we just count the pages in the web site, if sitemap.xml doesn’t list all the pages) with searches from the search engines:

• Google;
• Yahoo!;
• Bing;

We get a number of pages indexed in each search engine;
If you want to increase these numbers, you have to make sure you do two things:
i. You don’t “block” the search engines’ access into the web site; you can do this via a correctly configured robots.txt, by not using cookies, JavaScript, Flash, by following W3C guidelines (all of these have been described earlier), by robots meta tag-ul robots (described below); so, as a first solution – don’t block robots’ access;
ii. You “invite” the engines to visit your web site; what is an attraction to a search engine? What drives it and motivates it to visit link after link on your web site? What makes it come back and search for new texts? There are many criteria, mainly Google must see your web site as a quality web site; how does it do that? Mainly, if you have a lot of links (i.), from quality web sites, so they are not spamming and doing things at the border of legality (ii.), links are from web sites that have, on their turn, a lot of links, are trustworthy and come from web sites that are important in the Internet (iii.), the search engines will favor your web site and will better index it (will visit it once, will navigate as much of it as possible, will come back often);
The two reasons above synthesize an important percentage of the reasons for which a web site is well indexed; if you want a full, exhaustive list of the factors for which a web site is higher in rankings (and, thus, may be considered “appropriate” to be indexed), you can see a very good article at Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009 – SEOmoz;
As a side note, it is possible that the search engine shows more pages than you have pages on your web site; yes, it may seem absurd, but Google can “see” more pages on your web site than you actually have; what causes can there be for such a behavior? Duplicate files (the www. and non-www. version of the web site – analyzed below) or old pages on your web site, which no longer exist in the structure ofr your web site, but haven’t been deleted from the server and, although do not have links from other pages of the web site, can still be accessed by the search engines; anyhow, prior to deleting an old page from the web site, first read this:
Wrong Page Ranking in the Results? 6 Common Causes & 5 Solutions;

b. Is the homepage first on the list of search results?
If the homepage is not the first in the list, there are two explanations:
a. One or more pages have attracted more links than the main page;
b. Google has penalized the first page, from various reasons;
Although there is no direct correlation between the presence of another page than the homepage as the first in the list, it is preferable that the first page in the lists to be the homepage itself;

Practice:
a. Have most of the pages been indexed?
You don’t have a – sitemap.xml file; excluding the blog, and the results from the search pages, I estimate the number of pages on your web site to be about 800;
You have no pages in the HTML sitemap, since you don’t have a HTML sitemap;

Search engine searches:

• Google (533 indexed results);
• Yahoo! (37 indexed results);
• Bing (472 indexed results);

I can say that most of the pages on your web site have been indexed by Google and Bing; on the other hand, Yahoo! has indexed only in a small proportion the web site;

Overall, it is a satisfying result for Google and Bing, and less satisfying for Yahoo!;

b. Is the homepage first on the list of search results?
Yes, the web site www.camasi.com.ro is first in the list at all the engines;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): low gravity problems;

Things to do next:
See the solutions in the theoretical parts to increase Yahoo! indexing;

A3.2. Look for the brand name at the search engines
Theory:
a. Searching for the name of the company/brand
Searching for the name of the company/brand for a web site with a certain presence in the Internet should return on the first position the web site itself – thus, camasi.com.ro should be the first;
If this doesn’t happen, there is a possibility that the search engine considers the web site as spamming (or perhaps the web site hasn’t received enough links, another atypical thing for a web site which has a certain age on the Internet);
I chose to favor the searches in Romanian, because most Internet users in Romania do such searches – localized;

What should be done to increase positioning? First of all, if you are involved in spammy practices (links from obscure sources, you try to fool the search engines in one way or another), you should stop these practices; concerning links, if you have enough of them and they are quality links, normally the first site in the searches should become camasi.com.ro; thus – get more links!

b. Searching for top keywords
Also relevant for positioning are the searches for keywords that are traffic relevant; if the web site is well optimized internally (which means it has a good architecture) and externally (it has valuable links, from important web sites, from many web sites, from its activity niche, and with relevant anchor text), then it should be well positioned for the desired keywords; if the web site doesn’t have good positioning for some keywords, you can study the SEOmoz guide for rankings – SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors – and implement as many of the advices in there as possible; you should note that internal optimization (what you do on your own web site) is important for about 20% of the positioning factors, while external optimization (links that are put by others on your web site) account for 80% of positioning factors; thus, in this case also, put emphasis on getting more links;

Practice:
a. Searching for the name of the company/brand
The results for searching [camasi] at:

• Google (position 1 out of 10 results, pages in Romanian are advantaged at this search);
• Yahoo! (position 1 out of 10 results, pages in Romanian are advantaged at this search);
• Bing (position 1 out of 10 results, pages in Romanian are advantaged at this search);

You do well with search engine positioning; it should be noted that the Yahoo! search didn’t bring the homepage as the very first result;

b. Searching for top keywords
According to Google:
[camasi online] (1^st place);
[camasi barbati] (1^st place);
[camasa] (you don’t appear in the first 10 results);

(+important) You occupy top positions for searches related to your brand, you event have good results for the searching for top keywords; I’d look into the “camasa” issue;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
I would look on the solutions in the theoretical part to increase positioning for competitive keywords;

A3.3. Checking content
Theory:
a. Hidden content in the web site pages
Procedure: I visit Google cache for each of the pages (to see Google cache of a certain page, in this URL you should replace target_URL with your desired URL; I have done this for each of the 5 pages analyzed); then I select all the text in the page, to see if selecting the text shows a text written with the same color as the background; then for each of the previous links I choose text-only version (this will not load the CSS file, thus making the page look very rudimentary), to compare the original page with the results saved on Google’s server;

Situations: if the chosen pages don’t appear in Google cache, there are two hypotheses:
i. The pages have not been indexed by the search engine (either that page has recently appeared and Google hasn’t begun indexing it, or Google has had problems in reaching via regular crawling to the page, or – and this is a serious problem – Google penalizes you by not indexing your web site for some unorthodox practice; there is also the possibility of that page being considered less important by the search engines and for this reason it has not been indexed);
ii. The pages have been blocked from indexing; details here- avoid search engine indexing – on how this could have happened (you should generally do the opposite – make sure Google indexes you);

b. Checking for duplicate content (the content on your web site should not be found on other web sites)
The situation is typical – a web site publishes an extraordinary article and benefits the traffic, link, marketing buzz; the competition sees this thing and, with your permission or not, legally or not, copies the content; there is a problem, though: if an Internet users searches for a fragment from that extraordinary web site, which site will be shown? Will it be the web site that started the buzz, or will it be the web sites that copied the content? Google must decide this very well; ideally, you shouldn’t copy content from other web sites and others should not copy content from your web site;

There are a few possible situations:
i. Only you appear in the results – this is optimal;
ii. You appear in the results, among others (duplicate content), but you are the first in the results list – you can avoid copying content if, when you publish content on other web sites on your own, you publish different content on other web sites; so, you can make a content for your web site and a different content for your partners; the problem is not that big if you appear first in the search results, but this isn’t content, and it’s a shame if for your content, other web sites rank first; but it’s harder to avoid being copied by others;
iii. You appear in the results, among others (duplicate results), but you are not the first in the results list – it is a problem if someone looks for a page on your web site, and your web site ranks second in the results; you can apply the solution on point b. (different texts on other web sites), or you can increase the value of your web site in the search results; how do you do that? By gathering more links to that specific page and to your web site in general; also, if someone copies your text, it’s best if you have a link in that text, saying that the text originated from your web site; you should also try to make your web site very crawlable, so that the first web site that Google indexes is yours, not your competitors (this can be done with links to your web site and with a good crawling architecture); please remember that this is not about you copying content from others, or others copying content from you; what this is about is that Google considers that your page is less relevant than others, and shows it on a lower position; the satisfaction that you haven’t copied isn’t helpful in this situation – the benefit of traffic is of the first site shown in the results list;
iv. You appear in the results, others appear also – this is a good news for your product (people can find out about your product), and not a good news for you – you aren’t to be found; see the second solution on point c.;
v. You don’t appear in the results, other web sites don’t appear either – this is problematic, you have an indexing problem;
Solution? If others have copied content from you, see this guide: The Illustrated Guide to Duplicate Content in the Search Engines; if you are the ones with duplicate content issues (you have on your web site more pages with the same content, or you take content from other web sites), look here: SEOmoz on duplicate content;
Regarding indexing problems – check out two things – your web site should not block indexing and it should be attractive enough so that it “invites” the search engines to visit it (see the previously given solutions at 3.1);

Practice:
I will analyze the following 5 pages on your web site: 1 – Informatii generale, 2 – BOTANY BAY, 3 – LUCIO GREY, 4 – PABLO, 5 – KIRK BLUE;

a. Hidden content in the web site pages
Of all the five pages, all of the pages were indexed, thus I could check for hidden content on all of them; no problem was found with hidden content, and you have no problem with lack of indexing;

b. Checking for duplicate content (the content on your web site should not be found on other web sites)
I have made 5 searches for duplicate content on Google, corresponding to the 5 pages above:
1: out of the ten results, you don’t even appear; duplicate content problem everywhere in here;
2: a duplicate content with an article, but it’s pretty fine, you are on the first position, and the second one is not that relevant;
3: You occupy the first position, no duplicate content on the results page;
4: Duplicate content on okazii.ro, you are on 1^st position;
5: Duplicate content on okazii.ro, you are on 2^nd position;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problem, issues with the duplicate content;

Things to do next:
See the solution in the theoretical part;
you should avoid being copied and not post the same content on other web site yourselves;

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A4. Checking the hosting server and the domain

A4.1. Checking both the www. and the non-www. versions of the web site
Theory:
When some people are entering a web site, let’s say Google, type in www.google.com; other people, used with using the Internet, will not type www. in front of the domain and, for speed, will only type google.com; in both cases, the correct page will open; how is the situation in your case? I will test below, the option without www. and the option with www.; When I will visit these two pages, the redirect function should work and it should only be, in practice, one URL;
Also, I will test 14 other pages (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), generated by using various programming languages; normally, when I will test all of these pages, I should reach either the homepage (via a redirect), or an error page;
What happens if the redirect fails or I don’t receive an error message? In this situation, there is a problem (a big one, I might add) with the duplicate content! Solutions: use the canonical tag (if you wish to keep the current option, without any redirect) or redirection (and you will only have one version of the pages);

Practice:
(+important) The option without www. doesn’t redirect, as it should, to the option with www.; very big problem!

Out of the 14 pages tested (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), I have found problems at the pages 5 and 6; thus, you should redirect any of the pages (including 5 and 6) to the homepage or show me an error page; this is a big problem for duplicate content;

As a side note, the error page given on most of the pages is returning a very cryptic error mage, you should have a better 404 page, but I will come back to this later;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): very big problem;

Things to do next:
The most important thing is to make one of the www. or without www. versions of the web site as the main one;
Also, you should solve the index.php problem;

4.2 Testing a properly made 404 page
Theory:
I test if a page that doesn’t’ exists on your web site loads; normally, this should happen:
a. I should receive an error message which should inform me that the page doesn’t exist; the message should not be unclear (“404 error: the server could not load the page” – OK, what should I do now?); instead it should be understood by everyone (“The page that you have requested doesn’t exist on the web site, we invite you to search for a different page on the web site”);
b. I should have in the page a search box; it is possible that the web site has a search box permanently visible on the web site, including in the 404 page; it is nicer, though, that in a 404 page you repeat that box right beneath the text which informs the visitor that the page doesn’t exist; so, if the pages of the web site the search box is typically found on the right, you should also have it in the text itself;
c. (optional) It would be useful to also have a web site summary; if the page doesn’t exist and I have entered your web site, give me something to do; the most visited pages of the web site, or the pages most recently added are good examples of pages that can be shown; if we are talking of a small web site (under 20 pages), you can show all of the pages in the web site;
d. If you have a very large web site, it is best that you have a link to the page “sitemap” (example: Apple’s sitemap);
e. (complicated to implement, but very useful) If you notice that the user has entered your web site from a link that looks like this:
www.website.com/page-about-napoleon-generals,
you can automatically do a search within your web site for [page about napoleon generals] and show the visitors the results for that query;
f. If your web site doesn’t inform you automatically each time a person enters a 404 page, you can also include an option for the visitors to be able to send to the site administrator a short message;
h. Another good option is to have a link to the main page;
i. You can inform your visitors that they may have written a wrong URL, and check to see if it was properly typed;
j. Finally, against all my advices above, you should make a simple page; most of the times the visitors just wants to leave the page fast; don’t force the visitor to read a lot of text, make it brief;
I will give bellow some details on the code that should be returned by a page;
See details on how should a 404 page look like: Creating user-friendly 404 pages;

Practice:
The 404 page shows a message:
“Not Found
The requested URL /pagethatdoesntexist was not found on this server.”;
I would say that the messages are pretty unclear (“not found on this server” – what?), you don’t give a link to the homepage, there is no search option, and the navigation in the web site is not present; all-in-all, a pretty badly made page;
The page does return a 404 header, which is fine;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problem;

Things to do next:
I would improve the 404 page, as suggested in the theory part;

A4.3. Checking the IP and all the domains hosting on the server
Theory:
a. Testing the IP address
Selfseo.com will tell me the IP (Internet Protocol) address of www.camasi.com.ro;
I can also check the IP with the ping command:

I will find out to which country is the IP allocated to by using the database of RIPE.NET;
It is preferable that a web site from a country has an IP allocated in that country;

b. Testing the domains hosted on a server
Yougetsignal.com will show me, generally with a pretty precise reliability, with data that is also confirmed by Bing, how many domains are hosted by the same server with camasi.com.ro and which are those web sites; it is preferable that that number be as small as possible (your web site should be hosted to only a few other web sites), for one reason only: if one of the web sites hosted starts doing unethical things (spamming, promoting illegal activities, is in a “grey” to “black” zone of the Internet), automatically the rest of the web sites hosted on the server, including camasi.com.ro, will be flagged as web sites with possible problems; if there are more web sites hosted on a server, there are already more flags; this doesn’t automatically mean that your web site will have problems, but, as a general rule, it is best to be hosted on a server on which your “neighbors” are ethical, and a very good way to make sure this happens, if you don’t control the rest of the web sites, is to be hosted on servers which host only your web site and, as a maximum, only a few other web sites, which you can trust;
As a side note, in the list of the domains hosted by the server, it should, typically, also be found your web site;

Practice:
a. Testing the IP address
According to selfseo.com, your IP is: 86.105.167.6; doing the “ping” command, I get a confirmation of this aspect;
RIPE.NET tells me that the attributed country is Romania;

I’ve also confirmed the IP address above (A2.3. Navigation test (crawling)), at the seo-browser.com test;

b. Testing the domains hosted on a server
According to yougetsignal.com there 228 are domains hosted on the same web server;

Bing confirms this thing;

It is a very big number, things are very bad;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems – the number of domains hosted on the same server is large;

Things to do next:
Although the number of the domains hosted on the same server is large, if none of them are doing illegal things, you can have zero problems with that; in the future, I’d look for a hosting solution which offers me a dedicated IP address;

A4.4. Check the company’s history
Theory:
Internet Archive WayBackMachine (WBM) is a service which saves to pages on the Internet to archive them; since the Internet is permanently changing, WBM revisits, generally with a certain periodicity, a web site and saves the changes; so, by using this web site, the Internet users can see how did a web site look like in the past;
It is possible that the search engines use the web site to find out details on the history of a web site; if a web site hasn’t been indexed by WBM, there can be two explanations:
a. Few links to the web site have made the web site to appear as unimportant to WBM;
b. A web site such as camasi.com.ro can choose not to be indexed by WBM, for various reasons (for example, you may not like that today’s Internet users can see a design of your web site which is a few years old; if you wish to stop indexing, you can either block indexing, or eliminate the pages that have already been indexed);
c. A screenshot of the web site which has been made today will be shown only after about 6 months, so a web site can be in the index of WBM, but the information is not yet public;
Therefore, the absence of WBM is not a reason to be worried, there can be multiple reasons for which a web site doesn’t appear in the index; on the other hand, the presence in the web site guarantees, somehow, that the web site has a past which can be considered good;
Also, if a web site exists in WBM, it is very good that in the past the profile of the web site is identical or very much alike with the present-day profile of the web site (if we are talking about a web site which has done for 10 year car sales and now is doing audit services, it is a rather unpleasant situation);

Practice:
I have tested with Internet Archive WayBackMachine the two possible options of the main page: with www and without www;
You have no appearances in the web site; it is not very well, but this isn’t a big problem either;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
Do not block the access to WBM, in time you will probably be indexed;
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A5. The URLs

A5.1. One URL / page (avoid having a tracking URL / different parameters)
Theory:
In the analysis I will look at the page architecture; more than the existence of a page with or without www. (for example, the pages:
www.site.com/random-page and
site.com/random-page
should redirect to the same page), I will also check the existence of parameters:
site.com/random-page?id=20&num=30〈=ro&sort=down&page=4
this is a rather poor example of a page URL;
Ideally, a page should not contain parameters; the reason? Most of the times, for the pages with parameters, there is a problem of duplicate content (same content, or a very similar content of a page is shown for more distinct URLs);
Even if it contains parameters, a page should not have more than two:
www.site.com/cars.php?model=skoda&color=gray
is OK, but this URL:
www.site.com/cars.php?model=skoda&color=gray&doors=4&engine=diesel&price=descending&windows=power
has too many parameters;

Practice:
The option without www. doesn’t automatically redirect to the option with www, this is rather unpleasant;

The products in the web site have URL parameters; the product pages and categories have one single parameter, this is good news:
www.camasi.com.ro/produs.php?pid=223
www.camasi.com.ro/categorie.php?scid=5

As a hint, even if this is a small problem only, it would be preferable if you haven’t had any parameter in the URLs;

Also, an optimized URL for both the products and the category would look like this:
www.camasi.com.ro/camasa-flying-dutchman-albastra/
www.camasi.com.ro/camasi-regular-fit-maneca-lunga/

For the product pages you can consider this also:
www.camasi.com.ro/camasi-barbati/camasa-flying-dutchman-albastra/ or even
www.camasi.com.ro/camasi-regular-fit/camasa-flying-dutchman-albastra/

Regarding search, the pages with the search results look like this:
www.camasi.com.ro/cautare.php
So, I can’t send a search query to another person; if I want to send to a friend a link to a search, I can’t do that on your web site (usability problem, more than a SEO problem);

Have a look at this video:
Whiteboard Friday – Faceted Navigation for details on site navigation;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
I would focus on removing the URL parameters in all of the web site and making the URLs SEO friendly;

A5.2. The URLs should be short, descriptive (contain keywords), written in small letters and use the appropriate separator
Theory:
A long URL looks like this:
www.site.com/articles/fish/raise/this-page-is-all-about-raising-fish-in-natural-environments-article204848.html

A shorter URL would look like this
www.site.com/rising-fish-natural-environment

It can be noticed:
a. I have eliminated some folders, if they are not useful to the page (“/articles/fish/raise/”); for the current situation, the folders are not useful, since I can already determine the URL of the page that the page is about raising fish, the folders are only repeating information; if, instead, the folder would be something like:
www.site.com/2001/08/rising-fish-natural-environment,
which would show me that the article was written in August 2001, this information is useful to me, and I would keep those folders (it is a system frequently used on the blogging platforms, especially WordPress); it is recommended that a URL doesn’t have more than 4 subfolders; therefore, this would be a maximum:
www.site.com/subfolder1/subfolder2/subfolder3/subfolder4/page.html
b. I have eliminated the words that are not searched for in the search engines – are not keywords, are just there due to the title of the page, and bring no real value to the search (“this-page-is-all-about-”);
c. I have removed the prepositions and the words named”stopwords“, which, in general, are ignored by the engines, because are too common (“in”, “about”);
d. I have removed the article ID; if I will have two articles in the web site with the same URL, I would add to the article which has been inserted second the phrase “-2″ at the end of the URL:
www.site.com/rising-fish-natural-environment-2
e. I have eliminated the final extension (“.html” , it can also be “.php”, “.aspx”, “.htm”, etc.) – this is a very small impact solution; if all of the URLs of the web site end in .html, it makes little sense to change the whole web site architecture, but if you ever redo your web site, please retain this aspect – “.html” at the end of the URL doesn’t help and, by eliminating it, you only get a very small advantage;
None of the changes above are mandatory; on the other hand, by using them all, you will get a powerful effect of URL shortening;

Why should you aim for short URLs? Aren’t the long one also good? It is all about:
a. Keyword density – if someone searches at Google for [raising fish], the search engine will show, with a priority, the URL for which the rapport between what I have searched at Google (“raising fish”) and the total words in the title is as small as possible; a short URL:
www.site.com/rising-fish-natural-environment
has a keyword density of 2 (“rising fish”) out of 5 (“site rising fish natural environment”) = 40%; on the other hand, a long URL
www.site.com/articles/fish/raise/this-page-is-all-about-raising-fish-in-natural-environments-article204848.html
has a density of 2 (“rising fish”) out of 15 (“site articles fish raise this page is all about raising fish in natural environments article204848″) = 13.3%; in other words, at a search result the page with a bigger advantage is the result with the better density (bigger one) of keywords;
b. Usability – a very long URL will probably be displayed in the results of search engines in a smaller version; also, the users will be able to tell very fast what the page is about for a small URL; give them, in the URL, the essence of the article;

As a side note, in many cases it is preferable to make the URLs very well right from creating the web site, but when weighing the results, they don’t justify the change of the URLs for an entire web site, once the web site is finished;

Generally, it is preferable to have URLs written with small letter, the usage of big letters in URLs is not a problem, but it may lead to confusions; the Internet users are used to type a URL with small letters, instead of big ones;

Regarding the keyword separator, in a URL you can separate the keyword by:
a. Nothing:
www.site.com/risingfishnaturalenvironment
(this is an option I don’t recommend, only in the case of a domain name www.mygreatnewwebsite.com you should avoid using a separator, for any other case using one is recommended);
b. Space:
www.site.com/rising%20fish%20natural%20environment
(this URL will be shown in FireFox address bar like this:
www.site.com/rising fish natural environment,
but when you copy the URL, it is shown as above, with %20 as a separator);
Using space a separator is rather not recommended, it is not an appropriate separator;
c. Underscore:
www.site.com/rising_fish_natural_environment
Let’s say that this is a tolerated option; it is not that bat, but it’s rather not recommended;
d. Hypen:
www.site.com/rising-fish-natural-environment
This is the recommended option, excellent, top marks;

Practice:
The URLs of the web site are generally short, but you do have URLs which have been shortened in Google:
www.camasi.com.ro/photo-gallery.php?pid=210&index=1
www.camasi.com.ro/photo-gallery.php?pid=203&index=0
www.camasi.com.ro/photo-gallery.php?pid=223&index=2
www.camasi.com.ro/photo-gallery.php?pid=211&index=0
(these are photo galleries on your web site);

All of these URLs have been “cut” by Google;

How it can be improved:
a. Avoid the parameter (“210″, “203″, “223″, “211″);
b. Use keywords, instead of parameters;
c. Keep the URLs short;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
I would rewrite the URLs according to the instructions;
(top)

A6. Web site titles

A6.1. To be unique (without titles that repeat themselves on many pages), descriptive (it should be clear what the page is about from the title), contain keywords (things that are searched for in the search engines), use brandname (contain the company name in the title) and, despite all of these, to be short (not longer than 65 characters)
Theory:
I personally think that the titles of a web site are the most important on-page element; so, it’s very good to have well made titles, for maximum SEO results;

For testing I will use a Google search with 100 results on a page;

Regarding unique titles: the search engines prefer to show, in the page with results, unique things; if all the titles of a page would be unique, we could, in theory, get results such as this one:

If you look in the image, you will notice that none of the titles has any personality, they all look the same; this is a problem; the search engines don’t want to deliver an unpleasant experience to the user, so they will do everything they can to only show those results with an unique title; do you have many titles in your web site with identical titles? This is a problem, the search engine will probably remove part of those results; this is done, as said before, from the wish to deliver pleasant experiences to the end user;

Regarding descriptive titles, it is optimal that the in the title of the page I can tell what that page is about; in other words, a title should synthesize as good as possible the content on the page;

On the question of the keywords used in the content of the page, it is best to use keywords that are relevant to the content on that page;

For the brandname – your company web site should contain right from the title the name of the company; as a good practice, it is preferable to have a title like:
Bosch washing machine with 2 compressors – Home appliances – OnlineStore.com,
rather than:
OnlineStore.com – Home appliances – Bosch washing machine with 2 compressors;

The principle is simple:
Keywords for the current page – Category (if applicable) – Brandname
In other words, you should put the unique part of the title (in this case the name of the product) right at the beginning and the part which has the tendency to be repetitive (the category and, even more repetitive, the brandname) at the end; in exceptional cases, when the brandname is more relevant than the name of the page and is a short brandname, you can put it at the beginning:
Microsoft – IT solutions for companies;

Regarding the length, the things are simple: a title should not be longer than 65 characters in length; titles which are longer than this will be displayed in a shortened version in search engines results; as a solution to this problem, it is optimal that right from the content management system (CMS) you set the titles to be short; in other words, each time you insert a page into the web site, you should automatically check that the title isn’t longer than 65 characters;

Note: a typical problem in setting titles – web site creators have a tendency to optimize a whole web site, not just a page, for a keyword; so, if own a web site with vegetables and I’m interested in a very good positioning for, let’s say, “potatoes”, a common tendency is to put the keyword “potatoes” in all of the titles for all of the pages of the web site, no matter which is the profile of the page (so the page with cabbage will also contain, in the title, the word “potatoes”, although there is no connection between the two); this solution is inefficient; a single page should be optimized for the “potatoes” keyword (the homepage, for example, is usually advantaged in positioning, therefore you can optimize the homepage for the desired keyword) and on other pages you should optimize for different keywords; or you can make a dedicated page for the “potatoes” keyword and that’s it; you shouldn’t put the same keyword in all of the titles in all web site; it’s not useful, it doesn’t help and Google may consider you have duplicate content; if you try to “sell” to Google a lot of pages with all sorts of vegetables, optimized, all of them, for “potatoes” keyword, Google might consider that some pages just repeat, without any purpose, the content of the page with potatoes; in other words, putting a keyword in a lot of pages doesn’t help with positioning of a certain page, but it does hurt all of the other pages on which the keyword is present;

Practice:
According to Google: you have more pages with the same title:

“www.camasi.com.ro” for all of these: 1, 2, 3, and the list could continue;

“Magazin online camasi barbati – product of Condra” for all of these: 1, 2, 3, 4;

“SLIM FIT_ Maneca Lunga – product of Condra” for all of these pages: 1, 2, 3 and the list could continue;

Solutions:
- Have only one version of the homepage;
- Put titles and ALT texts for the pictures on your web site (name the photo for ALT, filename and title);
- For multi-page categories, use “page 2″ as a mean to differentiate between pages;

The titles are generally descriptive, I don’t like the titles for the photos:
“www.camasi.com.ro”;
Very poor choice;

The pages contain keywords, like “Camasa” or “Camasi”;

The brandname is there also:
“SLIM FIT_ Maneca Lunga – product of Condra”;
I have a bit of a problem with the title of the page, though; what’s with this “product of Condra”? In my opinion, it would be better if you named your pages like this:
Product – Category: Camasi.com.ro or even
Product – Category: Camasi;

That’s it; you only use “Condra” in some areas of the page, which make it confusing; I’d use “Camasi” as a brandname, or put “Condra” even more in front, right now it’s somewhat hidden;

Due to the fact that you use poor naming for photos, Google even decided in some cases to give automatically a title to the pages:

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
Get rid of duplicate titles, keep on having short titles, use a better brandname in the title;
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A7. Content

A7.1. Is there enough text content on the web site?
Theory:
As a main principle, a page should have between 500 and 600 words, as a minimum (this refers to the unique content of a page, thus eliminating texts from the menus, header, footer, sidebar); you can get good positioning in the search engines even with only a few sentences, and even very very long articles (tens of pages can rank well);
The main idea is different – be them long or not, it is optimal to have a lot of content on the web site: lots of pages, or pictures or video clips; if you choose to put 5 clips in a single article or if you create 5 distinct articles for each video clip, the principle is to have enough content on the web site; Google loves consistent content on a web site;
Attention! I don’t advise you with this advice to visit Wikipedia and random copy pages with texts and images, just to get some content; the content should be unique to your web site, or at least it shouldn’t appear on your web site after it first originated on other web sites (in other words, you should not copy texts from other parts);
Other than this, the more content, the better; of course, the visitors should have a pleasant experience on your web site, in other words: write quality texts and texts that are related to the profile of your web site (if your web site is on vegetables, write quality texts on vegetables, not other things);
Notes:
i. If you don’t update (by constantly adding new things) the pages on your web site, it’s best to have a section on your web site dedicated to fresh content – a “blog” section or one with news, or a section with press releases, or an articles section; you shouldn’t suddenly create 100 pages and then just dump the web site; constantly add new content;
ii. You can create content yourselves, automatically (for example, you can create, based on some technical and unclear descriptions of a product, an automated, detailed description, with more words, of that product), or you can ask others to write content (the visitors of your web site can leave comments, write reviews or testimonials);
iii. The new content doesn’t necessarily need to be in your web site; a sustained activity in the social networks ((Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) can, also, be a factor which is part of your overall presence on the web; it is of a smaller importance, though;

Practice:
You have plenty of unique content on the web site, mostly photos and descriptions of the products; you could use a blog which also should allow comments; you might also use some comments on the main web site and a presence on the social networks;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problems;

Things to do next:
Put a blog, be active social networks, and allow comments on both the blog and web site;

A7.2. You should have proper <h1>-<h6> tags
Theory:
If you open a book and start reading, you have a pretty clear picture what are the titles of the chapters and subchapters, based on font sizes;
A webpage is more complicated, though; you can open a web site, and you have on the left an interesting picture, on the right a big text which invites you to click it, there is also a title, you have more subtitles, all with different colors; a visitor, being human, may have problems identifying the title of the page;
How about the search engines? We are talking here about robots, that can’t “see” what’s in a picture, therefore can’t tell what that picture stands for – if it’s a page title or a photograph; also, a very big text on the page, written in black, can be less important than a smaller text written in bright blue; which of the two is the page title;
(Also) in the intent of solving this problem, hn tags (from <h1> to <h6>, values greater than h6 are irrelevant) have been invented;
With these tags, it can be noted:
i. With h1 the title of the page – very important;
ii. With h2 a subtitle – less important;
iii. With h3 a subtitle even less important;
By using CSS, web programmers can color, size and arrange in the page as they wish these titles (so, they are happy), while the engines know, very clearly, what is the title of the page and which are sub-titles, each for their importance (so, the engines are also happy); you can read here – h1-hn tags explained – additional information on using the tag;
As you might expect, the words which are marked as the title of the page using these tags are interpreted by the search engines are more important than the rest of the page;

As a SEO importance, h1 tag is very important, h2 a bit lesser, and tags from h3 and below are mostly useful for usability purposes, the search engines give them a minimal importance; some pages, such as those which are very long, can also have the <h6> tag; in a resource previously recommended (search engine ranking factors):
a. H1 tag: Keyword Use as the First Word(s) in the H1 Tag – 45% moderate importance;
b. H2-H6 tags: Keyword Use in other Headline Tags (H2–H6) – 35% low importance;
So, you should use at least H1 tag for the titles in the page for each page of the web site; if you have subtitles and sub-sub-titles in some pages, you should use h2-h6 for those cases;

A commonly seen practice (which I don’t recommend) is putting hn tags on:
a. The logo – this is pointless, an image can’t be the title of the page;
b. Elements which are repeated in all of the web site – menus, sidebar elements; I don’t recommend these practices, they do very little to help positioning the current page;

Practice:
On the main web site, you use h2 tag for newsletter and new products title, h3 tag for social networks, h4 tag for new products listing:
<h2>Newsletter</h2>
<h2>Produse noi</h2>

<h3><img src=”images/phone_logo.png” style=”float:right”/>Comanda telefonic la 0728 926.408 intre orele 08:00 – 17:00 <br />de L-V</h3>

<h3>Pentru cei ce fac din fiecare zi o zi importanta, <br /> Pentru cei care acorda atentie fiecarui detaliu, <br /> CONDRA ii asigura ca nimic nu a fost uitat</h3>

<h4>BOTANY BAY</h4>
<h4>FLYING DUTCHMAN</h4>
<h4>GOOD HOPE</h4>
…

On a category page, h2 is for the title of the page and h4 for listing the items:
<h2>SLIM FIT_ Maneca Scurta</h2>

<h4><a href=”produs.php?pid=192″>JAMES PURPLE</a></h4>
<h4><a href=”produs.php?pid=134″>BONO WHITE</a></h4>

On a product page, you use h2 for the name of the product:
<h2>BLOOM BLUE</h2>

Regarding the h4 tag, you use it everywhere in the web site to display a text for a non-loading .swf file (the slider at the top):
<h4>Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.</h4>

Hints:
- Avoid using img inside an hn tag, like you do on the homepage with the phone logo;
- Put h1 for the title of the product, name of the category and for a very important text on the homepage (like “Camasi barbatesti”, for example);
- Don’t use h4 tags, they’re hardly any relevant; if you use it for display purposes only, it may be fine;
- Don’t put too many hn tags (for h4 tags you have a lot of products on the homepage and category pages; avoid this);

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problems:

Things to do next:
I’d put the tags on the pages better, according to the instructions given;

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A8. Meta tags (meta description, meta keyword)

A8.1. <meta name=”keywords”> and keywords in the web site – problems with keyword stuffing?
Theory:
<meta name=”keywords”> was a tag which was useful in the past; it was used to inform the search engine what the page is about; so, if you were doing a page on Alain DELON, it was somewhat useful to inform the search engine that the page is dedicated to French cinematography:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”alain delon, movie, movies, french, france, fan, fans, filming, actor, cinema”/>
With time, this tag got to be so abused, that the search engines decided to ignore the tag completely; Google, for example, can tell, by itself, with today’s technology, that a page on Alain DELON refers to French cinematography and can correctly establish categories for a page; on the other hand, the web page creators tend to catalog a page (also) according to some unrealistic criteria (for example, I can put in the list of keywords “buy movie”, although on the web site I may not sell movies with Alain DELON, but I do have advertising on the web site with selling movies and I am really interested that my web site is visited by people who want to buy movies, so that I would earn money from advertising; another method for abusing this tag was, in the first years of using the meta tag, the obsessive repeat of keywords, with slight variations: movie, movies, the movies, filming, films, shooting); at the end of the day, you should remember that the tag is not relevant anymore;
But the initially created wave (in the first years of the search engines) still persists; you can still find, today, web page creators who will still add the keywords tag, in order to attract visits; if the engines don’t give you any boost by using such techniques, they can, instead, penalize you based on this fact – if you abuse the tag (by repeating keywords), Google may consider that you are trying to SPAM it; so, the tag is not helpful if you do create it, but if you use it in a bad way, you may get into problems, so it’s best to eliminate it altogether;

While the meta keywords tag is hidden to typical visitors and it’s visible just for the search engines, on the other hand the obsessive repetition, with no real sense for the user, just to get better positioning in the search engines of some keywords is very visible to the visitors (alongside to the search engines); this process is called”keyword stuffing” and it is a weak (and inefficient and unethical) method of promotion; my suggestion is not to repeat in a page a keyword obsessively just for positioning; of course, in a page about potatoes, you will naturally speak about this vegetable, but, as a main idea, don’t push things;

Practice:
You have the meta keywords tag implemented on the web site and it’s just this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”camasi, camasi barbati, camasi slim fit, camasi cambrate, camasi sport, camasi club, camasi clasice, camasi birou, camasi la moda, camasi online, camasi elegante, magazin camasi” />
Yes, this is correct, you repeat the above tag on each page of the web site;

In my opinion, it would be best to remove the tag; you are very close to the thin line which separates spam from legit data – you repeat “camasi” way too much and don’t have an unique keywords tag for each page (you shouldn’t do this, but it would be a lesser signal that you are spamming);

Regarding keyword stuffing within the content itself, I haven’t noticed you doing such things;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problems;

Things to do next:
Remove the meta keywords tag;
Keep doing the good work (avoid the keyword stuffing in the content area);

A8.2. <meta name=”description”> – it should exist, invite the viewer to click and have a proper length
Theory:
First of all, the meta description tag should exist; it would be very useful to have unique descriptions on all of the pages of the web site;
Why is it important to have a web site description? Not only does Google take that description and shows it in some searches as a snippet (small texts shown in the search results, under the title of the page – details here: Google snippets), Facebook also takes that description and uses it when someone sends a random page from your web site (the link send via Facebook has a description, which is exactly that description from the meta tag); it is thus useful to have a description for Google, also for the situation when someone recommends your page via Facebook, to give just two examples;

How can you make a description with good usability, so that the people are invited to click on the Google or Facebook result?
i. Directly – invite the people to visit your web site: “Visit our web site” / “Click here” / “We invite you on our web site” / “See our web page”;
ii. By presenting benefits, giving a motivation to enter the web site – “Our web site offers you X and Y and Z”, “The advantage of using the web site is A, B, C”, “If you enter the web site, you can register to …”, “The visitors of the web site can benefit from …”;
The description should be made thinking about the people who search for a term on Google, find your web site, and two rows of text appear; you should make the text thinking of those people on the Internet, and things will be fine; in other words, avoid writing:
“Our web site sells potatoes; the potatoes we sell are cheap; we have other vegetables, but we sell mainly potatoes; buy potatoes”,
or, even worse:
“potatoes, small potato, potatoes, potato food, packed potatoes, visit our web site for the latest potatoes”,
with the thought of obsessively repeating a keyword in order to have better positioning in the search engines; no important search engine (attention!, no one!) uses the description for positioning in search results; you should do the descriptions for people, ignore the web spiders; this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use keywords, on the contrary, you can use it and even repeat it (but don’t overdo it); on the other hand, you should write the page description thinking about the visitors; a good example:
“Online potatoes: web site about fresh vegetables in Romania. In order to choose from the biggest offer of online potatoes, visit our web site.”

Finally, we advise you to keep the description under 155 characters (spaces included), to fit in the space allocated by the search engines (otherwise, it will be interrupted by suspension points “…”);

As a general idea, the description for the main page is more important, because it is most often visible in searches;

Practice:
You have the meta description tag implemented in the web site like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”Condra va ofera cele mai cool camasi barbati online fabricate in Romania” />
(+important) Yes, I’m correct, all the pages have the same description, even the homepage doesn’t have a unique description; it’s also a bit too short;

If I were you, I’d either compose a meta description for each page of the web site, or I’d make it to take automatically, considering that you are an online store:
[name of the product] – [name of the category]: [small description for all of the products in that specific category] [invitation to enter the web site];

Example:
Good hope shirt – men regular fit shirts: for the latest shirts with short sleeves, visit our web site; your top choice for a shirt bought in Romania;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
I would make unique description for each page of the web site, or at least create them automatically, this is an important issue;
At most, remove the duplicate description from your web site completely (leave it only for the homepage);
Also, make the description larger, no more than 155 characters with spaces;

A8.3. <meta name=”robots”> – it shouldn’t exist, or if it exists, it should be there with a good implementation
Theory:
In the text above, “robots” can be replaced by a specific robot (the most important ones, corresponding to the different search engines, are: googlebot, googlebot-image, msnbot, msnbot-media, msnbot-products, mozilla, ia_archiver, ia_archiver-web.archive.org, yahoo-blogs, yahoo-mmaudvid, yahooseeker), based on the template:
<meta name=”googlebot”>
A different argument follows: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, noodp, noydir, nosnippet;
The principle is, if any of the above sounds very complicated, you should either avoid completely these tags (you can do just fine without them), or, if you do use them, you should inform yourselves more on Search Engine Land;
It is advisable to have tags referring to robots only for the pages to which you don’t wish to give access to search engines (admin pages could be examples); bad usage of the tags can lead to problems (lack of indexing, complete absence from the search engines, etc.);

Practice:
You do use the meta tag in the web site, and you allow all engines access, this is good;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
I would try, in the future also, not to block access to the robots;
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A9. Redirects and localization

A9.1. How do the HTTP headers for a typical page? How about for a 404 error page?
Theory:
Using the FireFox add-on Live HTTP headers I can see what is the code sent by the web site to the browser;
Most of the time the 302 code is returned for the files which haven’t been modified since the last access and 200 code for the standard responses; for codes from the classes 1xx, 2xx, 3xx everything is fine;
Up until now, no problem; on the other hand, if I codes from the 4xx class are returned (404 most of the times) or 5xx there can be problems – it means that there are elements in the page that don’t load;
On the other hand, if I access an inexistent page on the web site, I should obtain at least once a 404 code, which will confirm me that the page doesn’t exist;

Practice:
Typical pages return the appropriate codes, the 404 page returns a 404 code;
I have presented above the problems with 404 pages which don’t display properly;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
In the future, you should keep doing what you do now to have proper rankings in the search engines;

A9.2. The country of your IP and what top-level domain does the web site have
Theory:
If the server that hosts your web site has an IP which is attributed to Romania, there is an increased chance that the web site is in Romanian;
The problem of locating a web site (Google needs to know which country is a web site from) is minor for a web site with a lot of content; the search engines can automatically detect what language does a web site have and locate that web site; that criteria would have been important, for example, for a web site in English from Great Britain – in that case it is relevant to know if the web site is addressed to a Great Britain, Australia or United States target market, for example;
Even for the situation in which a web site doesn’t have a lot of indexable text (it is a photo web site, or it is a web site almost fully in Flash), there is a satisfying solution: using Google Webmasters Tools and their equivalent from Bing and Yahoo! to attribute a country to a web site;
As a conclusion, an IP from a certain country does help, but it is a minor element and can easily be substituted by alternative solutions;

Regarding the top-level domain (TLD) used (the last letters from the domain, like “.com”/”.eu”/”.cn”/etc.), it is preferable that a web site from a specific country has the extension of its country; exceptions are the web sites from the USA, which tend to use .com TLDs and web sites from the European Union, which can either use their national TLDs or .eu (for the whole Union) domain;

Practice:
Your IP is from Romania (see above);
camasi.com.ro – the TLD is .ro (Romania);

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
You should maintain the current situation – avoid putting the web site on an external domain and IP from a different country;

A9.3. The presence of a physical address in the contact page (it would be preferable to be also be present in the footer)
Theory:
A good indicator of the country a web site is attributed to is the physical address presented in the contact page and the presence of the address in the footer of the web site; in the address it is best to specify the town, street, postal code, perhaps even the country;
The search engines will easier attribute a web site to a specific country if they will meet these two elements;
The presence of a physical address is also an usability criteria (the users trust a web site to which they can have a rapport not only virtually – “a web site” -, but also physically – “a physical address”);

Practice:
You have the address in the contact page, and you specify the country listed;

You don’t have the address in the footer;

The contact page on the blog is really scarce;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
I would put the address in the footer and fill in the other details for the contact page on the blog;

A9.4. Register to Google Local
Theory:
I will test the registration to Google Local via a search for the brandname at Google Maps;
Your best option is to be present in the result list, and if not, you should register to Google Local;
Why register? You can obtain good positioning for some local searches; coming back to the example with “potatoes”:
cheap potatoes kolkata india
will show results which contain the phrase “cheap potatoes” in the area of Kolkata, in India;
How to register? You can do this by using Google Maps (create a KML file and add it to Google Webmasters Tools, or, alternatively, add a certain address on Google Maps);

Practice:
You show up first in the results;

I see you also have an ad displayed;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
Great job, nothing to do here;
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A10. Links from you to yourselves (internal links)

A10.1. The number of links, be them to yourselves or to other web sites should not be very big
Theory:
In the opinion of Matt CUTTS, manager of webspam team at Google, it is best that any web site has on a given page less than 100 links to other pages (internal, to the same web site, or external, to other web sites); it is not, by all means, mandatory to have less than 100 links; the motivation is simple – a link will bring more value if there are only 9 other links on the page, rather than 999 other links on the page; it is preferable to have a smaller number of links on the page, to provide good value to other pages;
How to check yourselves how many links are there in a page? Install Opera browser, open a page from your web site in Opera, let it load fully, Tools => Links, copy all of the links in Microsoft Excel and see how many links you have;
On the other hand, I recommend you to much rather use one of the two sites below:

• Link Counter Tool, In-bound & Out-bound Links, NoFollow Links;
• Free SEO Tools – Links Counter;

As a side note, it’s best to underline the links and write them with a color different than the rest of the texts in the web site; a good practice is using blue colored links;

Practice:
Analyzed pages:
- The main page: 29 links;
- SLIM FIT_ Maneca Scurta: 29 links;
- SLIM FIT_ Maneca Lunga: 31 links;
- ZORBING: 23 links;
- PANDORA: 23 links;

Conclusion: you don’t have too many links on any of the analyzed web pages;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
You should keep on having less than 120-130 links per page for the web site pages;

A10.2. The anchor text should correspond with the destination page – internal links
Theory:
On the Internet you probably saw a lot of times links with the anchor text: “click here”; well, these links are not recommended; it is preferably to write: See the page “How to learn better in 5 steps and 3 hours of sleep”, rather than “Click here for details”;
How to check yourselves the anchor texts in a page? Install Opera browser, open a page on your web site in Opera, let it load completely, Tools => Links, and in the left column you will see the anchor text.
Also see a search such as:
["click here" site:camasi.com.ro]

Practice:
In general, you use a correct anchor text for internal links;

I’ve seen with “find out more” on the homepage, linking to the About us page, but this is about it;

A search for “click here” site:camasi.com.ro provided zero relevant results;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
I’d focus on not using “find out more” on the texts on both the web site and the blog.
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A11. Links from you to others (to exterior)

A11.1. Checking nofollow links
Theory:
Regular links send value; if I create a A web site and make a link to another web site – B -, the B web site will benefit from my link;

On the other hand, if I create an A web site and I have a blog on it and I have as commentators persons who wish to promote their web sites via SPAM, and my commentators add links in the comments they add to the blog, perhaps I don’t wish those links to have a value for the search engines; in other words, I can leave the link on the web site, it can be clickable, but I want to inform Google – “I haven’t personally checked those links, ignore them, they can be low quality links”; for this purpose nofollow was invented and for this aim it can be still useful today;

Nofollow was also used with different purposes – to handle links on your own web site; in other words, I can let Google know – “product pages are very important, but, on the other hand, the pages with terms and conditions are very weak, you should ignore them” and for this I can use nofollow on the pages with terms and conditions, for example; this technique is called “Page Rank sculpting“;

All-in-all, the nofollow technique is a relatively advanced technique and, used wrongly, it can do more bad things than good (Google can’t crawl some pages, the web site is only partially indexed, me, as a site owner, have the – wrong!, one might add – impression, that I know better than Google which pages are more important and which not); to avoid the problems of incorrect usage of nofollow, Google took some measures which, in a few words, advise you:
a. To keep using nofollow for blog comments, comments on which you don’t constantly check how do the web sites of the people commenting on your blog look like (do they use ethical principles of promotion, or are they in a somewhat grey area?);
b. To avoid using nofollow on your web site as a page sculpting technique;

Right now, the nofollow technique, still used according to some old Page Sculpting techniques, can be a dangerous method of influencing rankings;

You can still use nofollow for web sites which you don’t manually check (the web sites of those commenting on the blog of the company, for example);

In the analysis I will also analyze the links, by using Xenu’s Link Sleuth; the general report will show:

• Broken links, ordered by link;
• Broken links, ordered by page;
• List of redirected URLs;
• List of valid URLs you can submit to a search engine;
• Site Map of HTML pages with a Title;
• Broken page-local links;
• Orphan files;
• Statistics for managers;

Things to fix:  ”broken” and “orphans” types of links; also, you should have a look at the URLs which redirect from one URL to the other – problems may also show from this part also;

Practice:
You have these external links on the homepage of your web site:
Recommendation service for each product – www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=camasicomro
External Flash player – www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer
Social networks accounts – www.facebook.com/camasicomro www.twitter.com/camasicomro
Online shopping services related to your business:
www.goshopping.com/ro/cat–6303–pret–Imbracaminte_pentru_barbati–sortby–tip–wordby–Camasi.html
www.shopmania.ro/
www.smartbuy.ro/

I haven’t seen nofollow links on your web site, so you don’t do PageSculpting on your web site;

Xenu’s Link Sleuth report, shows, as a general rule:

Correct internal URLs, by MIME type:

All pages, by result type:

You should check out the detailed report;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): Zero problems;

Things to do next:
Everything is fine, in the future you should avoid doing Page Sculpting;

Note for the future: having comments on the blog with nofollow is a good thing;

A11.2. The anchor text should correspond with the destination page – outside links
Theory:
See above the theory for internal links;

Practice:
You use correctly the anchor text for external links; I am satisfied with the results on this aspect;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
Things are fine;

A11.3. External links should have a connection with your web site
Theory:
If you have a web site on vegetables and potatoes, it makes sense to have links to web sites on the food industry, agriculture, transportation of fruits and vegetables;
If, on the other hand, most of your links to the outside lead to web sites about PC maintenance, this means that you have a problem with the profile of the links;

Ideally, the external links should lead to web sites that are connected, if not with the web site as a whole, at least with the subject on the page the link goes from;

I hope it is not necessary to say that there are web sites that deserve more trust (a site of a hospital) than others (web sites that sell Viagra);
So, you should pay attention to whom you give a link;

Practice:
While some links that you have are rather general (add this, flash player, social networking account), some external a connection with your business (go shopping, ShopMania, SmartBuy);

In the future, I’d focus more on finding some relevant businesses in your field to which to link to;

If you will have a blog, you will do a good job if you find good resources to link to;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): low gravity problems;

Things to do next:
In the future, you should put more links on your web site, which are related to your field of activity;
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A12. Links from others to yourself (links from the exterior)

A12.1 Should be numerous, be from quality web sites, be on web sites that are related to you, should not be all on the homepage, have a good anchor text, be a natural profile of links
I hope it is clear to you that links, if there are many, help you to make your link profile be natural, helps you with Page Rank, helps you show that you are on the web; and this is only referring to the number; but other things count also;

What does it mean to get links from quality web sites?
i. The links should be related to your web site (see above – if you have a web site about potatoes, you should obtain links either from fruits and vegetables web sites, either from a single article on a web site, article that is about vegetables);
ii. The web sites that link to you should have, in turn a lot of links;
iii. (vicious circle) The links you obtain should be from web sites that, in their turn, are quality web sites;
Therefore, if you get an article in a national newspaper, and that article has a link to your web site, you have just obtained a good quality link (the national newspaper will write the article on a subject that is related to you, the online version of the newspaper has a lot of links from other web sites and that web site generally has quality links);
If, on the other hand, the news article is copied illegally by 100 obscure news sources, which don’t do anything but copy (scrape) content from the Internet, you just got 100 pretty weak links;
In other words, it is important that a source like “The New York Times” provides you with a link, but it’s less important that a web site created just to scrape content on other web sites gives a link;
Of course, the links to your web site should be on pages that are related to your web site (I have detailed this above);
Another thing that is important is that links are not, all of them, to the homepage; the usual visitors enter the web sites, read you, open an article, read, open another page; at some point the visitors will find a page/an article/a section which they like; they will send it forward, perhaps, on social networks; but they will send that specific page, not any page on the web site; and, most of all, will not send the homepage of your web site;
But the site owner, when they promote a web site, tend to use the main page: “Visit the web site camasi.com.ro today …, and find out …, and receive …”; the problem is that a link profile in which 90% of the links to your web site are exclusively to the main page looks unnatural; you want positioning in Google and other search engines not only for the homepage, but to other web sites also;

Regarding the anchor text – if you have a web site on cucumbers:
www.mywebsite.com/vegetables/cucumbers,
when a client of your offers you to give you a link, advise you not to give a link as:
“To find excellent vegetables, click here”,
but rather give you a links as:
“To find excellent vegetables, see Cucumbers – web site with vegetables of X Company”;
The second version of the link is useful for both the user – who will better understand what the destination web site is about – and Google, who can better interpret the link;

How does a natural link profile look like?
a. You should have links from diverse sources – the local City Hall (which displays the list of companies in the town), clients web sites (which describe the experience with you), social networks (someone recommends a link on Twitter, another person uses Facebook, someone is filming you and puts your company on YouTube); I also include in here the fact that the links should come from as many web sites as possible (so if you have a link in the footer of site X and that X web site has 1,000 pages, OK, you have 1.000 links, but those links are not from diverse sources; those 1,000 links would be much better use to if they were distributed on 100 distinct web sites, 10 links per web site);
b. You should have links that are not exclusively dofollow (Wikipedia has nofollow, Twitter has nofollow, the list continues); if you have only dofollow links, you may leave the impression that you have influenced the process by which you got the links (it looks like an artificial process, and the search engines don’t appreciate this);
c. You should have links with different anchor text – if all the links to your web site look like this:
Cucumbers – enter here to buy cheap and great cucumbers, from Thailand,
may be a sign that you have manipulated the process of obtaining links; it’s best that some links to your web site differ, you shouldn’t have all of the links to your web site with the same anchor text;
d. You shouldn’t suddenly obtain lots and lots of links and then suddenly stop – if you add your web site into 1,000 web directories within 3 day, distribute very quickly 10 press releases in English on dozens of press release web sites and then you suddenly stop, this may be interpreted as a sign that you have used not very good methods of link building; my recommendation would be to obtain links step by step and constantly; also, you shouldn’t obtain more than 10-20 links in a given day; if you do get 20 links per day, you should try and keep this number for a lot of time; there are exceptions to this – should you write a phenomenally, revolutionary article and this article gets recommended a lot, you appear on TV, you’re all over media, be it online or offline, then you will get a lot of links fast; but they are quality links and those links generate, in turn, lots of links; yes – this kind of practices are good;
e. You shouldn’t have most of your links from obscure sources – if you submit your web site to web directories, choose them with care; if you send an article to be published on web sites of press releases, you should check the site on which you publish information; always ask yourselves – if I were a star, would I associate my brand with this web site? Would I like to have my name appear on the web site? Take good care of your brand; avoid getting links that can be obtained by anyone, even those that do spamming on the Internet;
f. It is useful not to take part to, at least not excessively, link exchange schemes; you can do such practices, but on a limited basis;

How can I see the links to you?

• (attention! Very little relevancy! See details below) Google;
• Yahoo!;
• Links to web site – Open Site Explorer;
• Individual web sites (distinct domains) which link to the website – Open Site Explorer;
• Anchor text according to the links the web site Open Site Explorer;

How can you see much more links?
Explanations for the number of links displayed in Google: that indicator is not necessarily a realistic indicator; what I suggest to find out an better estimation (this is still an estimation) of the number of links is to look at Google Webmasters Tools for details; Google Webmasters Tools only displays approximately 70-80% of the links, but it is a much more realistic indicator than one of the searches done above;
You also have the options offered by Bing and Yahoo! for webmasters; you can have access to much more links in there; for example, Yahoo! displays as a standard only 1,000 links, and counts also the links with nofollow, which aren’t relevant for rankings, and counts the links on the same web site repeatedly; on the other hand, Yahoo! Site Explorer will display the complete list of links;

Practice:
Tests (I advise you to use the option to download files as CSV/TSV to open them in Microsoft Excel):

• (attention! Very little relevancy! See details below) Google – 1 result;
• Yahoo! – 244 results;
• Links to web site – Open Site Explorer – 37 results;
• Individual web sites (distinct domains) which link to the website – Open Site Explorer – 22 distinct domains link to the web site;
• Anchor text according to the links the web site Open Site Explorer – 7 variations;

I’ve looked with Google Webmasters Tools and saw 364 links to your web site; 170 of those are to the homepage;

You also have links to these pages:
/docs/instructiuni-de-intretinere.pdf 21
/produs.php?pid=119 14
/servicii.php 13
/produs.php?pid=203 13

Looking on the links to your web site, I can say that:
a. You have very few links; this is the most important problem;
b. You also lack quality links; you only have quite a few links from quality web sites (Lumea SEO PPC, Styleshopper.ro, Condra, CityMaps.ro);
c. Not all of the links are from pages which are related to you (wonder.ro, for example);
d. You have a lot of links to the homepage;
e. The anchor text doesn’t have a lot of variations, but it is at a fine level;
f. The link profile looks semi-natural, you lack links from the community;

Regarding the anchor text, you have links to the web site with the following variations:
camasi barbati product of condra
costin iatan
(img)
[No Anchor Text]

http://www.camasi.com.ro

www.camasi.com.ro
camasi
aici

(+important) As a problem: you have relatively few links and of not great quality; I can say that some of the links that you do have are related to your business;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
I would improve the links profile, like this: I would increase the number of links, their quality, their relevance and the anchor text;

A12.2 Links from Twitter social network to your web site
Theory:
Why is it important to have links to your from Twitter? Twitter is, in most of the cases, a social network on which regular people post links that they find interesting; a sustained presence in such a social network can be a sign that you have a natural link profile, that people consider your links useful, and, willingly, they give links to you; last, but not least, a Twitter presence can be useful in other purposes than strictly SEO: you can interact with your target audience, you can get visits from the participants at Twitter discussions;
More recently, the presence of a web site in Twitter can positively affect the positioning in Google and Bing search engines;

I will test using BackTweets, Social Mention, Twitrratr and with Twitter.
Obviously, you should have as many links from Twitter as possible;

Practice:
BackTweets: I have found 3 tweets to your website; Social Mention has 42 social mentions to you, most important being the Flickr account; Twitrratr has no mentions, while Twitter: 0 tweets; it is a pretty poor performance, considering that your only three tweets are all links from your own Twitter account;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problem;

Things to do next:
I would try to raise the support of community to the web site; you can put buttons like “Tweet this!”, if you consider that your audience is using Twitter; or you can just test – put a button like this and see the results;

You could also use a more active presence on other social networks, to increase your presence in the Social Mention web site;
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A13. Analysis of the traffic and of the searches

A13.1. Alexa.com + public web analytics data
Theory:
If you use within the web site public traffic analysis software, I will analyze the traffic from these web sites;

If your traffic is private, I can base my analysis on the extrapolations made by Alexa.com;
It is important to know how does Alexa get the presented data: for all the users who have installed Alexa toolbar, they get information on the visited web sites; using the statistics got from the users who have installed that toolbar, (approximate) data is obtained, for all of the users of a specific country (or international)

The problem is, of course, that only a small percentage of the Internet users use the Alexa toolbar, and those that do use it (it is useful to get statistics on the visited web site, for example) have a tendency to be persons with advanced IT knowledge (therefore, the visitors profile is not necessarily the typical profile of an Internet user);

Nevertheless, it is an useful approximation, at least to have a general idea on the traffic data;

Practice:
According to Alexa.com, the web site camasi.com.ro:
- It is the 795,041^st most visited web site in the world;
- It is the 5,098^th most visited web site in Romania;

These are relatively weak results;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average;

Things to do next:
Try to increase the traffic to your web site;

A14.2. Being present in Google Trends
Theory:
Google Trends can provide information on the typical profile of the web site visitors; it is only available for web sites with a high volume of searches and displays in Google (usually, large and very large web sites);

Practice:
Google Trends doesn’t offer web site about the web site;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
You can’t do a too many things about it, you could only obtain more searches to the web site, and this is very little within in your control;
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A14. Semantic HTML

A14.1. Pages that load slowly? Testing the page sizes + the transfer speed
Theory:
No matter what the speed of the Internet for computer/laptop access is in your target markets, you should still focus on trying to improve the speed of your web site; take into account that some users access a web site on mobile devices, or share the same connection of Internet on many computers; another thing to note is that even if the transfer speed is very high, a file smaller with 50% will reduce the loading time from a (theoretical) 4 seconds to another (theoretical) 2 seconds; this means that even if the transfer is very fast, a page with small size will load even faster; therefore, if you can lower the page size – why not do it?

I consider to be interesting this quote by Google:

The average web page takes up 320 KB on the wire (Google took into account the embedded resources such as images, scripts and stylesheets). Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually compressed. In 80% of pages, 10 or more resources are loaded from a single host.

So, a typical web page has, with images and scripts, around 320 KB.

How do I test the page size?
I will save more pages with FireFox (Web page, complete); I will then say what the values of the sizes of HTML files were and then I will include the average size of the pages, with images, scripts, Flash files, as they were saved;

It is recommendable that the size of the HTML file (without any attachments: CSS, JavaScripts, images etc.) should not surpass 150 kilobytes;

Two notes:
i. Saving a page from the browser doesn’t always reflect the exact size; first of all, the same page saved in FireFox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Chrome, can have slight variations of size; on the other hand, if I do an average for 5 random pages on the web site, I will get some good results; secondly, there are things (JavaScripts, embedded video clips, video players, XML files) which (potentially) won’t be saved on the hard drive; I know no good solution for this;
ii. If I visit a web site, I visit the main page for the first time, the complete page will load (with the HTML file, attachments, Flash, JavaScript, CSS, etc.); if I visit another page of the web site, some of the elements of the web site will not load, therefore the load time for the second page in the web site is, most of the times, smaller;
Then, using the add-on Page Speed from Google and Yahoo! YSlow from Yahoo! (it is used only in FireFox, as an add-on for a different add-on – FireBug) I will do a test of the page and export the results;

How do I test the speed of the web site?
Ideally, for a web site with a target located in a specific country, the web site speed should be tested using some important Internet hubs in that country, using Internet service providers which are representative for that country, and do an average of the results;

My solution is a bit simplified – I will test with aptimize;

I will also used WebPagetest web site to evaluate the site’s performance;

SEOmoz solutions to increase the site speed;

Practice:
I have saved more pages with FireFox and found pages with sizes of 15, 14, 16, 16, 16 kilobytes (the HTML file only); if we add to this the rest of files (JavaScript, CSS, images), the average page size is somewhere at 687 KB; it is pretty good for the HTML file only, but the total size of the pages is large;

Regarding PageSpeed add-on, I have exported the results to ShowSlow.com for the homepage and a product page on your web site, you can see the details there;
You have better than average scores, 69-71 out of 100, as important problems I could note:

Add Expires headers
Compress components with gzip
Make JavaScript and CSS external
Leverage browser caching
Combine external JavaScript
Avoid document.write
Parallelize downloads across hostnames
Serve static content from a cookieless domain
Enable compression
Minify JavaScript
Minify CSS
Defer loading of JavaScript

Overall though, these are good results;

Testing with aptimize, I have got the results from the

attached PDF file – Aptimize results.
- The web site speed, with uncompressed data, loaded for the first time is 20.2 seconds (total loading time for the web site);
- If I return to the web site, only some files of the web site will reload, and the speed drops to 9.7 seconds;

Also, the results of the testing done on WebPagetest to evaluate the site’s performance show:

I’ve also had some additional times for loading at the A2.3. Navigation test (crawling) section;

These are satisfying times, not perfect, but good;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
You should check the errors got with Google PageSpeed and Yahoo! YSlow and solve them, as good as possible;

A14.2. Alternate text (ALT) for images and filenames
Theory:
For image optimization, alternate text is a very good solution;
You can obtain traffic from the search engines, based on image search, if you optimize images;
How to easily check the alternate text of images? In Opera: View => Images => No images;

Also, the name of an image (photograph, photo) from the web site should reflect what the image is about; in other words, you should not name an image:
DSC00004.gif,
but, instead, give it a real name:
Last-meeting-advisory-board-morning-SurfNet.gif

Practice:
The images on your web site generally have alternate text;
Well done! I have found images, especially in the navigation of the page, without alternate texts, but as a general rule, you do use alternate texts;
Unfortunately, you don’t use specific ALT text for each image, you just put a general ALT text for the image, using the product title; if I were you, I’d create unique ALT text for each image;

Regarding the filenames, you don’t fulfill the request very well, either: 1078_1305107719.jpg.

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problems;

Things to do next:
I would try to put unique alternate texts on all the images on your web site and, in the future, keep having alternate texts for images;

A14.3. Pages with poorly formatted text;
Theory:
Generally, text formatting helps with easy reading, with one condition: do not overdo it (for example, bolding excessively words in the web site, or using the hn tags abusive);

Practice:
I haven’t met this problem; generally you don’t have problem, you should keep on doing things this way;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
Keep on doing the current method of formatting the text;

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B. Other good practices, other bad practices

Theory:
a. Good practices
I’ll list below a list with good practices in handling a web site:
- If you target a keyword for a certain page, you should put the keyword first in the title of the page – <title>;
- If you wish to start a web site from scratch, it’s best that the URL of the domain to be a targeted keyword:
www.skodacars.com
www.potatoesbangladesh.com
www.qualityseo.eu
www.modernweddings.co.uk
(as a not – the dash “-” is unnecessary);
- The <h1> tag is best to start with the targeted keyword;
- The texts which you put for links to your own pages (link to “About us” page, for example) and to pages from outside (link to a page from outside) are very important; it’s best that those links are not:
“Click here for details”,
but instead:
“See the page – silkworm rearing – for details”;
- A page with texts should contain, at a minimum, 4-500 words (only the content, ignoring the header, the menu, sidebar, footer etc.);
- Do you wish to have top positioning for a page? You need:
i. Links to the web site, in general;
ii. Links to that specific page, specifically;
It’s best that the links:
i. Are connected with the domain of the web site;
ii. Are connected with the domain of the page for which you wish top positioning;
iii. Are not obtained all at once, but constantly and at a steady pace;
iv. Are on a good anchor text (“potatoes”, instead of “click here”);
v. Come from various sources (not just a type of web sites, but as many as possible);
vi. Come from trustworthy web sites, which in turn have obtained links especially from trustworthy web sites;
vii. Are obtained not just from other web sites, although these are important also, but should come from the interior, other pages of your web site;
- The site should have a clear, simple and easy to understand architecture; someone that enters a web site for the first time should easily understand what it is about and can navigate without any problems on the web site;
- Give links to other web sites, with no fear whatsoever; you shouldn’t be just a destination for the link, just be a source; you should decide if you want to give links to direct competitors;
- The server which hosts your web site:
a. Should be localized in specific country, if you target that specific country; also, it should have a bandwidth as possible; the reason is simple – the faster a web site will load, the better will it be seen by the search engines;
b. A web site it’s best that is functioning as long as possible – it looks natural, but you should make sure that you have a web site that has a period of functioning (uptime) in a year as high as possible;
- A site from a specific country should have a top-level domain (TLD) for that specific country:
.com for international web sites and sites based in the US;
.co.uk for sites in Great Britain;
.eu for sites in the European Union;

b. Bad practices
Below you will find a list of bad practices in handling a web site:
- You can have content dedicated for the search engines and a different content for the visitors; in other words, the search engines may have the impression you have useful articles on cucumbers, while, instead, for the users you have pages with illegal traffic of cucumbers; don’t do this;
- Avoid obtaining links from sources of links with poor quality, they can adversely affect you;
- Also, don’t give links to web sites with a bad reputation;
- Don’t write on the page texts with colors which looks similar to the background, to be seen by the search engines, and the usual visitors can have problem reading them; avoid this practice;
- Don’t fill a page with the same and same keywords; avoid repetition without a purpose;
- Don’t buy links;
- Don’t put excessively lot of links to other web sites in the footer, it can be a SPAM signal;

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C. Conclusions – important things + final conclusions

1. You occupy top positions for searches related to your brand, you event have good results for the searching for top keywords; I’d look into the “camasa” issue;

2. The option without www. doesn’t redirect, as it should, to the option with www.; very big problem!

3. Yes, I’m correct, all the pages have the same description, even the homepage doesn’t have a unique description; it’s also a bit too short;

4. As a problem: you have relatively few links and of not great quality; I can say that some of the links that you do have are related to your business;

Notă finală: dacă veți dori pe viitor să realizați un site web și să păstreze anumite criterii SEO, vedeți și:
The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet.

_________
Bottom line: the web site camasi.com.ro is a web site with very good search engine optimization.

Contents:

A. Detailed SEO analysis
A1. First impression
A2. Accessibility and navigation ease by the search engines’ spiders
A3. Checking the web site in search engines
A4. Checking the hosting server and the domain
A5. The URLs
A6. Web site titles
A7. Content
A8. Meta tags (meta description, meta keyword)
A9. Redirects and localization
A10. Links from you to yourselves (internal links)
A11. Links from you to others (to exterior)
A12. Links from others to yourself (links from the exterior)
A13. Analysis of the traffic and of the searches
A14. Semantic HTML
B. Other good practices, other bad practices
C. Conclusions

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A. Detailed SEO analysis

(top)

A1. First impression

A1.1. Usability
Theory:
The website usability is important for the user experience, in general; there is also a secondary importance – if the search engines consider that you have a web site that doesn’t offer a pleasant experience to the users, this may have a negative influence on the positioning on search engines results pages; you should remember that, as a general rule, if you ensure a pleasant experience to the viewers, the engines will appreciate this;
It’s best when a web site has a sitemap and a search function; these are two very good elements to help navigation; by sitemap I mean something like this: Apple’s sitemap;
It’s best when any page of the web site can be accessed via a menu, or via a different page, or, at least, through a page like “Sitemap”;
Breadcrumbs are also a valid option;

Practice:
Search function – it’s present in the upper-right corner;
Sitemap – you have an HTML sitemap;
Accessibility – any page of the web site can be accessed via the menu;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
Everything is fine;
You should keep up the good work;
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A2. Accessibility and navigation ease by the search engines’ spiders

A2.1. Navigation without JavaScript, cookies, Flash, CSS, forms, login, frames, splash (intro) pages
Theory:
Why is it a problem if some parts of the web site can’t be accessed without JavaScript? You can see here – W3 Schools browsers statistics – that the percentage of the visitors who don’t use JavaScript is around 5% of the total visitors of a general web site – this is a huge number! 5% of your visitors can’t navigate properly in the web site, if you use JavaScript for this; but from the search engines’ perspective, the problem is even bigger, there are real problems at navigating a web site which is based on links generated via JavaScript Google’s solution to crawling via JavaScript;

Also, the engines don’t generally use cookies; details on this on Google’s web site;

Although Flash can be indexed, my suggestion is to avoid using Flash for navigation elements (menus, links); details, again at Google’s;

CSS can be used adversely to hide elements in a page; in other words, you can write a text portion just for the search engines and hide that text to regular users, by using CSS; this is a negative behavior; you can read more on Google web site; the search engines don’t interpret very well CSS; thus it’s best to have a web site that can be browsed without CSS;
Read Google’s guidelines for details;

Also, a web site should be possible to navigate without using forms – for example, if my web site is a dictionary and on the very first page there is a form which forces me to insert a word to find a definition, there is a problem; the engines will not insert, randomly, words in the form to find all the possible combinations; you can use, in this situation, alternative solutions to navigate the web site (links to words, a sitemap), and navigation by filling out a form should be just an option out of more possibilities;

The same goes for the login option – if my web site is a social network and all of the site contents is “hidden” behind a login page, the engines will lack the option of browsing the web site;

Frames (displaying two pages, with different URLs, within the same browser window) are a web development solution which can make the browsing by the search engines difficult;

Intro pages are pages displayed prior to entering the web site; a lot of times they are used for purely esthetic reasons, ignoring functionality; their main problem is that they move the web site content to yet another click away from site entry, forcing you to wait for the page to load and click on it to be able to visit the web site; I advise you not to use this for reasons that are SEO related, mainly, but also for usability reasons (the first time you see a intro page may be interesting, the second time you are already annoyed by it);

To test a web site without JavaScript, in FireFox go to: Tools => Options => Content => Enable JavaScript (uncheck); after you test it, you should return to the initial settings;

To navigate the web site without cookies, Tools => Options => Privacy => Use custom settings for history => Show cookies => delete only the cookies on your web site, by doing a search => Close => uncheck Accept cookies from sites; after you test, you should return to the original settings;

A web site can be seen without Flash this way: Tools => Add-ons => Plugins => Shockwave Flash => Disable; don’t forget to set Enable after testing;

How does a web site look without CSS? I recommend you to use FireFox and choose View => Page Style => No page style (you will choose Basic Page Style to return to the previous setting);

Practice:
a. Navigation without JavaScript – the search option no longer hides “search here” text when I click on it; I can subscribe to the newsletter, even if I insert no data (you should check this), I can’t see the Euro exchange rate; other than that, the navigation was fine;
b. Navigation without cookies – I can contact you, use the search, browse the web site; I can’t login on WordPress blog, yet that’s fine, I don’t see new content by logging in;
c. Navigation with deactivated Flash – I can’t see one banner, the videos don’t load;
d. Navigation without CSS – I can browse the web site without the CSS loading;
e. About navigation using forms – although you do have a search box, a contact form and a login page for the WordPress blog, they’re all fine; I can navigate most of the web site content without forms;
f. About navigation by logging into the web site – only the WordPress blog has a login, it’s fine without that content being accessible;
g. You don’t use frames;
h. You have no splash page;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problems;

Things to do next:
I’d look into the problems of JavaScript;
The navigation without Flash can be improved slightly if you use static banners, instead of Flash ones, yet it’s a minor issue;

A2.2. Presence of robots.txt and sitemap.xml
Theory:
I expect the file robots.txt: first of all to exist, and second of all to contain a link to at least one of the files:
i. sitemap.xml;
ii. sitemap.xml.gz;
iii. sitemap.gz,
so that the search engines know that you have a .xml sitemap;
You can read here about robots.txt files – robots.txt organization;
As a general rule, you should avoid using disallow without know very well what you are doing (example: reasons for site security – maybe you wish to change some texts on a daily basis, and you don’t want this thing to be seen on Google cache; or you may hide the login and admin pages completely secured and away from the eyes of the search engines);
On the other hand, used without precautions, robots.txt can create some problems;
A lot of people use Disallow for SEO reasons – Page Sculpting; I recommend you to read these articles: nofollow problems, Page Sculpting is nonsense before doing such things;
How to create a sitemap.xml file? You can find here – XML Sitemaps Generator – a sitemap generator for a regular web site, smaller than 500 pages; a best practice would be to run it from time to time, as you update your web site; also, here – Google Sitemap Generator – you will find a plugin for WordPress;
Depending on the platform of your web site, you can have an automated sitemap.xml generator, or you can develop one in-house (it’s not very hard); if your web site rarely ever updates its structure (new files, new pages), you can use the above generator for manually update the sitemap.xml;
If your sitemap.xml is very large, you can consider splitting your file into more pieces;
Also, it’s best that the sitemap elements contain priority of each file (thus, you can “inform” the search engine how important is one page) and the date for the last change;
Final note: don’t forget to use Google Webmasters Tools to add your sitemap.xml into it;

Practice:
Robots.txt – the file exists, excellent!
Link to sitemap.xml – no;
Disallow – you do use disallow, but you do this very well; no problem in here; I have seen though that you block the access via disallow to the images folder; I really think that this is a bad practice, you can get good traffic to your web site via Google Images Search; I would stop blocking images folder;
In the future, pay attention to how you use disallow, not to block any engine;
sitemap.xml, sitemap.xml.gz, sitemap.gz – none of these three files exists;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average;

Things to do next:
If I were you, I’d create a sitemap.xml file and link to it from robots.txt;
Also, stop blocking Images folder;

A2.3. Navigation test (crawling)
Theory:
I will test the web site with Smart IT Consulting – Googlebot spoofer, with SEO browser and with JSunpack – JavaScript Unpacker; I will also do a test navigation using Lynx Viewer;
Also, you should note that if you follow the rules of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) you can be sure that the web site is well navigated (crawled) by the search engines; W3C rules are standards that the creators of Internet browsers – FireFox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer etc. – try to follow; if you follow those standards, in theory both the browsers (that display your web site to the users) and the search engine spiders (a basic aim for SEO) will navigate the web site very well;
According to W3C tests you can see the current status of how well you follow the guidelines of W3C; do remember that, although it’s optimal to have 0 errors, most of the times it’s better to have a look on the errors and solve only those problems that affect the navigation by the search engines in a significant amount; have you forgotten to put ALT attribute for an image? That’s very bad for image indexing, but the web site can still be indexed; have you forgotten to close a tag that affects the correct display of the web site? Perhaps you should correct this; remember, as a general rule, that permanently seeking to have 0 errors on W3C on any page of the web site will only help little, if you are talking about minor errors;
I will do the test of W3C for the main page of the web site; in the future, it might be a good idea that if you will have doubts that a page is not index, to check that page with W3C testing (in other words, you can test any page of the web site, not only the homepage, and it’s best to run those tests when you have a real need for it);

PS: More than the external testing, you can do a test yourselves; just check out the Crawl errors sections from Google Webmasters Tools – you will see there the potential crawling errors; other search engines have functions similar to Google Webmasters Tools: Bing and Yahoo! Site Explorer;

I will also test the CSS and the links from the web site;

Practice:
Testing with Smart IT Consulting – Googlebot spoofer: no major problems; some parts of the web site are missing (as interpreted by the search engines), some external elements in the page (JavaScript and Flash, for example), don’t load, but the navigation is possible;
SEO browser test: I could browse the web site very well;
Below some data which you should retain, they will be presented again in a different form later in the report:
Page loaded in: 2.194 seconds
IP address: 91.200.123.206
Country IP: Romania
Lynx Viewer test: on this test I had a problem loading the URL;
JSunpack – JavaScript Unpacker test: there are no malicious or suspect elements;
W3C testing: 88 errors, 71 warnings; I would have a look on the errors and fix the important ones;
CSS test: No error, 10 warnings, it’s pretty OK;
Link checking: I couldn’t run this check;

I have personally checked your Google Webmasters Tools, Bing Webmaster Center and Yahoo! Site Explorer – no problem found generally; I do have to warn you about this page;
There are 44 URLs which have not been found, 8 URLs which have been restricted by robots.txt and 25 URLs have links to them, but can’t be reached; I’d solve all those problems;

No crawl errors on Bing;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
I’d solve the W3C errors (only the ones which are really important);
Very important is to have no pages on the web site which don’t load, so log into Google Webmasters Tools and fix the problems;

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A3. Checking the web site in search engines

A3.1. The search [site:citycompass.ro]
Theory:
a. Have most of the pages been indexed?
We compare the results from sitemap.xml (or we just count the pages in the web site, if sitemap.xml doesn’t list all the pages) with searches from the search engines:

• Google;
• Yahoo!;
• Bing;

We get a number of pages indexed in each search engine;
If you want to increase these numbers, you have to make sure you do two things:
i. You don’t “block” the search engines’ access into the web site; you can do this via a correctly configured robots.txt, by not using cookies, JavaScript, Flash, by following W3C guidelines (all of these have been described earlier), by robots meta tag-ul robots (described below); so, as a first solution – don’t block robots’ access;
ii. You “invite” the engines to visit your web site; what is an attraction to a search engine? What drives it and motivates it to visit link after link on your web site? What makes it come back and search for new texts? There are many criteria, mainly Google must see your web site as a quality web site; how does it do that? The most important thing is for you to have a lot of links (i.), from quality web sites, so they are not spamming and doing things at the border of legality (ii.), links are from web sites that have, on their turn, a lot of links, are trustworthy and come from web sites that are important in the Internet (iii.), the search engines will favor your web site and will better index it (will visit it once, will navigate as much of it as possible, will come back often);
The two main reasons above synthesize an important percentage of the reasons for which a web site is well indexed; if you want a full, exhaustive list of the factors for which a web site is higher in rankings (and, thus, may be considered “appropriate” to be indexed), you can see a very good article at Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009 – SEOmoz;

b. Is the homepage first on the list of search results?
If the homepage is not the first in the list, there are two explanations:
a. One or more pages have attracted more links than the main page;
b. Google has penalized the first page, from various reasons;
Although there is no direct correlation between the presence of another page than the homepage as the first in the list, it is preferable that the first page in the lists to be the homepage itself;

Practice:
a. Have most of the pages been indexed?
You don’t have a – sitemap.xml file; excluding the blog, and the results from the search pages, I estimate the number of pages on your web site to be about 250;
You have 52 pages in the Html sitemap;

Search engine searches:

• Google (190 indexed results);
• Yahoo! (77 indexed results);
• Bing (194 indexed results);

I can say that most of the pages on your web site have been indexed by Google and Bing; on the other hand, Yahoo! has indexed only in a small proportion the web site;

Overall, it is a satisfying result for Google and Bing, and less satisfying for Yahoo!;
b. Is the homepage first on the list of search results?
Yes, the web site www.citycompass.ro is first in the list at all the engines;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): low gravity problems;

Things to do next:
See the solutions in the theoretical parts to increase Yahoo! indexing;

A3.2. Look for the brand name at the search engines
Theory:
a. Searching for the name of the company/brand
Searching for the name of the company/brand for a web site with a certain presence in the Internet should return on the first position the web site itself – thus, citycompass.ro should be the first;
If this doesn’t happen, there is a possibility that the search engine considers the web site as spamming (or perhaps the web site hasn’t received enough links, another atypical thing for a web site which has a certain age on the Internet);
I chose to favor the searches in Romanian, because most Internet users in Romania do such searches – localized;

What should be done to increase positioning? First of all, if you are involved in spammy practices (links from obscure sources, you try to fool the search engines in one way or another), you should stop these practices; concerning links, if you have enough of them and they are quality links, normally the first site in the searches should become citycompass.ro; thus – get more links!

b. Searching for top keywords
Also relevant for positioning are the searches for keywords that are traffic relevant; if the web site is well optimized internally (which means it has a good architecture) and externally (it has valuable links, from important web sites, from important web sites, from its activity niche, and with relevant anchor text), then it should be well positioned for the desired keywords; if the web site doesn’t have good positioning for some keywords, you can study the SEOmoz guide for rankings – SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors – and implement as many of the advices in there as possible; you should note that internal optimization (what you do on your own web site) is important for about 20% of the positioning factors, while external optimization (links that are put by others on your web site) account for 80% of positioning factors; thus, in this case also, put emphasis on getting more links;

Practice:
a. Searching for the name of the company/brand
The results for searching [City Compass] at:

• Google (position 1 out of 10 results, pages in Romanian are advantaged at this search);
• Yahoo! (position 1 out of 10 results, pages in Romanian are advantaged at this search);
• Bing (position 1 out of 10 results, pages in Romanian are advantaged at this search);

You do well with search engine positioning; it should be noted that the Yahoo! search didn’t bring the homepage as the very first result;

b. Searching for top keywords
According to Google:
[Bucharest city tour] (you don’t appear in the first 10 results);
[online language classes] (you don’t appear in the first 10 results);
[expat relocation romania] (position 8 out of 10 results);

Although you occupy top positions for searches related to your brand, I can say that the results for the searching for top keywords is not very good, I would work more on positioning on competitive keywords;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
I would look on the solutions in the theoretical part to increase positioning for competitive keywords;

A3.3. Checking content
Theory:
a. Hidden content in the web site pages
Procedure: I visit Google cache for each of the pages ( to see Google cache of a certain page, in this URL you should replace target_URL with your desired URL; I have done this for each of the 5 pages analyzed); then I select all the text in the page, to see if selecting the text shows a text written with the same color as the background; then for each of the previous links I choose text-only version (this will not load the CSS file, thus making the page look very rudimentary), to compare the original page with the results saved on Google’s server;

Situations: if the chosen pages don’t appear in Google cache, there are two hypothesis:
i. The pages have not been indexed by the search engine (either that page has recently appeared and Google hasn’t begun indexing it, or Google has had problems in reaching via regular crawling to the page, or – and this is a serious problem – Google penalizes you by not indexing your web site for some unorthodox practice; there is also the possibility of that page being considered less important by the search engines and for this reason it has not been indexed);
ii. The pages have been blocked from indexing; details here- avoid search engine indexing – on how this could have happened (you should generally do the opposite – make sure Google indexes you);

b. Checking for duplicate content (the content on your web site should not be found on other web sites)
The situation is typical – a web site publishes an extraordinary article and benefits the traffic, link, marketing buzz; the competition sees this thing and, with your permission or not, legally or not, copies the content; in the end, for the search engines is not really important who copied who; there is a problem, though: if an Internet users searches for a fragment from that extraordinary web site, which site will be shown? Will it be the web site that started the buzz, or will it be the web sites that copied the content? Google must decide this very well; ideally, you shouldn’t copy content from other web sites and others should not copy content from your web site;

There are a few possible situations:
a. Only you appear in the results – this is optimal;
b. You appear in the results, among others (duplicate content), but you are the first in the results list – you can avoid copying content if, when you publish content on other web sites on your own, you publish different content on other web sites; so, you can make a content for your web site and a different content for your partners; the problem is not that big if you appear first in the search results, but this isn’t content, and it’s a shame if for your content, other web sites rank first;
c. You appear in the results, among others (duplicate results), but you are not the first in the results list – it is a problem if someone looks for a page on your web site, and your web site ranks second in the results; you can apply the solution on point b. (different texts on other web sites), or you can increase the value of your web site in the search results; how do you do that? By gathering more links to that specific page and to your web site in general; also, if someone copies your text, it’s best if you have a link in that text, saying that the text originated from your web site; you should also try to make your web site very crawlable, so that the first web site that Google indexes is yours, not your competitors (this can be done with links to your web site and with a good crawling architecture); please remember that this is not about you copying content from others, or others copying content from you; what this is about is that Google considers that your page is less relevant than others, and shows it on a lower position; the satisfaction that you haven’t copied isn’t helpful in this situation – the benefit of traffic is of the first site shown in the results list;
d. You appear in the results, other appear also – this is a good news for your product (people can find out about your product), and not a good news for you – you aren’t to be found; see the second solution on point c.;
e. You don’t appear in the results, other web sites don’t appear either – this is problematic, you have an indexing problem;
Solution? If others have copied content from you, see this guide: The Illustrated Guide to Duplicate Content in the Search Engines; if you are the ones with duplicate content issues (you have on your web site more pages with the same content, or you take content from other web sites), look here: SEOmoz on duplicate content;
Regarding indexing problems – check out two things – your web site should not block indexing and it should be attractive enough so that it “invites” the search engines to visit it (see the previously given solutions at 3.1);

Practice:
I will analyze the following 5 pages on your web site: 1 – Romania, 2 – Discover Little Paris City Tour, 3 – Welcome to Bucharest: Introductory Coaching, 4 – Getting Along in Everyday Life, 5 – Traffic and Transportation;

a. Hidden content in the web site pages
Of all the five pages, only pages #2 and #5 were indexed, thus I could check for hidden content; no problem was found with hidden content, but the lack of indexing is a problem by itself;

b. Checking for duplicate content (the content on your web site should not be found on other web sites)
I have made 5 searches for duplicate content on Google, corresponding to the 5 pages above:
1: out of the ten results, you don’t even appear;
2: a duplicate content with the Facebook page, but it’s pretty fine, you are both on the first and second position, I’m happy with the result;
3: You occupy the first position, no duplicate content on the results page;
4: First and only result; great!
5: you are on the first position;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problem, especially on the not indexing part, and some issues with the duplicate content

Things to do next:
See the solution in the theoretical part;
Also, you should try to add distinctive things to your web site; try to make your web site to have more information about your services;

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A4. Checking the hosting server and the domain

A4.1. Checking both the www. and the non-www. versions of the web site
Theory:
When some people are entering a web site, let’s say Google, type in www.google.com; other people, used with using the Internet, will not type www. in front of the domain and, for speed, will only type google.com; in both cases, the correct page will open; how is the situation in your case? I will test below, the option without www. and the option with www.; When I will visit these two pages, the redirect function should work and it should only be, in practice, one URL;
Also, I will test 10 other pages (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), generated by using various programming languages; normally, when I will test all of these pages, I should reach either the homepage (via a redirect), or an error page;
What happens if the redirect fails or I don’t receive an error message? In this situation, there is a problem (a big one, I might add) with the duplicate content! Solutions: use the canonical tag (if you wish to keep the current option, without any redirect) or redirection (and you will only have one version of the pages);

Practice:
The option without www. doesn’t redirect, as it should, to the option with www.; very big problem!

Out of the 10 pages tested (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), I have found problems at the pages 5 and 6; thus, you should redirect any of the pages (including 5 and 6) to the homepage or show me an error page; this is a big problem for duplicate content;
As a side note, the error page given on most of the pages is returning a 403 error; normally, it should be a 404 error; this is a low gravity problem, but still you should solve it;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): very big problem;

Things to do next:
The most important thing is to make one of the www. or without www. versions of the web site as the main one;
Also, you should solve the index.php problem;
You should redirect a page that doesn’t exist either to the homepage, or give a 404 error; right now you return 403 error message for a non-existing page and you don’t redirect in all of the cases analyzed above;

4.2 Testing a properly made 404 page
Theory:
I test if a page that doesn’t’ exists on your web site loads; normally, this should happen:
a. I should receive an error message which should inform me that the page doesn’t exist; the message should not be unclear (“404 error: the server could not load the page” – OK, what should I do now?); instead it should be understood by everyone (“The page that you have requested doesn’t exist on the web site, we invite you to search for a different page on the web site”);
b. I should have in the page a search box; it is possible that the web site has a search box permanently visible on the web site, including in the 404 page; it is nicer, though, that in a 404 page you repeat that box right beneath the text which informs the visitor that the page doesn’t exist; so, if the pages of the web site the search box is typically found on the right, you should also have it in the text itself;
c. (optional) It would be useful to also have a web site summary; if the page doesn’t exist and I have entered your web site, give me something to do; the most visited pages of the web site, or the pages most recently added are good examples of pages that can be shown; if we are talking of a small web site (under 20 pages), you can show all of the pages in the web site;
d. If you have a very large web site, it is best that you have a link to the page “sitemap” (example: Apple’s sitemap);
e. (complicated to implement, but very useful) If you notice that the user has entered your web site from a link that looks like this:
www.website.com/page-about-napoleon-generals,
you can automatically do a search within your web site for [page about napoleon generals] and show the visitors the results for that query;
f. If your web site doesn’t inform you automatically each time a person enters a 404 page, you can also include an option for the visitors to be able to send to the site administrator a short message;
h. Another good option is to have a link to the main page;
i. You can inform your visitors that they may have written a wrong URL, and check to see if it was properly typed;
j. Finally, against all my advices above, you should make a simple page; most of the times the visitors just wants to leave the page fast; don’t force the visitor to read a lot of text, make it brief;
I will give bellow some details on the code that should be returned by a page;
See details on how should a 404 page look like: Creating user-friendly 404 pages;

Practice:
The 404 page shows a message:
“404 – Component not found
You may not be able to visit this page because of:
1. an out-of-date bookmark/favorites
2. a search engine that has an out-of-date listing for this site
3. a mistyped address
4. you have no access to this page
5. The requested resource was not found.
6. An error has occurred while processing your request.
Please try one of the following pages:
* Home Page
If difficulties persist, please contact the System Administrator of this site.
Component not found”;
I would say that the messages are pretty unclear (“404 – Component not found” – what?, “If difficulties persist, please contact the System Administrator of this site.” – how to do this?, “Component not found” – what?), you only give a link to the homepage, there is no search option, and the navigation in the web site is not present; all-in-all, a pretty badly made page;
The page does return a 404 header, which is fine;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problem;

Things to do next:
I would improve the 404 page, as suggested in the theory part;

A4.3. Checking the IP and all the domains hosting on the server
Theory:
a. Testing the IP address
Selfseo.com will tell me the IP (Internet Protocol) address of www.citycompass.ro;
I can also check the IP with the ping command:

I will find out to which country is the IP allocated to by using the database of RIPE.NET;
It is preferable that a web site from a country has an IP allocated in that country;

b. Testing the domains hosted on a server
Yougetsignal.com will show me, generally with a pretty precise reliability, with data that is also confirmed by Bing, how many domains are hosted by the same server with citycompass.ro and which are those web sites; it is preferable that that number be as small as possible (your web site should be hosted to only a few other web sites), for one reason only: if one of the web sites hosted starts doing unethical things (spamming, promoting illegal activities, is in a “grey” to “black” zone of the Internet), automatically the rest of the web sites hosted on the server, including citycompass.ro, will be flagged as web sites with possible problems; if there are more web sites hosted on a server, there are already more flags; this doesn’t automatically mean that your web site will have problems, but, as a general rule, it is best to be hosted on a server on which your “neighbors” are ethical, and a very good way to make sure this happens, if you don’t control the rest of the web sites, is to be hosted on servers which host only your web site and, as a maximum, only a few other web sites, which you can trust;
As a side note, in the list of the domains hosted by the server, it should, typically, also be found your web site;

Practice:
a. Testing the IP address
According to selfseo.com, your IP is: 91.200.123.206;
RIPE.NET tells me that the attributed country is Romania;

b. Testing the domains hosted on a server
According to yougetsignal.com there are only two domains hosted on the same web server:
blog.citycompass.ro
www.citycompass.ro

Bing confirms this thing;

It is a very small number, you own both of the web sites, things are great;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems – the number of domains hosted on the same server is very small;

Things to do next:
You have no problem with the number of domains hosted on the same server;

A4.4. Check the company’s history
Theory:
Internet Archive WayBackMachine (WBM) is a service which saves to pages on the Internet to archive them; since the Internet is permanently changing, WBM revisits, generally with a certain periodicity, a web site and saves the changes; so, by using this web site, the Internet users can see how did a web site look like in the past;
It is possible that the search engines use the web site to find out details on the history of a web site; if a web site hasn’t been indexed by WBM, there can be two explanations:
a. Few links to the web site have made the web site to appear as unimportant to WBM;
b. A web site such as citycompass.ro can choose not to be indexed by WBM, for various reasons (for example, you may not like that today’s Internet users can see a design of your web site which is a few years old; if you wish to stop indexing, you can either block indexing, or eliminate the pages that have already been indexed);
c. A screenshot of the web site which has been made today will be shown only after about 6 months, so a web site can be in the index of WBM, but the information is not yet public;
Therefore, the absence of WBM is not a reason to be worried, there can be multiple reasons for which a web site doesn’t appear in the index; on the other hand, the presence in the web site guarantees, somehow, that the web site has a past which can be considered good;
Also, if a web site exists in WBM, it is very good that in the past the profile of the web site is identical or very much alike with the present-day profile of the web site (if we are talking about a web site which has done for 10 year car sales and now is doing audit services, it is a rather unpleasant situation);

Practice:
I have tested with Internet Archive WayBackMachine the two possible options of the main page: with www and without www;
You have no appearances in the web site; it is not very well, but this isn’t a big problem either;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
Do not block the access to WBM, in time you will probably be indexed;
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A5. The URLs

A5.1. One URL / page (avoid having a tracking URL / different parameters)
Theory:
In the analysis I will look at the page architecture; more than the existence of a page with or without www. (for example, the pages:
www.site.com/random-page and
site.com/random-page
should redirect to the same page), I will also check the existence of parameters:
site.com/random-page?id=20&num=30〈=ro&sort=down&page=4
this is a rather poor example of a page URL;
Ideally, a page should not contain parameters; the reason? Most of the times, for the pages with parameters, there is a problem of duplicate content (same content, or a very similar content of a page is shown for more distinct URLs);
Even if it contains parameters, a page should not have more than two:
www.site.com/cars.php?model=skoda&color=gray
is OK, but this URL:
www.site.com/cars.php?model=skoda&color=gray&doors=4&engine=diesel&price=descending&windows=power
has too many parameters;

Practice:
The option without www. doesn’t automatically redirect to the option with www, this is rather unpleasant;

The products in the web site have URL parameters; the product pages and categories have one single parameter, this is good news:
citycompass.ro/en/city-guide-online/229-interesting-links.html
citycompass.ro/en/city-guide-online/223-legal-and-business-.html
citycompass.ro/en/about/222-about-city-compass.html

As a hint, even if this is a small problem only, it would be preferable if you haven’t had any parameter in the URLs;

Also, the .html extension can create problem; so, if I visit:
citycompass.ro/en/about/222-about-city-compass.html,
my tendency, if I wish to visit the parent page of this page is to go to:
citycompass.ro/en/about/,
but I will get an error;
I should go to
citycompass.ro/en/about.html,
but I can’t know if this is the right URL just by looking at it;
Your parent category has .html at the end, problematic;

Regarding search, the pages with the search results look like this:
citycompass.ro/en/component/search/tour.html?searchphrase=all&start=20
This page has actually been indexed by Google; I would not bother much about this, but do remember that the parameters in the search option are a bit of a problem;

Have a look at this video:
Whiteboard Friday – Faceted Navigation for details on site navigation;

I’m thinking that the advanced search could also generate some problems;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
I would focus on removing the URL parameters in all of the web site; also, skip the .html extension;

A5.2. The URLs should be short, descriptive (contain keywords), written in small letters and use the appropriate separator
Theory:
A long URL looks like this:
www.site.com/articles/fish/raise/this-page-is-all-about-raising-fish-in-natural-environments-article204848.html

A shorter URL would look like this
www.site.com/rising-fish-natural-environment

It can be noticed:
a. I have eliminated some folders, if they are not useful to the page (“/articles/fish/raise/”); for the current situation, the folders are not useful, since I can already determine the URL of the page that the page is about raising fish, the folders are only repeating information; if, instead, the folder would be something like:
www.site.com/2001/08/rising-fish-natural-environment,
which would show me that the article was written in August 2001, this information is useful to me, and I would keep those folders (it is a system frequently used on the blogging platforms, especially WordPress); it is recommended that a URL doesn’t have more than 4 subfolders; therefore, this would be a maximum:
www.site.com/subfolder1/subfolder2/subfolder3/subfolder4/page.html
b. I have eliminated the words that are not searched for in the search engines – are not keywords, are just there due to the title of the page, and bring no real value to the search (“this-page-is-all-about-”);
c. I have removed the prepositions and the words named”stopwords“, which, in general, are ignored by the engines, because are too common (“in”, “about”);
d. I have removed the article ID; if I will have two articles in the web site with the same URL, I would add to the article which has been inserted second the phrase “-2″ at the end of the URL:
www.site.com/rising-fish-natural-environment-2
e. I have eliminated the final extension (“.html” , it can also be “.php”, “.aspx”, “.htm”, etc.) – this is a very small impact solution; if all of the URLs of the web site end in .html, it makes little sense to change the whole web site architecture, but if you ever redo your web site, please retain this aspect – “.html” at the end of the URL doesn’t help and, by eliminating it, you only get a very small advantage;
None of the changes above are mandatory; on the other hand, by using them all, you will get a powerful effect of URL shortening;

Why should you aim for short URLs? Aren’t the long one also good? It is all about:
a. Keyword density – if someone searches at Google for [raising fish], the search engine will show, with a priority, the URL for which the rapport between what I have searched at Google (“raising fish”) and the total words in the title is as small as possible; a short URL:
www.site.com/rising-fish-natural-environment
has a keyword density of 2 (“rising fish”) out of 5 (“site rising fish natural environment”) = 40%; on the other hand, a long URL
www.site.com/articles/fish/raise/this-page-is-all-about-raising-fish-in-natural-environments-article204848.html
has a density of 2 (“rising fish”) out of 15 (“site articles fish raise this page is all about raising fish in natural environments article204848″) = 13.3%; in other words, at a search result the page with a bigger advantage is the result with the better density (bigger one) of keywords;
b. Usability – a very long URL will probably be displayed in the results of search engines in a smaller version; also, the users will be able to tell very fast what the page is about for a small URL; give them, in the URL, the essence of the article;

As a side note, in many cases it is preferable to make the URLs very well right from creating the web site, but when weighing the results, they don’t justify the change of the URLs for an entire web site, once the web site is finished;

Generally, it is preferable to have URLs written with small letter, the usage of big letters in URLs is not a problem, but it may lead to confusions; the Internet users are used to type a URL with small letters, instead of big ones;

Regarding the keyword separator, in a URL you can separate the keyword by:
a. Nothing:
www.site.com/risingfishnaturalenvironment
(this is an option I don’t recommend, only in the case of a domain name www.mygreatnewwebsite.com you should avoid using a separator, for any other case using one is recommended);
b. Space:
www.site.com/rising%20fish%20natural%20environment
(this URL will be shown in FireFox address bar like this:
www.site.com/rising fish natural environment,
but when you copy the URL, it is shown as above, with %20 as a separator);
Using space a separator is rather not recommended, it is not an appropriate separator;
c. Underscore:
www.site.com/rising_fish_natural_environment
Let’s say that this is a tolerated option; it is not that bat, but it’s rather not recommended;
d. Hypen:
www.site.com/rising-fish-natural-environment
This is the recommended option, excellent, top marks;

Practice:
The URLs of the web site are generally short, but you do have URLs which have been shortened in Google:
blog.citycompass.ro/uncategorized/foxs-bar-review-gradina-verona/
citycompass.ro/en/services/communism-to-democracy-city-tour/237-this-week-end-in-sinaia.html
www.citycompass.ro/en/city-guide-online/219-sports-and-entertainment.html
www.citycompass.ro/en/city-guide-online/220-traffic-and-transportation.html

All of these URLs have been “cut” by Google;

How it can be improved:
a. Avoid the parameter (“237″, “219″, “220″);
b. Don’t put blog posts in the “uncategorized” category;
c. Don’t use “Hint” as a blog post title and hence URL keyword; write the keyword in the blog post title;
d. Skip the “.html” extension if you will redo the web site;
e. If I look at this URL:
citycompass.ro/en/services/communism-to-democracy-city-tour/237-this-week-end-in-sinaia.html,
my first thought is that you offer, as a dedicated service, the passage from communism to democracy; I would put “city tour” as the first keywords in the page;
f. You should decide which of the following folders:
“/en/services/communism-to-democracy-city-tour/”
are really that important to you; right now you are a bit over the border with using folders;

It is very nice that you use as a separator the hyphen;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problems;

Things to do next:
I would rewrite the URLs according to the instructions;
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A6. Web site titles

A6.1. To be unique (without titles that repeat themselves on many pages), descriptive (it should be clear what the page is about from the title), contain keywords (things that are searched for in the search engines), use brandname (contain the company name in the title) and, despite all of these, to be short (not longer than 65 characters)
Theory:
For testing I will use a Google search with 100 results on a page;

Regarding unique titles: the search engines prefer to show, in the page with results, unique things; if all the titles of a page would be unique, we could, in theory, get results such as this one:

If you look in the image, you will notice that none of the titles has any personality, they all look the same; this is a problem; the search engines don’t want to deliver an unpleasant experience to the user, so they will do everything they can to only show those results with an unique title; do you have many titles in your web site with identical titles? This is a problem, the search engine will probably remove part of those results; this is done, as said before, from the wish to deliver pleasant experiences to the end user;

Regarding descriptive titles, it is optimal that the in the title of the page I can tell what that page is about; in other words, a title should synthesize as good as possible the content on the page;

On the question of the keywords used in the content of the page, it is best to use keywords that are relevant to the content on that page;

For the brandname – your company web site should contain right from the title the name of the company; as a good practice, it is preferable to have a title like:
Bosch washing machine with 2 compressors – Home appliances – OnlineStore.com,
rather than:
OnlineStore.com – Home appliances – Bosch washing machine with 2 compressors;

The principle is simple:
Keywords for the current page – Category (if applicable) – Brandname
In other words, you should put the unique part of the title (in this case the name of the product) right at the beginning and the part which has the tendency to be repetitive (the category and, even more repetitive, the brandname) at the end; in exceptional cases, when the brandname is more relevant than the name of the page and is a short brandname, you can put it at the beginning:
Microsoft – IT solutions for companies;

Regarding the length, the things are simple: a title should not be longer than 65 characters in length; titles which are longer than this will be displayed in a shortened version in search engines results; as a solution to this problem, it is optimal that right from the content management system (CMS) you set the titles to be short; in other words, each time you insert a page into the web site, you should automatically check that the title isn’t longer than 65 characters;

Note: a typical problem in setting titles – web site creators have a tendency to optimize a whole web site, not just a page, for a keyword; so, if own a web site with vegetables and I’m interested in a very good positioning for, let’s say, “potatoes”, a common tendency is to put the keyword “potatoes” in all of the titles for all of the pages of the web site, no matter which is the profile of the page (so the page with cabbage will also contain, in the title, the word “potatoes”, although there is no connection between the two); this solution is inefficient; a single page should be optimized for the “potatoes” keyword (the homepage, for example, is usually advantaged in positioning, therefore you can optimize the homepage for the desired keyword) and on other pages you should optimize for different keywords; or you can make a dedicated page for the “potatoes” keyword and that’s it; you shouldn’t put the same keyword in all of the titles in all web site; it’s not useful, it doesn’t help and Google may consider you have duplicate content; if you try to “sell” to Google a lot of pages with all sorts of vegetables, optimized, all of them, for “potatoes” keyword, Google might consider that some pages just repeat, without any purpose, the content of the page with potatoes; in other words, putting a keyword in a lot of pages doesn’t help with positioning of a certain page, but it does hurt all of the other pages on which the keyword is present;

Practice:
According to Google: you have more pages with the same title:

“Registration form newsletter” for all of these: 1, 2, 3, 4;
“Great Romanian ladies” for all of these: 1, 2, 3 (there were others also)

“Hint” for these two pages: 1, 2;

I can “forgive” you for putting the same page on your web site / weblog by mistake; but putting two different articles on your blog with the same title is not something which seems normal to me; I’d advise you, first of all, to avoid creating articles on your blog with the same title;
This is a big problem;

I have found only a long title:
“Interview: The Frank Show, Money Channel, December 01, 2009″
with 59 characters (with spaces), which is still in the limits of 65 characters; well done, in the future also keep this limit;

The titles are generally descriptive;

As a problem, you don’t use the brandname (City Compass) in them;

My suggestion – create titles that contain “City Compass” within them:
[this is an example title]: City Compass
or
[this is an example title]: CityCompass.ro

You don’t use too many keywords in the title; despite everything, this is a natural thing – yes, it’s a natural-looking title in there, so you may want to keep this; but strictly for SEO purposes, it would be best to insert some keywords in the title;

For example, on the homepage, instead of:
“Feel at Home in Bucharest!”,
you could use something like:
“Feel at home with City Compass city tours of Bucharest”
(see the “city tours” and “tours of bucharest” keywords inserted);

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
Get rid of duplicate titles, keep on having short titles, use brandname in the title, perhaps even use some keywords;
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A7. Content

A7.1. Is there enough text content on the web site?
Theory:
As a main principle, a page should have between 500 and 600 words, as a minimum (this refers to the unique content of a page, thus eliminating texts from the menus, header, footer, sidebar); you can get good positioning in the search engines even with only a few sentences, and even very very long articles (tens of pages can rank well);
The main idea is different – be them long or not, it is optimal to have a lot of content on the web site: lots of pages, or pictures or video clips; if you choose to put 5 clips in a single article or if you create 5 distinct articles for each video clip, the principle is to have enough content on the web site; Google loves consistent content on a web site;
Attention! I don’t advise you with this advice to visit Wikipedia and random copy pages with texts and images, just to get some content; the content should be unique to your web site, or at least it shouldn’t appear on your web site after it first originated on other web sites (in other words, you should not copy texts from other parts);
Other than this, the more content, the better; of course, the visitors should have a pleasant experience on your web site, in other words: write quality texts and texts that are related to the profile of your web site (if your web site is on vegetables, write quality texts on vegetables, not other things);
Notes:
i. If you don’t update (by constantly adding new things) the pages on your web site, it’s best to have a section on your web site dedicated to fresh content – a “blog” section or one with news, or a section with press releases, or an articles section; you shouldn’t suddenly create 100 pages and then just dump the web site; constantly add new content;
ii. You can create content yourselves, automatically (for example, you can create, based on some technical and unclear descriptions of a product, an automated, detailed description, with more words, of that product), or you can ask others to write content (the visitors of your web site can leave comments, write reviews or testimonials);
iii. The new content doesn’t necessarily need to be in your web site; a sustained activity in the social networks ((Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) can, also, be a factor which is part of your overall presence on the web; it is of a smaller importance, though;

Practice:
You have plenty of unique content on the web site, especially the guide; you have a blog which also allows comments; you might use some comments on the main web site and a presence on the social networks;

Also, I would focus on having more pictures on the web site;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
Use more the comments on the web site and leverage the power of social networks;

A7.2. You should have proper <h1>-<h6> tags
Theory:
If you open a book and start reading, you have a pretty clear picture what are the titles of the chapters and subchapters, based on font sizes;
A webpage is more complicated, though; you can open a web site, and you have on the left an interesting picture, on the right a big text which invites you to click it, there is also a title, you have more subtitles, all with different colors; a visitor, being human, may have problems identifying the title of the page;
How about the search engines? We are talking here about robots, that can’t “see” what’s in a picture, therefore can’t tell what that picture stands for – if it’s a page title or a photograph; also, a very big text on the page, written in black, can be less important than a smaller text written in bright blue; which of the two is the page title;
(Also) in the intent of solving this problem, hn tags (from <h1> to <h6>, values greater than h6 are irrelevant) have been invented;
With these tags, it can be noted:
i. With h1 the title of the page – very important;
ii. With h2 a subtitle – less important;
iii. With h3 a subtitle even less important;
By using CSS, web programmers can color, size and arrange in the page as they wish these titles (so, they are happy), while the engines know, very clearly, what is the title of the page and which are sub-titles, each for their importance (so, the engines are also happy); you can read here – h1-hn tags explained – additional information on using the tag;
As you might expect, the words which are marked as the title of the page using these tags are interpreted by the search engines are more important than the rest of the page;

As a SEO importance, h1 tag is very important, h2 a bit lesser, and tags from h3 and below are mostly useful for usability purposes, the search engines give them a minimal importance; some pages, such as those which are very long, can also have the <h6> tag; in a resource previously recommended (search engine ranking factors):
a. H1 tag: Keyword Use as the First Word(s) in the H1 Tag – 45% moderate importance;
b. H2-H6 tags: Keyword Use in other Headline Tags (H2–H6) – 35% low importance;
So, you should use at least H1 tag for the titles in the page for each page of the web site; if you have subtitles and sub-sub-titles in some pages, you should use h2-h6 for those cases;

A commonly seen practice (which I don’t recommend) is putting hn tags on:
a. The logo – this is pointless, an image can’t be the title of the page;
b. Elements which are repeated in all of the web site – menus, sidebar elements; I don’t recommend these practices, they do very little to help positioning the current page;

Practice:
On the main web site, you only use h3 tag, and you use it for these elements in the sidebar:
<h3>Upcoming Events</h3>
<h3>CityCompass Newsletter</h3>
<h3>City Compass Partners</h3>
<h3>Leu Exchange Rate</h3>

On the blog, you use h2 tags for the titles of the blog posts;

If I were you, I’d use h1 tags for the titles of the articles on both the web site and the blogs, and h2 for subparts of some pages (like the city guide of Bucharest);

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problems:

Things to do next:
I’d put the tags on the pages better, according to the instructions given;

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A8. Meta tags (meta description, meta keyword)

A8.1. <meta name=”keywords”> and keywords in the web site – problems with keyword stuffing?
Theory:
<meta name=”keywords”> was a tag which was useful in the past; it was used to inform the search engine what the page is about; so, if you were doing a page on Alain DELON, it was somewhat useful to inform the search engine that the page is dedicated to French cinematography:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”alain delon, movie, movies, french, france, fan, fans, filming, actor, cinema”/>
With time, this tag got to be so abused, that the search engines decided to ignore the tag completely; Google, for example, can tell, by itself, with today’s technology, that a page on Alain DELON refers to French cinematography and can correctly establish categories for a page; on the other hand, the web page creators tend to catalog a page (also) according to some unrealistic criteria (for example, I can put in the list of keywords “buy movie”, although on the web site I may not sell movies with Alain DELON, but I do have advertising on the web site with selling movies and I am really interested that my web site is visited by people who want to buy movies, so that I would earn money from advertising; another method for abusing this tag was, in the first years of using the meta tag, the obsessive repeat of keywords, with slight variations: movie, movies, the movies, filming, films, shooting); at the end of the day, you should remember that the tag is not relevant anymore;
But the initially created wave (in the first years of the search engines) still persists; you can still find, today, web page creators who will still add the keywords tag, in order to attract visits; if the engines don’t give you any boost by using such techniques, they can, instead, penalize you based on this fact – if you abuse the tag (by repeating keywords), Google may consider that you are trying to SPAM it; so, the tag is not helpful if you do create it, but if you use it in a bad way, you may get into problems, so it’s best to eliminate it altogether;
As a side note, Yahoo! still takes into account, with a very small importance, this tag; since Yahoo! search engine will soon be replaced by Bing, it is irrelevant whether Yahoo! takes into account the tag or not;

While the meta keywords tag is hidden to typical visitors and it’s visible just for the search engines, on the other hand the obsessive repetition, with no real sense for the user, just to get better positioning in the search engines of some keywords is very visible to the visitors (alongside to the search engines); this process is called”keyword stuffing” and it is a weak (and inefficient and unethical) method of promotion; my suggestion is not to repeat in a page a keyword obsessively just for positioning; of course, in a page about potatoes, you will naturally speak about this vegetable, but, as a main idea, don’t push things;

Practice:
You don’t have the meta keywords tag implemented on the web site;

Regarding keyword stuffing within the content itself, I haven’t noticed you doing such things;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
Keep doing the good work;

A8.2. <meta name=”description”> – it should exist, invite the viewer to click and have a proper length
Theory:
First of all, the meta description tag should exist; it would be very useful to have unique descriptions on all of the pages of the web site;
Why is it important to have a web site description? Not only does Google take that description and shows it in some searches as a snippet (small texts shown in the search results, under the title of the page – details here: Google snippets), Facebook also takes that description and uses it when someone sends a random page from your web site (the link send via Facebook has a description, which is exactly that description from the meta tag); it is thus useful to have a description for Google, also for the situation when someone recommends your page via Facebook, to give just two examples;

How can you make a description with good usability, so that the people are invited to click on the Google or Facebook result?
i. Directly – invite the people to visit your web site: “Visit our web site” / “Click here” / “We invite you on our web site” / “See our web page”;
ii. By presenting benefits, giving a motivation to enter the web site – “Our web site offers you X and Y and Z”, “The advantage of using the web site is A, B, C”, “If you enter the web site, you can register to …”, “The visitors of the web site can benefit from …”;
The description should be made thinking about the people who search for a term on Google, find your web site, and two rows of text appear; you should make the text thinking of those people on the Internet, and things will be fine; in other words, avoid writing:
“Our web site sells potatoes; the potatoes we sell are cheap; we have other vegetables, but we sell mainly potatoes; buy potatoes”,
or, even worse:
“potatoes, small potato, potatoes, potato food, packed potatoes, visit our web site for the latest potatoes”,
with the thought of obsessively repeating a keyword in order to have better positioning in the search engines; no important search engine (attention!, no one!) uses the description for positioning in search results; you should do the descriptions for people, ignore the web spiders; this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use keywords, on the contrary, you can use it and even repeat it (but don’t overdo it); on the other hand, you should write the page description thinking about the visitors; a good example:
“Online potatoes: web site about fresh vegetables in Romania. In order to choose from the biggest offer of online potatoes, visit our web site.”

Finally, we advise you to keep the description under 155 characters (spaces included), to fit in the space allocated by the search engines (otherwise, it will be interrupted by suspension points “…”);

As a general idea, the description for the main page is more important, because it is most often visible in searches;

Practice:
You don’t have the meta description tag implemented in the web site, not even the homepage has one;

If I were you, I’d either compose a meta description for each page of the web site, or I’d make it to take automatically the first sentence of that page.

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
I would make unique description for each page of the web site, or at least create them automatically, this is important;

A8.3. <meta name=”robots”> – it shouldn’t exist, or if it exists, it should be there with a good implementation
Theory:
In the text above, “robots” can be replaced by a specific robot (the most important ones, corresponding to the different search engines, are: googlebot, googlebot-image, msnbot, msnbot-media, msnbot-products, mozilla, ia_archiver, ia_archiver-web.archive.org, yahoo-blogs, yahoo-mmaudvid, yahooseeker), based on the template:
<meta name=”googlebot”>
A different argument follows: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, noodp, noydir, nosnippet;
The principle is, if any of the above sounds very complicated, you should either avoid completely these tags (you can do just fine without them), or, if you do use them, you should inform yourselves more on Search Engine Land;
It is advisable to have tags referring to robots only for the pages to which you don’t wish to give access to search engines (admin pages could be examples); bad usage of the tags can lead to problems (lack of indexing, complete absence from the search engines, etc.);

Practice:
You do use the meta tag in the web site, and you allow all engines access, this is good;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
I would try, in the future also, not to block access to the robots;
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A9. Redirects and localization

A9.1. How do the HTTP headers for a typical page? How about for an 404 error page?
Theory:
Using the FireFox add-on Live HTTP headers I can see what is the code sent by the web site to the browser;
Most of the time the 302 code is returned for the files which haven’t been modified since the last access and 200 code for the standard responses; for codes from the classes 1xx, 2xx, 3xx everything is fine;
Up until now, no problem; on the other hand, if I codes from the 4xx class are returned (404 most of the times) or 5xx there can be problems – it means that there are elements in the page that don’t load;
On the other hand, if I access an inexistent page on the web site, I should obtain at least once a 404 code, which will confirm me that the page doesn’t exist;

Practice:
Typical pages return the appropriate codes, the 404 page returns a 404 code;
I have presented above the problems with 404 pages which don’t display properly;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
In the future, you should keep doing what you do now to have proper rankings in the search engines;

A9.2. The country of your IP and what top-level domain does the web site have
Theory:
If the server that hosts your web site has an IP which is attributed to Romania, there is an increased chance that the web site is in Romanian;
The problem of locating a web site (Google needs to know which country is a web site from) is minor for a web site with a lot of content; the search engines can automatically detect what language does a web site have and locate that web site; that criteria would have been important, for example, for a web site in English from Great Britain – in that case it is relevant to know if the web site is addressed to a Great Britain, Australia or United States target market, for example;
Even for the situation in which a web site doesn’t have a lot of indexable text (it is a photo web site, or it is a web site almost fully in Flash), there is a satisfying solution: using Google Webmasters Tools and their equivalent from Bing and Yahoo! to attribute a country to a web site;
As a conclusion, an IP from a certain country does help, but it is a minor element and can easily be substituted by alternative solutions;

Regarding the top-level domain (TLD) used (the last letters from the domain, like “.com”/”.eu”/”.cn”/etc.), it is preferable that a web site from a specific country has the extension of its country; exceptions are the web sites from the USA, which tend to use .com TLDs and web sites from the European Union, which can either use their national TLDs or .eu (for the whole Union) domain;

Practice:
Your IP is from Romania (see above);
citycompass.ro – the TLD is .ro (Romania);

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
You should maintain the current situation – avoid putting the web site on an external domain and IP from a different country;

A9.3. The presence of a physical address in the contact page (it would be preferable to be also be present in the footer)
Theory:
A good indicator of the country a web site is attributed to is the physical address presented in the contact page and the presence of the address in the footer of the web site; in the address it is best to specify the town, street, postal code, perhaps even the country;
The search engines will easier attribute a web site to a specific country if they will meet these two elements;
The presence of a physical address is also an usability criteria (the users trust a web site to which they can have a rapport not only virtually – “a web site” -, but also physically – “a physical address”);

Practice:
You have the address in the contact page, and you specify the country and the postal code;

You don’t have the address in the footer;

The contact page on the blog is really scarce;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
I would put the address in the footer and fill in the other details for the contact page on the blog;

A9.4. Register to Google Local
Theory:
I will test the registration to Google Local via a search for the brandname at Google Maps;
Your best option is to be present in the result list, and if not, you should register to Google Local;
Why register? You can obtain good positioning for some local searches; coming back to the example with “potatoes”:
cheap potatoes kolkata india
will show results which contain the phrase “cheap potatoes” in the area of Kolkata, in India;
How to register? You can do this by using Google Maps (create a KML file and add it to Google Webmasters Tools, or, alternatively, add a certain address on Google Maps);

Practice:
You don’t show up in the results;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average;

Things to do next:
My suggestion for you is to register to Google Local;
(top)

A10. Links from you to yourselves (internal links)

D10.1. The number of links, be them to yourselves or to other web sites should be smaller than 100
Theory:
In the opinion of Matt CUTTS, manager of webspam team at Google, it is best that any web site has on a given page less than 100 links to other pages (internal, to the same web site, or external, to other web sites); 130 links? OK, this is fine; 300? It’s already much too many;
How to check yourselves how many links are there in a page? Install Opera browser, open a page from your web site in Opera, let it load fully, Tools => Links, copy all of the links in Microsoft Excel and see how many links you have;
As a side note, it’s best to underline the links and write them with a color different than the rest of the texts in the web site; a good practice is using blue colored links;

Practice:
Analyzed pages:
- The main page: 72 links;
- Bucharest City Guide: 73 links;
- Other Services: 59 links;
- City Compass in the Press: 60 links;
- City Compass Blog: 74 links;

Conclusion: you don’t have too many links on any of the analyzed web pages;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
You should keep on having less than 120-130 links per page for the web site pages;

D10.2. The anchor text should correspond with the destination page – internal links
Theory:
On the Internet you probably saw a lot of times links with the anchor text: “click here”; well, these links are not recommended; it is preferably to write: See the page “How to learn better in 5 steps and 3 hours of sleep”, rather than “Click here for details”;
How to check yourselves the anchor texts in a page? Install Opera browser, open a page on your web site in Opera, let it load completely, Tools => Links, and in the left column you will see the anchor text

Practice:
In general, you use a correct anchor text for internal links; you do have a tendency to use “click here” or “here” text (for example in the sidebar “Click here to subscribe to City Compass newsletter.”, or on the blog).

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
I’d focus on not using “click here” or “here” on the texts on both the web site and the blog.
(top)

A11. Links from you to others (to exterior)

D11.1. Checking nofollow links
Theory:
Regular links send value; if I create a A web site and make a link to another web site – B -, the B web site will benefit from my link;

On the other hand, if I create an A web site and I have a blog on it and I have as commentators persons who wish to promote their web sites via SPAM, and my commentators add links in the comments they add to the blog, perhaps I don’t wish those links to have a value for the search engines; in other words, I can leave the link on the web site, it can be clickable, but I want to inform Google – “I haven’t personally checked those links, ignore them, they can be low quality links”; for this purpose nofollow was invented and for this aim it can be still useful today;

Nofollow was also used with different purposes – to handle links on your own web site; in other words, I can let Google know – “product pages are very important, but, on the other hand, the pages with terms and conditions are very weak, you should ignore them” and for this I can use nofollow on the pages with terms and conditions, for example; this technique is called “Page Rank sculpting“;

All-in-all, the nofollow technique is a relatively advanced technique and, used wrongly, it can do more bad things than good (Google can’t crawl some pages, the web site is only partially indexed, me, as a site owner, have the – wrong!, one might add – impression, that I know better than Google which pages are more important and which not); to avoid the problems of incorrect usage of nofollow, Google took some measures which, in a few words, advise you:
a. To keep using nofollow for blog comments, comments on which you don’t constantly check how do the web sites of the people commenting on your blog look like (do they use ethical principles of promotion, or are they in a somewhat grey area?);
b. To avoid using nofollow on your web site as a page sculpting technique;

Right now, the nofollow technique, still used according to some old Page Sculpting techniques, can be a dangerous method of influencing rankings;

You can still use nofollow for web sites which you don’t manually check (the web sites of those commenting on the blog of the company, for example);

Practice:
You have these external links on the homepage of your web site:
A link to your blog: blog.citycompass.ro
Links to the currency converters: fx-rate.net
A partner link: librarie.carturesti.ro
Google maps: maps.google.com
Weather elements: yowindow.com and yr.no
Partners: www.fcv.ro/en/ www.romania-insider.com www.humanitas.ro www.turnkeye.com
Newsletter services: www.inwise.ro www.feedburner.com

On other pages of your web site you have different other links to various web sites; some links on your blog;

I haven’t seen nofollow links on your web site, so you don’t do PageSculpting on your web site;

I have found a comment on your blog with a link, and saw that you do use nofollow on the links on your blog (comments area); very good thing!

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): Low problems;

Things to do next:
Everything is fine, in the future you should avoid doing Page Sculpting;

Having comments on the blog with nofollow is a good thing;

D11.2. The anchor text should correspond with the destination page – outside links
Theory:
See above the theory for internal links;

Practice:
You use correctly the anchor text for external links; I am satisfied with the results on this aspect;

I have seen a link for Cărturești Bookstores with the anchor text www.carturesti.ro, you can improve this, but other than that things are fine;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
Things are fine;

D11.3. External links should have a connection with your web site
Theory:
If you have a web site on vegetables and potatoes, it makes sense to have links to web sites on the food industry, agriculture, transportation of fruits and vegetables;
If, on the other hand, most of your links to the outside lead to web sites about PC maintenance, this means that you have a problem with the profile of the links;

Ideally, the external links should lead to web sites that are connected, if not with the web site as a whole, at least with the subject on the page the link goes from;

I hope it is not necessary to say that there are web sites that deserve more trust (a site of a hospital) than others (web sites that sell Viagra);
So, you should pay attention to whom you give a link;

Practice:
While some links that you have are rather general (weather, currency, newsletter), some external links of your partners have little to do with your business (Cărturești Bookstore, for example), and some links are related to your business (learning a foreign language);

In the future, I’d focus more on finding some relevant businesses in your field to which to link to;

On the blog you do a good job of finding good resources to link to, you should do this, perhaps, on your blog also;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): low gravity problems;

Things to do next:
In the future, you should put more links on your web site, which are related to your field of activity;
(top)

A12. Links from others to yourself (links from the exterior)

D12.1 Should be numerous, be from quality web sites, be on web sites that are related to you, should not be all on the homepage, have a good anchor text, be a natural profile of links
I hope it is clear to you that links, if there are many, help you to make your link profile be natural, helps you with Page Rank, helps you show that you are on the web; and this is only referring to the number; but other things count also;

What does it mean to get links from quality web sites?
i. The links should be related to your web site (see above – if you have a web site about potatoes, you should obtain links either from fruits and vegetables web sites, either from a single article on a web site, article that is about vegetables);
ii. The web sites that link to you should have, in turn a lot of links;
iii. (vicious circle) The links you obtain should be from web sites that, in their turn, are quality web sites;
Therefore, if you get an article in a national newspaper, and that article has a link to your web site, you have just obtained a good quality link (the national newspaper will write the article on a subject that is related to you, the online version of the newspaper has a lot of links from other web sites and that web site generally has quality links);
If, on the other hand, the news article is copied illegally by 100 obscure news sources, which don’t do anything but copy (scrape) content from the Internet, you just got 100 pretty weak links;
In other words, it is important that a source like “The New York Times” provides you with a link, but it’s less important that a web site created just to scrape content on other web sites gives a link;
Of course, the links to your web site should be on pages that are related to your web site (I have detailed this above);
Another thing that is important is that links are not, all of them, to the homepage; the usual visitors enter the web sites, read you, open an article, read, open another page; at some point the visitors will find a page/an article/a section which they like; they will send it forward, perhaps, on social networks; but they will send that specific page, not any page on the web site; and, most of all, will not send the homepage of your web site;
But the site owner, when they promote a web site, tend to use the main page: “Visit the web site citycompass.ro today …, and find out …, and receive …”; the problem is that a link profile in which 90% of the links to your web site are exclusively to the main page looks unnatural; you want positioning in Google and other search engines not only for the homepage, but to other web sites also;

Regarding the anchor text – if you have a web site on cucumbers:
www.mywebsite.com/vegetables/cucumbers,
when a client of your offers you to give you a link, advise you not to give a link as:
“To find excellent vegetables, click here”,
but rather give you a links as:
“To find excellent vegetables, see Cucumbers – web site with vegetables of X Company”;
The second version of the link is useful for both the user – who will better understand what the destination web site is about – and Google, who can better interpret the link;

How does a natural link profile look like?
a. You should have links from diverse sources – the local City Hall (which displays the list of companies in the town), clients web sites (which describe the experience with you), social networks (someone recommends a link on Twitter, another person uses Facebook, someone is filming you and puts your company on YouTube); I also include in here the fact that the links should come from as many web sites as possible (so if you have a link in the footer of site X and that X web site has 1,000 pages, OK, you have 1.000 links, but those links are not from diverse sources; those 1,000 links would be much better use to if they were distributed on 100 distinct web sites, 10 links per web site);
b. You should have links that are not exclusively dofollow (Wikipedia has nofollow, Twitter has nofollow, the list continues); if you have only dofollow links, you may leave the impression that you have influenced the process by which you got the links (it looks like an artificial process, and the search engines don’t appreciate this);
c. You should have links with different anchor text – if all the links to your web site look like this:
Cucumbers – enter here to buy cheap and great cucumbers, from Thailand,
may be a sign that you have manipulated the process of obtaining links; it’s best that some links to your web site differ, you shouldn’t have all of the links to your web site with the same anchor text;
d. You shouldn’t suddenly obtain lots and lots of links and then suddenly stop – if you add your web site into 1,000 web directories within 3 day, distribute very quickly 10 press releases in English on dozens of press release web sites and then you suddenly stop, this may be interpreted as a sign that you have used not very good methods of link building; my recommendation would be to obtain links step by step and constantly; also, you shouldn’t obtain more than 10-20 links in a given day; if you do get 20 links per day, you should try and keep this number for a lot of time; there are exceptions to this – should you write a phenomenally, revolutionary article and this article gets recommended a lot, you appear on TV, you’re all over media, be it online or offline, then you will get a lot of links fast; but they are quality links and those links generate, in turn, lots of links; yes – this kind of practices are good;
e. You shouldn’t have most of your links from obscure sources – if you submit your web site to web directories, choose them with care; if you send an article to be published on web sites of press releases, you should check the site on which you publish information; always ask yourselves – if I were a star, would I associate my brand with this web site? Would I like to have my name appear on the web site? Take good care of your brand; avoid getting links that can be obtained by anyone, even those that do spamming on the Internet;
f. It is useful not to take part to, at least not excessively, link exchange schemes; you can do such practices, but on a limited basis;

How can I see the links to you?

• (attention! Very little relevancy! See details below) Google;
• Yahoo!;
• Links to web site – Open Site Explorer;
• Individual web sites (distinct domains) which link to the website – Open Site Explorer;
• Anchor text according to the links the web site Open Site Explorer;

How can you see much more links?
Explanations for the number of links displayed in Google: that indicator is not necessarily a realistic indicator; what I suggest to find out an better estimation (this is still an estimation) of the number of links is to look at Google Webmasters Tools for details; Google Webmasters Tools only displays approximately 70-80% of the links, but it is a much more realistic indicator than one of the searches done above;
You also have the options offered by Bing and Yahoo! for webmasters; you can have access to much more links in there; for example, Yahoo! displays as a standard only 1,000 links, and counts also the links with nofollow, which aren’t relevant for rankings, and counts the links on the same web site repeatedly; on the other hand, Yahoo! Site Explorer will display the complete list of links;

Practice:
Tests (I advise you to use the option to download files as CSV/TSV to open them in Microsoft Excel):

• (attention! Very little relevancy! See details below) Google – 9 results;
• Yahoo! – 2,926 results;
• Links to web site – Open Site Explorer – 321 results;
• Individual web sites (distinct domains) which link to the website – Open Site Explorer – 14 distinct domains link to the web site;
• Anchor text according to the links the web site Open Site Explorer – 13 variations;

Looking on the links to your web site, I can say that:
a. You have very few links;
b. Quite a few links are from quality web sites (meetup.com, viitorplus.ro, pavilionunicredit.ro)
c. Not all of the links are from pages which are related to you (drifi.net, for example);
d. You have a lot of links to the homepage;
e. The anchor text doesn’t have a lot of variations, but it is at a fine level;
f. The link profile looks semi-natural, you lack links from the community;

Regarding the anchor text, you have links to the web site with the following variations:
(img) city compass
city compass
www.citycompass.ro
(img) [No Anchor Text]
(img) size s key key url www
(img) city compass logo
(img) banner1
see
citycompass
communism to democracy city tour

http://www.citycompass.ro

website

As a problem: you have relatively few links and of not great quality; the good news is that you don’t have very poor quality links (web directories, for example), and the links that you do have are related to your business;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): big problems;

Things to do next:
I would improve the links profile;
I would increase the number of links, their quality, their relevance and the anchor text;

D12.2. Links from Twitter social network to your web site
Theory:
Why is it important to have links to your from Twitter? Twitter is, in most of the cases, a social network on which regular people post links that they find interesting; a sustained presence in such a social network can be a sign that you have a natural link profile, that people consider your links useful, and, willingly, they give links to you; last, but not least, a Twitter presence can be useful in other purposes than strictly SEO: you can interact with your target audience, you can get visits from the participants at Twitter discussions;
I will test using BackTweets.
Obviously, you should have as many links from Twitter as possible;

Practice:
BackTweets: I have found 0 tweets to your website, it is a pretty poor performance;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average problem;

Things to do next:
I would try to raise the support of community to the web site; you can put buttons like “Tweet this!”, if you consider that your audience is using Twitter; or you can just test – put a button like this and see the results;
(top)

A13. Analysis of the traffic and of the searches

D13.1. Alexa.com + public web analytics data
Theory:
If you use within the web site public traffic analysis software, I will analyze the traffic from these web sites;

If your traffic is private, I can base my analysis on the extrapolations made by Alexa.com;
It is important to know how does Alexa get the presented data: for all the users who have installed Alexa toolbar, they get information on the visited web sites; using the statistics got from the users who have installed that toolbar, (approximate) data is obtained, for all of the users of a specific country (or international)

The problem is, of course, that only a small percentage of the Internet users use the Alexa toolbar, and those that do use it (it is useful to get statistics on the visited web site, for example) have a tendency to be persons with advanced IT knowledge (therefore, the visitors profile is not necessarily the typical profile of an Internet user);

Nevertheless, it is an useful approximation, at least to have a general idea on the traffic data;

Practice:
According to Alexa.com, the web site citycompass.ro:
- It is the 3,561,769^th most visited web site in the world;
- It is the 24,401^st most visited web site in Romania;

These are relatively weak results;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): average;

Things to do next:
Try to increase the traffic to your web site;

D14.2. Being present in Google Trends
Theory:
Google Trends can provide information on the typical profile of the web site visitors; it is only available for web sites with a high volume of searches and displays in Google (usually, large and very large web sites);

Practice:
Google Trends doesn’t offer web site about the web site;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): zero problems;

Things to do next:
You can’t do a too many things about it, you could only obtain more searches to the web site, and this is very little within in your control;
(top)

A14. Semantic HTML

D14.1. Pages that load slowly? Testing the page sizes + the transfer speed
Theory:
No matter what the speed of the Internet for computer/laptop access is in your target markets, you should still focus on trying to improve the speed of your web site; take into account that some users access a web site on mobile devices, or share the same connection of Internet on many computers; another thing to note is that even if the transfer speed is very high, a file smaller with 50% will reduce the loading time from a (theoretical) 4 seconds to another (theoretical) 2 seconds; this means that even if the transfer is very fast, a page with small size will load even faster; therefore, if you can lower the page size – why not do it?

I consider to be interesting this quote by Google:

The average web page takes up 320 KB on the wire (Google took into account the embedded resources such as images, scripts and stylesheets). Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually compressed. In 80% of pages, 10 or more resources are loaded from a single host.

So, a typical web page has, with images and scripts, around 320 KB.

How do I test the page size?
I will save more pages with FireFox (Web page, complete); I will then say what the values of the sizes of HTML files were and then I will include the average size of the pages, with images, scripts, Flash files, as they were saved;

It is recommendable that the size of the HTML file (without any attachments: CSS, JavaScripts, images etc.) should not surpass 150 kilobytes;

Two notes:
i. Saving a page from the browser doesn’t always reflect the exact size; first of all, the same page saved in FireFox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Chrome, can have slight variations of size; on the other hand, if I do an average for 5 random pages on the web site, I will get some good results; secondly, there are things (JavaScripts, embedded video clips, video players, XML files) which (potentially) won’t be saved on the hard drive; I know no good solution for this;
ii. If I visit a web site, I visit the main page for the first time, the complete page will load (with the HTML file, attachments, Flash, JavaScript, CSS, etc.); if I visit another page of the web site, some of the elements of the web site will not load, therefore the load time for the second page in the web site is, most of the times, smaller;
Then, using the add-on Page Speed from Google and Yahoo! YSlow from Yahoo! (it is used only in FireFox, as an add-on for a different add-on – FireBug) I will do a test of the page and export the results;

How do I test the speed of the web site?
Ideally, for a web site with a target located in a specific country, the web site speed should be tested using some important Internet hubs in that country, using Internet service providers which are representative for that country, and do an average of the results;

My solution is a bit simplified – I will test with aptimize;

SEOmoz solutions to increase the site speed;

Practice:
I have saved more pages with FireFox and found pages with sizes of 34, 29, 32, 45, 36 kilobytes (the HTML file only); if we add to this the rest of files (JavaScript, CSS, images), the average page size is somewhere at 926 KB; it is pretty good for the HTML file only, but the total size of the pages is large;

Regarding PageSpeed add-on, I have exported the results to ShowSlow.com for the homepage and a random page on your web site, you can see the details there;
You have pretty good scores, 79-96 out of 100, as important problems I could note:

Add Expires headers
Make JavaScript and CSS external
Combine images using CSS sprites
Avoid document.write
Serve static content from a cookieless domain
Defer loading of JavaScript
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Configure entity tags (ETags)

Overall though, these are good results;

Testing with aptimize, I have got the results from the

attached PDF file – Aptimize results.
- The web site speed, with uncompressed data, loaded for the first time is 8.2 seconds (total loading time for the web site);
- If I return to the web site, only some files of the web site will reload, and the speed drops to 6.0 seconds;

These are satisfying times, not perfect, but good;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
You should check the errors got with Google PageSpeed and Yahoo! YSlow and solve them, as good as possible;

D14.2. Alternate text (ALT) for images and filenames
Theory:
For image optimization, alternate text is a very good solution;
You can obtain traffic from the search engines, based on image search, if you optimize images;
How to easily check the alternate text of images? In Opera: View => Images => No images;

Also, the name of an image (photograph, photo) from the web site should reflect what the image is about; in other words, you should not name an image:
DSC00004.gif,
but, instead, give it a real name:
Last-meeting-advisory-board-morning-SurfNet.gif

Practice:
The images on your web site generally have alternate text;
Well done! I have found images, especially in the navigation of the page, without alternate texts, but as a general rule, you do use alternate texts;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
I would try to put alternate texts on all the images on your web site and, in the future, keep having alternate texts for images;

D14.3. Pages with poorly formatted text;
Theory:
Generally, text formatting helps with easy reading, with one condition: do not overdo it (for example, bolding excessively words in the web site, or using the hn tags abusive);

Practice:
I haven’t met this problem; generally you don’t have problem, you should keep on doing things this way;

How big the problem is:
The gravity of the issues (very big problems, big problems, medium gravity, low gravity problems, zero problems): small problems;

Things to do next:
Keep on doing the current method of formatting the text;

(top)

B. Other good practices, other bad practices

Theory:
a. Good practices
I’ll list below a list with good practices in handling a web site:
- If you target a keyword for a certain page, you should put the keyword first in the title of the page – <title>;
- If you wish to start a web site from scratch, it’s best that the URL of the domain to be a targeted keyword:
www.skodacars.com
www.potatoesbangladesh.com
www.qualityseo.eu
www.modernweddings.co.uk
(as a not – the dash “-” is unnecessary);
- The <h1> tag is best to start with the targeted keyword;
- The texts which you put for links to your own pages (link to “About us” page, for example) and to pages from outside (link to a page from outside) are very important; it’s best that those links are not:
“Click here for details”,
but instead:
“See the page – silkworm rearing – for details”;
- A page with texts should contain, at a minimum, 4-500 words (only the content, ignoring the header, the menu, sidebar, footer etc.);
- Do you wish to have top positioning for a page? You need:
i. Links to the web site, in general;
ii. Links to that specific page, specifically;
It’s best that the links:
i. Are connected with the domain of the web site;
ii. Are connected with the domain of the page for which you wish top positioning;
iii. Are not obtained all at once, but constantly and at a steady pace;
iv. Are on a good anchor text (“potatoes”, instead of “click here”);
v. Come from various sources (not just a type of web sites, but as many as possible);
vi. Come from trustworthy web sites, which in turn have obtained links especially from trustworthy web sites;
vii. Are obtained not just from other web sites, although these are important also, but should come from the interior, other pages of your web site;
- The site should have a clear, simple and easy to understand architecture; someone that enters a web site for the first time should easily understand what it is about and can navigate without any problems on the web site;
- Give links to other web sites, with no fear whatsoever; you shouldn’t be just a destination for the link, just be a source; you should decide if you want to give links to direct competitors;
- The server which hosts your web site:
a. Should be localized in specific country, if you target that specific country; also, it should have a bandwidth as possible; the reason is simple – the faster a web site will load, the better will it be seen by the search engines;
b. A web site it’s best that is functioning as long as possible – it looks natural, but you should make sure that you have a web site that has a period of functioning (uptime) in a year as high as possible;
- A site from a specific country should have a top-level domain (TLD) for that specific country:
.com for international web sites and sites based in the US;
.co.uk for sites in Great Britain;
.eu for sites in the European Union;

b. Bad practices
Below you will find a list of bad practices in handling a web site:
- You can have content dedicated for the search engines and a different content for the visitors; in other words, the search engines may have the impression you have useful articles on cucumbers, while, instead, for the users you have pages with illegal traffic of cucumbers; don’t do this;
- Avoid obtaining links from sources of links with poor quality, they can adversely affect you;
- Also, don’t give links to web sites with a bad reputation;
- Don’t write on the page texts with colors which looks similar to the background, to be seen by the search engines, and the usual visitors can have problem reading them; avoid this practice;
- Don’t fill a page with the same and same keywords; avoid repetition without a purpose;
- Don’t buy links;
- Don’t put excessively lot of links to other web sites in the footer, it can be a SPAM signal;

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C. Conclusions

_________
Bottom line: the web site citycompass.ro is a web site with very good search engine optimization.

Contents:

A. General web site analysis (elements that can be applied to many pages)
A1. Copywriting
A2. Design
A3. Structure of Information
A4. Usability
B. Analysis of the main elements in the homepage (cutting the homepage into pieces)
B1. Logo
B2. Header area
B3. Left sidebar
B4. Center area
B5. Right sidebar
B6. Footer
C. Analysis of web site pages (the most important pages of the web site, analyzed separately)
C1. About page
C2. Services
C3. Mass media
C4. Newsletters
C5. City Compass in the Press
C6. Contact page
C7. The blog
D. Conclusions
D1. Idea generation
D2. Important issues, to be implemented immediately

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A. General web site analysis (elements that can be applied to many pages)

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A1. Copywriting

+You write in a very good English; also, your web site has a lot of content;
1. (+important) The font face is very small, I can barely read the texts; I would increase the font size;
2. (+important) You use different font sizes on different pages; bad idea;
3. I’d look for solutions to writer shorter sentences, they are easier to read;
4. (+idea) What answers I’d love to receive from the web site:
a. Value Selling Proposition (VSP) – answer me the question: “What value does the web site bring? What are the benefits of using it?”; you should have a dedicated page the answers to these questions; tell me why your business field is good;
b. Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – this question is “What do you have and others in the same field don’t have”; what makes you different? Why you, instead of others? This is a key-question, which deserves to have an answer;
c. Guarantees – let’s say I buy from you, I don’t like your service; what happens then? Tell me what my guarantees of using the services you provide are;
d. Testimonials – what others clients who bought from you said; a long page, with name of persons, photographs and company names assigns you a lot of trust; do you have a lot of clients? Let me see them;
e. Case studies – this one is even better: you take one person and present the whole process; he was looking for a service in your field; he did a little research, he got to you eventually, and picked you because …; the result was that …; six months later he’s still satisfied because …; after he has recommended you to others, they reported him that …;
I would love to see all of these been linked-to on the “About us” page;
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A2. Design

+The colors are calm and relaxing, well done;

1. There is a lot of crowding on the web site; I tend to get confused easily;
2. The sidebar is very crowded, I’d reduce the number of things;
3. I’d make sure that the images on the web site are resized prior to uploading them on the web site;
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A3. Structure of Information

+Home is the first element in the menu, Contact the last; good;
1. (+idea) If I were you, instead of writing with a lot of typefaces, fonts, colors, bolded or italic, CAPS or Title Case, font sizes, I’d do just this:
I’d bold (that’s the one thing I would allow you to do) the first sentence in a paragraph, and specifically make that sentence describe the paragraph – or make subtitles and, again, bold them;
For hyperlinks I’d use either blue color or underline (a combination is also fine);
That’s it;
2. I’d look for a solution for people to get to any page of your web site within two clicks; right now it’s not that easy to navigate;
3. (+idea) I reach the footer area; give me something to do; scenario: I visit your homepage, read what it is to be read, I reach the footer area; here there are more options:
(i.) I can click one of the links in the footer, if there are any;
(ii.) I may leave the web site;
For (ii.) scenario not to happen, you should have some interesting links in the footer; top pages on your web site would be a good place to start;
4. (+idea) It would be interesting to have a page with help – what is a RSS feed? How are the newsletters delivered? How do I search the web site?
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A4. Usability

+The search option is in the upper-right corner, nice;
1. (+important) Bad practice: you give me a link to another page on your web site and you make it open in a new window; not good; it doesn’t matter what page is, if it’s not a PDF or an external type of file (an image, for example), I shouldn’t be forced to open a lot of browser windows on the same web site; bad idea;
2. I’d make the links underline or of a different color;
3. (+idea) Somewhere on the page it would be nice to include a box with “You call me back”; I would just have to write a phone number and you would call me; you can also ask for a name;
4. The search results page is very crowded, it’s hard for me to understand what to do next; I don’t think you need very advanced search operators, your site is rather small; I would only put advanced search as an extra option, not as the default search option; also, a good idea would be to make the search keywords in bold; also, just listing the name of the page might also be fine (so, show me the resulting pages, rather than include a snippet);
5. (+idea) You lack the use of a button with “Recommend the page to others” function; this is a must-have in my opinion; I’ve written an extended article in Romanian about this:
“Cum adaugi un buton de rețele sociale – Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / Hi5 / Yahoo! Messenger pe blogul tău WordPress?“;
Main ideas:
(i.) Use only a few buttons, instead of a lot;
(ii.) Only use the services you think your customers will mostly use (email, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! Messenger, for example);
(iii.) Make it very easy to share, reduce the number of clicks;
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B. Analysis of the main elements in the homepage (cutting the homepage into pieces)

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B1. Logo

+The logo is black & white, easy to print; I also like the idea of putting the compass in a bit of an angle, great effect (makes me wonder – do I really know where I want to go?);

1. You write “COMPASS” with capitals, I am not especially fond of this; why?
2. I don’t think that as a foreigner I come to Bucharest to feel at home; I think I’m more interested in finding new things in Romania;
3. I would avoid exclamation points in the motto;
4. The main idea of the logo is this – a fancy font, a CAPITAL word, a bit “screaming” motto and the image of a compass; sorry, I don’t consider that you have put enough efforts to make the process of having a good logo worth it;
5. The compass itself is a bit hard to notice, I’d try to make it a bit larger;
6. (+idea) I would love that the logo would have an idea behind it; yes, I can pretty much understand what it’s all about, but it’s not that creative to explain “City compass” with a compass; I would put more emphasis on finding a good idea for the logo;
7. You have a big problem with duplicate content (I’ll come back to this in the SEO section); yet the problem with duplicate content starts right from your logo; scenario: I visit your homepage (which may be 1 or 2), and then I click on the logo; you may think you’ll land again on the link you just came on; well, no! You will be sent to a different page – again, 1 or 2;
So, just by visiting the homepage and clicking on the first link, the search engines (and the humans) will run into the problem of duplicate content (that is, 4 URLs in total, as shown above, which have the exact same content);
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B2. Header area

+You clearly show that the city you refer to is Bucharest, and the idea of the map and a compass is very well suggested;

1. On the map of Romania, the compass you present is not actually oriented to North; it is just a little bit in a wrong angle;
2. On your map “Ploiești”, hardly seen, is spelled wrong;
3. Your welcome text is larger than the logo; a bit strange; also, due to the colors, it has more contrast and it’s easier to spot; again, strange;
4. I love what you did with the spaces in the logo, very nice to see; yet, I cannot help but notice that in your header area you waste a lot of space; your header is about 280 pixels high, and you only show two pictures, a logo and a motto; yes, it’s friendly, yes, it leaves the impression of open space, but it’s a bit too much; also, the whole thing with “we have a lot of space” is in big contradiction with the rest of the page, which is crowded, everything is mixed in there; so, the main theme of the web site is “everything is crowded”, with the sole exception of the header, where you go like “we have plenty of space”;
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B3. Left sidebar

+I like the fact that the “Home” link is the first in the list, while the “Contact” is the last; excellent!

1. The title of a menu item should not exceed one line; you have items with three lines of text, it’s too much;
2. I would avoid having exclamation points in the menu, seems aggressive:
“Advertise with City Compass!”;
3. The menu is not vertically aligned with the other columns; so, if you look at the center column or the column with the search box, they both start from somewhere higher than the column on the left;
4. I’m pretty sure you can write:
“City Compass in the Press”
with fewer words;
5. Why do you need to specify that the guide is online? I’m on a web site claiming to be a compass in the city, and that is, naturally, online; no need to mention “online” here:
“Bucharest Survival Guide Online – New Version”;
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B4. Center area

+You use bulleted points, bolded affirmations, use a good structure of information to make the text scannable by the readers;

1. You write:
“Buy the Bucharest Survival Guide 2010 at new locations below!”
using two font colors; this may be confusing, if considering that they might indicate to be links; so, the text in red may be considered a hyperlink;
2. The font face is very small, I can barely read the texts;
3. Isn’t it a bit ironic?
“This year’s edition is full of new, updated content”;
Can a updated content be anything but new? Why is it necessary to specify that the content is both new and updated? Isn’t it obvious that one leads to the other?
4. I presume you are kidding here:
“This year’s edition is full of new, updated content essential to survival”;
So, you are only kidding when saying that if I won’t read your guide, I won’t survive;
5. I would be more specific and state the year (2010), instead of just saying “This year’s”;
6. There should be a comma prior to “essential”:
“This year’s edition is full of new, updated content essential”;
7. You say this:
“Redesigned with the most pressing needs in mind”;
and I ask – “Who’s needs?”; it’s not clear;
8. This sentence:
“it is the must have source of info for newcomers and seasoned expats alike”
doesn’t specify this – “newcomers to what?”;
9. You say this:
“Completely Redesigned Look: This edition has a new color-coded layout and Table of Contents to make finding info easier (see example below!)”;
But this makes little sense; you start the sentence claiming that the guide has a new look & feel, and you finish the sentence by explaining with structure-based data; so you say “This house is beautiful, because the rooms are organized by numbers”; it’s nonsense;
10. Space missing:
“on-the-go.For”;
11. There’s either a “&” or a “,” missing:
“For quick easy”;
12. This claim can easily be proved false:
“For quick easy answers to all of your questions this is the source to have!”;
13. Comma missing:
“information with”;
14. Isn’t it a bit ironic that you first state that you have everything in the book and you need an appendix for this? So the book has it all, but you still need to add some extra information; don’t you think it’s a bit strange?
“It contains our full databases of information with massive lists and descriptions of everything from notaries to embassies, as well as our full appendices. “;
15. If I were you, I’d say what the reduction is from:
“The price of the new guide has been reduced this year to RON 30!”;
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B5. Right sidebar

+The search box is where I expect it to find, in the upper-right corner; the newsletter is in the sidebar, on the right; ads are all grouped together; great! Everything is fine from this point of view;

1. (+important) You have a small (in height) left sidebar, a larger center column, and an even larger right column; the result? I visit the website, I start reading the center column; after reaching the bottom, I still have to scroll down, due to the fact that the right column is longer than the center one; oops!
2. On the search function: I would lose the “search here” text; the search button is self-explanatory;
3. Your first upcoming event:
a. The title of the event, which is clickable, has no different color; how should I know I can click it?
b. I would avoid both to write October without a capital and to abbreviate it:
“oct”;
c. You have a blue text which is a link and a blue text which is not a link; do you see something wrong with this picture?
d. I would write the map not like this:
“, MAP”,
but rather:
“- see map”
or
“(see map)”;
Right now, writing with capital letters makes it no better than the usual text;
Rather than suggesting the viewers to find your title and click on it:
“(Click the title above for more info)”,
I would just make the text clickable and say:
“More details”;
So, in this way, both the title and the “more details” links would lead to the same page;
4. Your second upcoming event:
a. For the first event, on the very homepage, I can get – hour of the event, date, location, map; for the second event I get to know that it’s sometime in 2010, and, by looking at the picture, that it’s at the Parliament Palace; huh?
b. Again, don’t write:
“Click the picture above for more info.”;
instead, put a “More details” link;
c. It’s funny to see two texts in the “Upcoming events”, written either with italics typeface or not, with normal size fonts or with small fonts;
5. (+idea) Regarding the newsletter box – if I were you, I’d create a page dedicated to the newsletter, instead of having the option right in the sidebar; why the need for a dedicated page?
a. In the sidebar you give me no warranties – what will you do with my email address, how will I unsubscribe, how often you will send me emails, in what purposes you will use my email address; in a dedicated page, my advice would be to have all those details;
b. Also, a tip to you would be to register to Data Protection Romania, and get an official act which allows you to use email forms;
c. Right now I can’t see any of the previous newsletters; this would be an important function – I would like to know, prior to subscribing to a web site, what other newsletters have you sent; have a list of previous newsletters in a dedicated page;
d. Also interesting to have would be the option of displaying the current number of subscribers;
e. Also, still about the newsletter box, I would include the options to subscribe via:
- classic newsletter (email);
- RSS feed (you can specify this for a specific section in your web site);
- Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / other social network account in which to announce the most important events; you have to be where I, your visitor, already am;
6. About the newsletter – in Romania, at the countryside, we have this way of saying about a person that it’s “Ionel, the son of Măriuca”, or, shorter, “Ionel of Măriuca’s”; you notice that only the first name is used; it’s very rarely used, and especially at the countryside, but this is the impression when I saw your newsletter form: you ask for the first name and the company:
“Ionel of Petrom’s”;
If I were you, I’d ask for either “First name” and “Last name”, or for “Full name”;
Also, much more conventional, is just to ask for
“Name”
“Email”;
If you want to have more subscribers to the newsletter, make their life easier and ask them to fill as fewer fields as possible – why not just email?
7. The idea with “Powered by Inwise” is good, it gives me trust in your newsletter, but I land in a Romanian page, I would prefer to land on a page with details in English;
8. You say:
“CityCompass Newsletter”
and one row below:
“Subscribe to the CityCompass Newsletter”;
Don’t you think that just by saying “Subscribe”, it would have been enough?
9. Sometime you use titles with an initial capital:
“Email Address”,
and sometimes not:
“First name”;
Disturbing;
10. The newsletter button says:
“Send”;
So, in my mind this idea forms:
“Oh, I will give away my email address, it will be sent somewhere, to a web site I don’t really trust”;
How about having a button that says:
“Subscribe”,
with this idea behind it:
“By clicking the button, I will receive the newsletters that I want so much”;
See the difference?
11. Your banner about “Corstjens Worldwide movers” has this image:
corstjens_web.bmp
It is a small black & white picture which, due to the fact that it’s saved as BMP file, not as PNG (for files with small number of colors, like the current one), has 70+ kb; the PNG version has 20+ kb;
You can read on this page – “What is the difference between “JPG” / “JPEG” / “PNG” / “BMP” / “GIF” / “TIFF” Image?“:
“BMP shouldn’t be used online within web pages – wastes bandwidth”
12. There is a problem with the vertical space that you have kept between images:

As you can see, sometimes it’s larger, sometimes it’s smaller;
13. Regarding the currency convertor:
a. Your currency convertor has this title:
“Leu exchange rate”;
Two lines below, I see “1 Eur”; so, I should guess that 1 Leu = 1 Eur?
b. Also, the title of the box is obviously wrong, the correct title should be “Euro Exchange rate”;
c. Another thing: wouldn’t it be just great to present this as a link? Do you think I need to see the rate more than once in a visit on the web site? You have allocated so much space to that box, it’s relatively futile; put just a link to an online converter;
d. Let’s say I’m from Denmark; I go to your web site and I see a converter from 1 Euro to 1 Krone; do you think that need to know that currency? Being from Denmark, I probably know this already; I might be interested to go from 1 Krone to 1 Leu; even better, to go from a sum I actually have, 187 Kroner to some amount of lei; this, I can’t do; on the web site I’d have to figure how many Euros does 187 Kroner mean, and from that to convert to Lei; huh? It’s really pointless to me; no use;
e. (+idea) What to do with the current currency box? Either put a link to an online converter, or put a small form with three fields:
Convert
(how many field)
(from what currency)
to
(to what currency)
Go;
And when I click go, I’m lead to an online resource which gives me the exact answer; this yes, would be of interest to me;
Also, when listing the currency, list the most used first (Eur, Lei);
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B6. Footer

+Wow, you have an HTML sitemap on the web site, great idea!

1. The copyright notice is one year behind:
“Copyright and all Rights reserved © 2009, CityCompass.ro “;
2. Why write “Rights” with an initial capital, and no other words in the sentence?
3. Again, some items are with an initial capital:
“Legal Information”,
while others are not:
“Terms and conditions”;
4. What’s with the title:
“Legal Information”?
That is the one place in your web site where you have something that is legal?
Or have you gathered all that boring and eeky stuff in one page, so I would have the option of not seeing it?
I really don’t like your choice of a name;
I visited the page and I had the surprise of a lifetime – you put in there the name of the company and fiscal data;
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C. Analysis of web site pages (the most important pages of the web site, analyzed separately)

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C1. About page

+Very good information in this page, great job!
1. When I visit an about page on a web site, I generally want to know more about the web site, the team behind it, the business that drives it; for real information that consists of site’s purpose, I expect dedicated pages; if I were you, I’d move the information about Romania and Bucharest in other sections;
2. Your numbering doesn’t have dots after them; so you say:
“1 About City Compass (video)”;
Where’s the dot?
3. It’s really rather irrelevant to number four items; it’s of no particular use to me, as a visitor to your web site, if you decide that information about Romania is on 3^rd position or 4^th; I don’t care about that;
4. Again, look at the font sizes:

It’s disturbing to see a logo in a smaller font than the title of the page; it’s also disturbing to see a huge title of the page, very small menus, very small breadcrumbs;
The text on the page is, by comparison, quite normal; but I would strive to make all of the text on the page of “normal” size;
5. Too much space between the menu options;
6. Why, in this list of items:
“1 About City Compass (video)
2 City Compass Team
3 Romania
4 Bucharest”,
only “City Compass” has “About” preceding it? Very strange option;
7. About City Compass:
a. The font in the video is small, hard to read;
b. I noticed small typo in the clip in Romanian:
“deasemenea” should have a space in it (“de asemenea”);
c. Your video has an embed option; it’s really rather pointless to have this option, YouTube offers it by default;
d. I loved your video, the idea to show yourselves in a video format is great; however, I might say that you didn’t deliver the promise of telling me about City Compass; or perhaps my expectations only weren’t met; if I go in a typical “About this company” page, I expect to find different results;
e. (+idea) For those persons who access the web site on a mobile phone, you might think of including in the current page a transcript of the video;
f. (+important) The current page (About City Compass – video) doesn’t appear in the menu on the left; big problem;
8. City Compass Team:
a. I think this is illogical:
“get to know the city faster and more detailed”;
Get to know more detailed? What?
b. You start by:
“I was born in Biberach, Germany.”
Christian Pauls starts by:
“I have lived since May 2007 in Bucharest.”;
I think it would have been better to have a framework – I mean, you say a lot of what you did prior to Romania, Christians – bam! – he’s in Bucharest since 2007; both presentation are fine, but I feel they’re on a different perspective, not actually a team;
c. (+idea) On the team page, I’d love to see listed the phone numbers (with international prefixes) of each person on the page;
d. The Gospels present the life of Jesus from different times – they focus on different parts, some go faster in the first period, some put accent on the last period; it’s the exact same feeling I get when seeing the presentation:
Volker – prior to founding the company + present day;
Christian – present day, nothing about the past;
Bizu – prior to founding the company, nothing about the present;
e. I find these texts:
“Working at City Compass has been a great experience; introducing expats to this crazy city is a lot of fun.”
a bit unrevealing; it’s no different than “I like my job”; OK, you like it, by why exactly? What makes it fun and a great experience?
f. The pictures don’t have the same backgrounds;
9. About Romania:
a. I can barely read the text; very small fonts;
b. You use different font sizes on different pages; bad idea;
c. You can write:
“1st”
like this:
“1^st“;
d. Is this relevant to anything?
“Romania has the 9th largest territory and the 7th largest population (with 21.5 million people) among the European Union member states.”;
Sure, the information about the population number is important, but the ranking?
e. You are my survival guide for Bucharest and you give me this information?
“Capital City : Its capital and largest city is Bucharest (2.6 million inhabitants)”;
The information is actually true, but the number of people who are in Bucharest is much larger, you should have specified this;
f. This is actually funny:
“Total 238,391 km2 (92,043 sq mi). 82nd country in the world”;
Why is it relevant if I am 82^nd or 94^th?
g. (+important) You should specify the source of information on the About Romania page; who says this:
“Autumn is dry and cool, with fields and trees producing colorful foliage”?
You?
h. (+idea) You have a tendency to present links like this:
“Additional info:
www.romaniatourism.com
www.unseenromania.com
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania”;
How about this:
“Additional info:
Romania Tourism (www.romaniatourism.com): a site very rich in information about X; we find it interesting that Y; the best thing about the web site is Z; you should definitely read this and that;
Unseen Romania (www.unseenromania.com): a site very rich in information about X; we find it interesting that Y; the best thing about the web site is Z; you should definitely read this and that;
Romania page on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania) : a site very rich in information about X; we find it interesting that Y; the best thing about the web site is Z; you should definitely read this and that;”;
It’s like this: “Go see X movie”; the answer to this:
“You ask me to stay and watch a 1-2 hours movie, based on your feeling that I will like it? Couldn’t you give me a hint on why you think so?”;
10 . Bucharest:
a. This is very bad idea:
“Map of Bucharest:”;
You give me this text, I should expect to see a map right? Instead, I see a 269×269 pixels map (small), from which I can’t see a thing; I click on it, nothing happens; whoops, bad idea;
b. Funny (not in a good way) thing: I right-click on the image, and select “View image”; the image shows at its right size, 800×800 pixels; if you think that 90+% of your visitors won’t do this, I think you are right; in the current state, it’s just a very large image (800×800), showing in a small size (269×269); not the best idea; you can read here:
“In an html document, is it a bad practice to resize images with the height and width tags?”
this:
“When you leave image resizing to the browser, the original (full-size) image has to be downloaded before the browser can display it at a smaller scale. This means that you use more bandwidth and your webpage takes longer to load. However, if you mainly use the larger image throughout your site, then it will be faster to always use this image, since the browser can cache it.
If you’re concerned about image quality, you would get better results and would have more control over the downsampling process using a dedicated graphics application to resize the image..”;
c. I checked and you did the same thing with the map of Romania;
d. Do most of your site visitors prefer miles instead of kilometers?
“Size: City of Bucharest – 88 sq.miles (228 sq.km);
_____Bucharest Metropolitan area – 587 sq.m(1,521 sq.km)”;
I’ve seen on other pages that you use km, so anyhow, either here or in the other pages you do something bad (even not keeping consistency);
e. Again, you do this:
“Population: City ~ 1.93 million (2007)
__________Metropolitan ~2.6 million (2007)”;
You claim to be my guide, and you give me the official figures of population? I think you should make me aware that the people that can be found in Bucharest in any given day are much more than the official numbers (students, tourists, illegal inhabitants);
f. If I were you, I’d either:
- list more than one option for the weather:
“Bucharest Weather Forecast”;
- explain why you have picked this weather channel in favor of others;
g. Look at the link below:
“The subway map in Bucharest (click to open)“;
Does it look fine?
Well, the “The” word has a link to an old map, while the rest of the text has the correct link; oops;
h. Bad practice: you give me a link to another page on your web site and you make it open in a new window; not good; it doesn’t matter what page is, if it’s not a PDF or an external type of file (an image, for example), I shouldn’t be forced to open a lot of browser windows on the same web site; bad idea;
“For more information about Bucharest please search our Online Guide.”
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C2. Services

+You have a video on the page, it makes me feel good;
1. I would avoid putting the same video on different pages; I saw it once, don’t show it again; the video is an “About” video, not a “Services” video; sorry, it doesn’t fit;
2. Bad spacing:
““Feel at Home”- services”;
You either put a space before and after “-”, or you don’t put any;
3. Sometimes you say:
“expatriates”,
while other times you say:
“expats”;
I’d pick an option, be it formal or informal, and stick to it;
4. I think a comma is needed prior to “for”:
“Bucharest City Tours for”;
5. Also:
“clients on demand as well as”;
6. What?
“The book is available also online for free at www.citycompass.ro.”;
I’m on the web site, give me link to the guide, and don’t speak to me as if this were a printed guide;
Also, I would avoid writing text in the middle of the sentences with smaller typeface than the rest of the text;
7. If I were you, instead of:
“we publish a newsletter which is sent on a bi-monthly basis”,
I’d say:
“we publish a newsletter which is sent on the 1^st and 15^th day of the month”,
or
“we publish a newsletter which is sent on the 1^st and 3^rd Monday of the month”;
I prefer clarity;
8. Discover Little Paris City Tour:
a. “Did you know …”;
“Do you know …”;
“Did you know …”;
I would keep the same verb tense;
b. How do you know this?
“Led by a local historian and researcher, this unforgettable two-hour trek through history, art, politics and religion, will change the way you see the city.”
It’s like saying “I’m the smartest on my street, and I will beat you at chess”; it’s much better to say “I proved in a test that I’m the smartest in my class and I’ve beaten the computer two times at chess”; you know?
c. How could I discover these?
“We will discover the Royal Palace – National Art Museum, the Romanian Atheneum, the Revolution Square, Vilacrosse Passage, Stavropoleos Church and many more”;
Wouldn’t it be better to say “Know more about”?
Also, “Atheneum” is actually “Athenaeum”;
d. Comma:
“City Tour please”;
“City Tour please” (again);
e. See below:

just how many times you switch typefaces, font sizes, whether the text is bolded or italic; my eyes hurt; badly;
9. Communism to Democracy City Tour
a. Shouldn’t the title be something like:
“”Communism to Democracy” City Tour” (extra quotes),
instead of:
“Communism to Democracy City Tour”?
b. The title isn’t specific (is it Bucharest or something else?); to me, it’s just like saying:
“Oh, you know, it’s the city; Romania has this city – Bucharest; so we can all call it “City”, since, you know, there’s just one city”;
I don’t like this;
c. I don’t know the bus tour, but since you say:
“Our expert guide (a Bucharest native) will take you on a journey to deep within the heart of the city’s cultural and political history: fifty years of communism, twenty years of democracy, and the “Golden Age” of the interwar period have all shaped the city in different and profound ways.”,
I find it hard to see this delivered from these sights:
“Piata Victoriei
Calea Victoriei
Dambovita
Palace of the people
Ferentari quarter
Unirii square
University square
Calea Mosilor
Obor market
Floreasca”;
Besides Obor and Ferentari (Floreasca perhaps also), to me there’s nothing that “Deep”; most of them are central locations;
10. Discover Hidden Romania – Dracula weekend trip:
a. In this page you’ve also added changing font color and writing with ALL CAPS as methods of convincing me of how great you are;
b. If I were you, instead of writing with a lot of typefaces, fonts, colors, bolded or italic, CAPS or Title Case, font sizes, I’d do just this:
I’d bold (that’s the one thing I would allow you to do) the first sentence in a paragraph, and specifically make that sentence describe the paragraph – or make subtitles and, again, bold them;
For hyperlinks I’d use either blue color or underline (a combination is also fine);
That’s it;
c. Why do I care since when you offer a service? It’s not relevant to me:
“offered by City Compass in collaboration with The Company of Mysterious Journeys as of May 2010″;
d. I know you want me to show me a map, but where is the punctuation for ending a sentence?
“Piata Charles de Gaulle, main entrance of Herastrau Park, next to the statue of Charles de Gaulle MAP”;
e. Bad paragraph:
“next
to”;
“and
cultural”;
“offered
them”;
f. What’s with the approximation?
“there are about 365 dams”
I’d rather say:
“there are about 360 dams”
or
“there are about 350 dams”;
This “about 365″ is too precise for an “about” approximation;
g. “The one at Vidraru is a Top 10 one.” … (according to?);
h. “…hear the story of the Transfagarasan, one of the most challenging roads ever built” (according to…?);
11. Testimonials:
a. To me this is a bad testimonial to include on your page:
“Thanks to the guide I start to have some feelings for this city”;
OK, so prior to visiting the Bucharest in detail, it was a blunt city; now, it might stand a chance; hmm, so if I don’t come to see your tour, there’s a good chance I’ll consider the city dull? Not a very good reason to come to Romania, in this case;
b. I like the pictures of the people a lot, yet it’s a bit strange that there mostly two kinds of people:
- Those who share a picture and not a company;
- Those that share the company, not a picture;
12. Welcome to Bucharest: Introductory Coaching:
a. Comma missing:
“Workshop please”;
“workshop please” (again);
b. And a dot:
“please click here”;
c. I told you before about browser resizing of pictures; the problem is still here in the page, pictures are larger than what they should be (they are uploaded as large pictures, and resized via the browser);
13. Getting Things Done in Romania: Business Coaching:
a. I would avoid having this part:
“Key insights:”
for the 1-to-1 coaching sessions;
How can you tell, prior to the session, what will my key insights be?
It’s not clear that the “Key insights” section refers only to the groups;
b. To me, in a training session, the trainer tells me – “This is like this, this is like that”; in a coaching session, the trainer makes me get an idea – “Oh, I think this is like this”; I will get the insight, even if it’s true or not; you tell me, even for the groups, what are the main insights that I’ll get; oops, I think this is rather a training, than a coaching;
14. Bucharest Guide Bucharest Expat guide 2010 – printed version
a. Space missing:
“on-the-go.For”;
b. And a comma:
“questions this”;
15. City Angel: personal assistance:
a. I didn’t see this service:
“If you need help with a particularly challenging aspect of the city (translation during a shopping-trip”
offered in any other part of the web site, so it’s intriguing that you offer it as a one-to-one service;
b. Comma:
“assistance please”;
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C3. Mass media:

+You give links to each media apparition, that’s great;
1. The link for
“The Frank Show on The Money Channel”
is broken;
2. You have translated “Trinitas” as “Trinity”, I don’t think that this is correct:
“The Romanian Church even has its own station called ‘Trinity’”;
3. I would love that you would write a small description – why pick this in favor of that? Help me with this;
4. I don’t understand why you don’t link to the English section of a newspaper, instead of the homepage;
5. Again, links on this page that lead to your own web site (newsletter) open in a new window, instead of opening in the current window; not a good practice;
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C4. Newsletters:

+You have an archive of the newsletters, well done!
1. I have entered an email, a name, a company, I got this message:
“Thanks for signing up to our newsletter!
We will keep you up to date with useful information about Bucharest: Cultural and social events, hints for newcomers and new products and services in town!”;
What’s wrong with this picture?
After I type in an email address, I should be told – “You should now check your email address and confirm your subscription”; I really don’t care if you do this or not, you should change your message; also, I’ve checked my email – no confirmation message received, I was just subscribed; this is bad practice; someone with bad intentions might subscribe other persons to your newsletter, without their approval; thus you would be spamming, against your wish; bad practice;
2. For the newsletter confirmation page – space missing:
“guests- we”;
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C5. City Compass in the Press:

+I like the idea of gathering all the information about you on a section;
1. You say on “Dacian Dispatch Article September 2009” page:
“Click the article for a high resolution version!”;
This is too technical, tell me I should click to see better; I might not know what a high resolution is, and I don’t need to;
2. I would consider putting the articles also as text, not only as a PDF version;
3. For the videos, an idea would be to include a small description of the videos;
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C6. Contact page:

+Lots of options for contact;
1. I would put the legal information in here;
2. I’d give a name for a contact person, not just a phone number;
3. I’d present in this page the team of City Compass, with their respective email addresses;
4. In all the web site the emails are not protected against spam, and in the contact page they are; it’s a hard to understand procedure;
5. I don’t see the reason of listing your web site in the contact page;
6. I would put a mobile phone symbol near your phone since it really is a mobile phone;
7. Some fields below are Title Case, while some are not:
“Enter your Name:
E-mail address:
Message Subject: “;
8. Why don’t also ask for a phone to be contacted at when submitting a form;
9. Your email form is bogus; I’ve tried contacting you with fake data (invalid email address) and it didn’t give me an error message, but I couldn’t send the message until I got the error fixed; but you should have let me know – hey! There is a problem with your email address, work on that;
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C7. The blog:

+The search option is in the upper right corner, good!
1. I would put the archives option as a drop-down menu; I’d also list in it the number of blog posts for each month;
2. You don’t offer the option to subscribe via email; why is that?
3. I’d suggest considering moving your blog from the current address:
blog.citycompass.ro
to this one:
citycompass.ro/blog
for Search Engine Optimization reasons;
Read more about this decision on SEOmoz:
“Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate“;
4. I’d remove the “Log in” link on your blog; it’s only useful to blog admins, not to your visitors;
5. For the comment option, I’d make this text:
“Mail (will not be published) (required)”
look like this:
“Mail (required, will be kept private)”;
6. I’d state that the web site is optional;
7. I’d put an option for RSS subscription for the comments of each blog post; if I wish to see what do others comment on a blog post, I would like to have this option; details;
8. You say:
“Author: Bucharest Angel”;
I’d state the name;
9. The calendar function is really great, I would include it as a link from the main site;

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D. Conclusions

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D1. Idea generation

1. What answers I’d love to receive from the web site:
a. Value Selling Proposition (VSP) – answer me the question: “What value does the web site bring? What are the benefits of using it?”; you should have a dedicated page the answers to these questions; tell me why your business field is good;
b. Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – this question is “What do you have and others in the same field don’t have”; what makes you different? Why you, instead of others? This is a key-question, which deserves to have an answer;
c. Guarantees – let’s say I buy from you, I don’t like your service; what happens then? Tell me what my guarantees of using the services you provide are;
d. Testimonials – what others clients who bought from you said; a long page, with name of persons, photographs and company names assigns you a lot of trust; do you have a lot of clients? Let me see them;
e. Case studies – this one is even better: you take one person and present the whole process; he was looking for a service in your field; he did a little research, he got to you eventually, and picked you because …; the result was that …; six months later he’s still satisfied because …; after he has recommended you to others, they reported him that …;
I would love to see all of these been linked-to on the “About us” page;
2. If I were you, instead of writing with a lot of typefaces, fonts, colors, bolded or italic, CAPS or Title Case, font sizes, I’d do just this:
I’d bold (that’s the one thing I would allow you to do) the first sentence in a paragraph, and specifically make that sentence describe the paragraph – or make subtitles and, again, bold them;
For hyperlinks I’d use either blue color or underline (a combination is also fine);
That’s it;
3. I reach the footer area; give me something to do; scenario: I visit your homepage, read what it is to be read, I reach the footer area; here there are more options:
(i.) I can click one of the links in the footer, if there are any;
(ii.) I may leave the web site;
For (ii.) scenario not to happen, you should have some interesting links in the footer; top pages on your web site would be a good place to start;
4. It would be interesting to have a page with help – what is a RSS feed? How are the newsletters delivered? How do I search the web site?
5. Somewhere on the page it would be nice to include a box with “You call me back”; I would just have to write a phone number and you would call me; you can also ask for a name;
6. You lack the use of a button with “Recommend the page to others” function; this is a must-have in my opinion; I’ve written an extended article in Romanian about this:
“Cum adaugi un buton de rețele sociale – Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / Hi5 / Yahoo! Messenger pe blogul tău WordPress?“;
Main ideas:
(i.) Use only a few buttons, instead of a lot;
(ii.) Only use the services you think your customers will mostly use (email, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! Messenger, for example);
(iii.) Make it very easy to share, reduce the number of clicks;
7. I would love that the logo would have an idea behind it; yes, I can pretty much understand what it’s all about, but it’s not that creative to explain “City compass” with a compass; I would put more emphasis on finding a good idea for the logo;
8. Regarding the newsletter box – if I were you, I’d create a page dedicated to the newsletter, instead of having the option right in the sidebar; why the need for a dedicated page?
a. In the sidebar you give me no warranties – what will you do with my email address, how will I unsubscribe, how often you will send me emails, in what purposes you will use my email address; in a dedicated page, my advice would be to have all those details;
b. Also, a tip to you would be to register to Data Protection Romania, and get an official act which allows you to use email forms;
c. Right now I can’t see any of the previous newsletters; this would be an important function – I would like to know, prior to subscribing to a web site, what other newsletters have you sent; have a list of previous newsletters in a dedicated page;
d. Also interesting to have would be the option of displaying the current number of subscribers;
e. Also, still about the newsletter box, I would include the options to subscribe via:
- classic newsletter (email);
- RSS feed (you can specify this for a specific section in your web site);
- Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / other social network account in which to announce the most important events; you have to be where I, your visitor, already am;
9. What to do with the current currency box? Either put a link to an online converter, or put a small form with three fields:
Convert
(how many field)
(from what currency)
to
(to what currency)
Go;
And when I click go, I’m lead to an online resource which gives me the exact answer; this yes, would be of interest to me;
Also, when listing the currency, list the most used first (Eur, Lei);
10. For those persons who access the web site on a mobile phone, you might think of including in the current page a transcript of the video;
11. On the team page, I’d love to see listed the phone numbers (with international prefixes) of each person on the page;
12. You have a tendency to present links like this:
“Additional info:
www.romaniatourism.com
www.unseenromania.com
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania”;
How about this:
“Additional info:
Romania Tourism (www.romaniatourism.com): a site very rich in information about X; we find it interesting that Y; the best thing about the web site is Z; you should definitely read this and that;
Unseen Romania (www.unseenromania.com): a site very rich in information about X; we find it interesting that Y; the best thing about the web site is Z; you should definitely read this and that;
Romania page on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania) : a site very rich in information about X; we find it interesting that Y; the best thing about the web site is Z; you should definitely read this and that;”;
It’s like this: “Go see X movie”; the answer to this:
“You ask me to stay and watch a 1-2 hours movie, based on your feeling that I will like it? Couldn’t you give me a hint on why you think so?”;

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D2. Important issues, to be implemented immediately

1. The font face is very small, I can barely read the texts; I would increase the font size;
2. You use different font sizes on different pages; bad idea;
3. Bad practice: you give me a link to another page on your web site and you make it open in a new window; not good; it doesn’t matter what page is, if it’s not a PDF or an external type of file (an image, for example), I shouldn’t be forced to open a lot of browser windows on the same web site; bad idea;
4. You have a small (in height) left sidebar, a larger center column, and an even larger right column; the result? I visit the website, I start reading the center column; after reaching the bottom, I still have to scroll down, due to the fact that the right column is longer than the center one; oops!
5. The current page (About City Compass – video) doesn’t appear in the menu on the left; big problem;
6. You should specify the source of information on the About Romania page; who says this:
“Autumn is dry and cool, with fields and trees producing colorful foliage”?
You?

_______
Bottom line: CityCompass.ro is a very well made web site, with an incredible guide on it.

Contents of my blog post:
A. Analysis of the main elements of the web site;
A1. Design
A2. Usability
A3. Summary SEO review
A4. Copywriting
A5. Information structure
B. Analysis of the site elements
B1. The logo
B2. The footer area
B3. The main menu
B4. The sliding text 1
B5. The sliding text 2
B6. The buy online box
C. Analysis of each page
C1. Saloon
C2. Services
C3. Prices
C4. Information for epilating (“Info epilare“)
C5. Catalogue
C6. Contact page
C7. Account page
C8. Careers page
C9. History and presentation
C10. Eyelashes and eyebrows
C11. Universal Contour Wrap
C12. Permanent laser hair removal
C13. Manicure and pedicure
C14. Milesman Premium Laser Diode
C15. Differences between laser and IPL
C16. Types of equipment
C17. The page of a product
C18. The checkout page
D. Detailed SEO Analysis
D1. First impressions
D2. Accessibility and ease of navigation by search engines spiders;
D3. Google health check
D4. Duplicate Content
D5. URLs
D6. Site titles
D7. Content
D8. Meta tags
D9. Redirect sites
D10. Internal links
D11. Geographical location;
D12. External links
D13. Semantic HTML
E. Generated ideas

So, what I would do better about the web site?
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A. Analysis of the main elements of the web site;

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A1. Design

+I like the use of white space, it’s very nice to read;
+I like the curved lines, makes a very good impression;
1. Some texts are hard to read due to the combination of small font and colors with low contrast;
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A2. Usability

+The account box is in the upper-right area, good job!
1. In the upper-right corner of the web site I would expect to find a search field; this one is missing;
2. From a usability point of view, the use of Flash on the homepage is a bit disappointing; I don’t think you would miss the special effects from the homepage if they were gone, so I would avoid using Flash altogether;
3. The homepage is pretty crowded;
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A3. Summary SEO review

+You have a lot of content on the web site, good job;
1. Empty pages just for SEO? 1, 2 and 3;
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A4. Copywriting

+The texts are nice, easy to read, follow and understand; nice!
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A5. Information structure

+Most of the pages have main category they belong to, which makes them easy to identify;
1. I find it a bit hard to comprehend from the start what is the structure of the web site;
2. I find the lack of a sitemap disturbing;
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B. Analysis of the site elements

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B1. The logo

+I can easily see a logo that I like, and this is one beautiful logo;

1. You are using two fonts (one for “Marazul” and another one for “Estet”), you change the color two times (black, green, black again), you write with different font size; this game of changing things is a bit tiring to my eyes;
2. The flower from the logo (if that is a flower) reminds me of esthetics, it is elegant; I would prefer something more logical and with a substance; as a separate rule, considering you company’s activity, I can accept a logo with purely esthetics appeal, nothing too brainy, let’s say;
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B2. The footer area

+It’s great that you have this space, whenever a person stops reading some article, that person goes to the footer and wants to read something more; great idea!

1. I generally recommend people to have a footer just like yours – with lots of links and things to go from; yet, I think that in your case, you went a bit over board; it’s just that your footer is so large that it is another, completely separate part of the web site; I would look for a method to make the footer smaller;
2. Why give me two phone numbers? I would prefer just one;
3. You give me these two email addresses:
contact@m[I cut this, to avoid spamming]
programari@m[I cut this, to avoid spamming]
How should I pick out the two? One is for contact, another one is for programming; the choice you give me only makes things more complicated;
4. In Romanian the title “The Saloon” doesn’t sound as good as “The Marazul Saloon”:
“Salonul”;
“The Saloon” is just not enough explanatory;
5. I would prefer that this text, with a link:
“Vezi
toate produsele”
is not split on two different rows; you can have it on just one row;
6. I think that this sentence:
“Suntem unic intermediar” (we are the only middleman)
sounds better as:
“Suntem unici intermediari” (we are the only middlemen);
7. The last link on the page:
“Echipamente laser”
doesn’t have a call-to-action, it doesn’t invite me to click on it;
Also, I think, since it’s the last word on the page, and it is preceded by a dot, that this small text also ends with a dot;
8. We’re in Romania; saying
“Shop online”
instead of
“Cumpara pe Internet”
seems a bit awkward;
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B3. The main menu

+The contact menu is near the end, which makes it easy to spot; it’s also in a dedicated area, great!

1. I think the font is too small;
2. For the Contact title, you have a small icon attached:

Unlike this, for both “The saloon” and “Contact” you have no icon and I was wondering why is that;
Also, I think the Contact menu item should be the last one;
Also, I see no reason for making “Shop” with a different color, I’d try to make them all look pretty much the same;
The “Salonul” (Saloon) item should better be name About (“Despre”);
3. The menu itself seems a bit crowded;
4. I would love a larger font size;
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B4. The sliding text 1

+The fact that you use the logo of a company makes the box trustworthy;

1. I think that in Romanian it’s better to say 2 hours like this:
“doua ore”,
instead of:
“2 ore”;
2. You use the term
“Universal Contour Wrap”
3 times in a box; it’s just too much!
The same for “Detoxifiere si slabire”; too much usage in that small area;
3. Instead of
“efectul nu tine”,
it is better to use
“efectul nu dureaza”;
“Tine” is not an appropriate use for “The effect doesn’t last”;
4. In the box on the right you use diacritics, while in the box on the left you don’t use them; why is that?
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B5. The sliding text 2

+I like the use of the “perfect skin” (pielea perfecta) words; nice!

1. The image isn’t very appealing to me; it also has a red area, which is the first time I see red on the design of the web site;
2. When using numerals like “25000″ is best to have a separating point, which in Romanian would make the number look like this:
“25.000″;
3. The text basically says that you’ve tested your methods on so many clients, that you can now safely proceed with newer clients; sorry, but it’s a bit creepy to me; what you are saying is that you have done experiments on 25,000 people and only now you offer quality services? What about those poor fellows? This isn’t a selling point to me;
4. The image with your logo I think would be better to have the same colors as the logo itself (the small bullets from the bulleted items);
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B6. The buy online box

+It’s so good that you’ve used a different font color for this box, makes it so much easier to understand it all;

1. I personally don’t prefer text written in ALL CAPS, even for the titles;
2. A lot of the texts in the image are written with a too small font;
3. It’s too much variation in those boxes; you switch from “Buy online” to “Gifts” and then you go to “About us” and then the products you offer for sale; I’m confused;
4. Ending a sentence like this:
“in doar 28 de …”
seems a bit strange;
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C. Analysis of each page

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C1. Saloon

+I’m glad that you offer details on each page, so I know what to expect prior to clicking;
1. Please be more precise; which Spanish group do you belong to?
“Marazul Estet face parte dintr-un grup spaniol”;
2. Instead of having a passive tense, you should use, in my opinion, an active voice:
“filozofia noastra consta in oferirea clientilor nostri a celor”
should be:
“Oferim clientilor nostri …” (we offer to our clients…);
3. What’s that, a reasonable price?
“la preturi rezonabile”;
4. This sentence ends strangely:
“catre doua arii principale”;
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C2. Services

+Looking at the page, I have a clear idea what’s behind each page you link to; great!
1. If you look at this:

you may agree with me that there’s just too much vertical space used for this part;
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C3. Prices

+I’m happy that you have discounts, makes it easy for the client to know what’s an advantage of ordering more;
1. In Romanian it’s better to say:
“Pentru doua”
rather than:
“Pentru 2″;
2. Comma missing:
“alegere poti”;
3. I would avoid using abbreviations and this text:
“Nr. tratamente”
sounds better with a preposition:
“Nr. de tratamente”;
4. This really doesn’t sound as Romanian:
“1 sedinta gratuita”;
You should have used
“O sedinta gratuita”;
5. You have an offer since November? This looks bad;
“Oferta noiembrie”;
6. If you do use abbreviations, at least use the dot:
“pt”
should be
“pt.”;
7. The title of the column with the price is this:
“Pret RON”,
and yet you specify that the price is in RON; why that?
“Pretul este in RON”;
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C4. Information for epilating (“Info epilare“)

+I’m very glad that this section exists;
1. I think it’s better not to use the abbreviation “info” for “Information”;
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C5. Catalogue

+You do have pictures for the items presented, that’s good, makes me want to click;
1. For a page that’s called “Catalogue”, there are far too few items presented; I would do my best to have a larger list;
2. (idea generation also) Scenario: I enter your web site, click on “Catalogue”, select:
a. A price range; or
b. The list with top sales; or
c. The cheapest products; or
d. The products with most views from the visitors; or
e. The products that have price discounts; or
f. New products on your store;
g. Products from a certain producers;
h. Products that have been given good ratings by your viewers;
i. Items that you, as a store, recommend;
j. Products that have been recommended by your viewers to their friends, using a function such as “Send to a friend”;
k. Most commented items;
I would love this scenario to be put into practice; right now; I enter “Catalogue” and only see a list in a given order; I would prefer to sort the products on your web site using various criteria, to filter the results; this would really ease my decision-making process;
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C6. Contact page

+It’s great that you have a map, makes me pinpoint you easily; you have a link, I guess that’s fine too;
1. I would love the map to be interactive, to be able to scroll or zoom-in;
2. I’m not sure why you give the postal code on your web site;
3. I think it would be better to have fiscal data on your contact page; you can read my blog post about possible legal implications of not doing so;
4. I would love to see a contact person on the contact page, this would help me get a better understanding of your company;
5. In the contact form you ask for an email and you set that field to be mandatory; I would much rather ask for an email or a phone number (either of the two), and answer the client the way he/she wants;
6. You say this (you will answer in the shortest time possible):
“vom raspunde in cel mai scurt timp posibil”;
This is nothing; you aren’t telling me a thing; give me a time frame if you want to, or don’t say it at all; has anyone ever complained to you that the answer time wasn’t actually the smallest one possible? Would this make sense?
7. You use a politeness form in Romanian (dumneavoastră) all over the place, and for the send button you use the casual form (Trimite); I’d try to keep a consistency in the way you express yourselves;
8. (idea generation also) I would love to see on the Contact page also an outside photo of your building; there are also some 3D maps (see Norc, for example) which could help me get to you faster;
9. (idea generation also) Also interesting to see on the Contact page would be some photos of your employees, it would make me get a better understanding with whom I communicate;
10. (idea generation also) You give me a form to fill-in on the Contact page; yet you give me nothing about the protection of my data, how will you use my email address, when will you phone me if I leave a phone number, what do you do with the list of persons who contact you? Help me get a glimpse on what’s behind a contact form;
11. (idea generation also) Wouldn’t it be nice if on the Contact page there was also a link to a Frequently Asked Questions page? I would love to see such a page;
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C7. Account page

+You make it clear which fields are mandatory and which are not; great!
1. Scenario: I visit your web site, click on “Account” (cont), see the login page; the “Create a new user link”:

is very small and barely visible; I would look for solution to make that link more prominent; you can put it right next to “Autentificare” button, for example; right now it’s barely visible”; another option would be to split the current page into two sections, one for login, and another one for creating a new account;
2. You say in this text:
“Introduceţi numele utilizator Marazul.”
to basically insert Marazul as the username;
I’m sure you meant to say that the user should insert the username for Marazul web site, but that’s not what you did say; I would correct this;
3. After clicking on “Create an account”, I insert my data, and click on “Create an account” button; well, the problem is I don’t get any message after this, I am redirected to the homepage; that’s some very poor usability; I entered your web site, wanted to create an account, and now, out of nowhere, I’m on the homepage again; what should I do? I’m so confused;
4. (idea) After creating an account, I would love to have a discount page, which should list the possible discounts I’d get for ordering more;
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C8. Careers page

+I love that the page even exists, it shows you care for your team;
1. The text is a bit sexist, you could have some problems with the law:
“Daca esti manichiurista”;
2. I think it’s best to give the contact person, when you ask for a CV via email; people tend to also send a cover letter, and it’s best to know to whom it will be addressed;
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C9. History and presentation

+Very nice to show the past of the company, helps build trust;
1. You say you had the first top equipments in the US in 1997; I would be more precise – what kind of equipments? You could even state the models:
“cu primele echipamente de top din USA”;
2. In an enumeration, it’s best to separate the last to items with “si” (and):
“Israel, Italia”;
3. I don’t think that it’s best to say that you had “cases”; it sounds like a problem; you had 25,000 solutions and 25,000 clients – I think it’s better to say it like this;
4. This numeral:
“25, 000 de cazuri”
is better said in Romanian:
“25.000 de cazuri”;
5. “Bucuresti -Marazul” => “Bucuresti – Marazul”;
“progresiv -definitiva” => “progresiv-definitiva”
6. I have no idea about this institution, please explain or link to them:
“aprobat de catre FDA”;
7. Poor language skills:
“asa dupa cum arata”;
8. Whenever you cite a study, it’s best to have an external link to prove your claims:
“Eficienta sa este demonstrata stiintific, asa dupa cum arata studiile”;
And if there are more studies, cite them all;
9. “traditional” => “traditionale”;
10. If you do use abbreviations (and not the whole words, as I suggest), use them correctly:
“cca.”
instead of
“ca.”;
11. There is no Romanian language use of more than one “!”; this is incorrect:
“comercial!!!!”,
it should have been, top, like this:
“comercial!”
12. (also an idea) I would love that on the Presentation page you also list some CVs of the doctors; it would be very nice to have a good understanding of the person that will treat me; put photos, CVs, even some small videos with them talking, it helps create a friendly atmosphere; and some photos with the whole team would be nice also;
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C10. Eyelashes and eyebrows

1. You say that the eyebrows are considered unimportant:
“Desi apreciate ca un detaliu estetic neimportant”;
Perhaps, prior to reading this, I would have considered them important, but after reading your site I changed my mind; I would avoid making such statements;
2. You have put a comma between the subject and the predicate, which is wrong:
“o spranceana conturata gresit, schimba”;
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C11. Universal Contour Wrap

+It’s great to have warranties;
1. “femei-” => “femei -”;
2. “indefinite” is not a word in Romanian with the meaning you intended it;
3. “cataplasma” is a hard to comprehend word by me; same for “elastina”;
4. This:
“pielii cum ar fi psoriazisul si eczema, pot”
should be either like this:
“pielii, cum ar fi psoriazisul si eczema, pot”
or like this:
“pielii cum ar fi psoriazisul si eczema pot”;
5. “15cm” => “15 cm”;
“cumulati– sau” => “cumulati – sau”;
6. “absolute” => “absolut”; in English it sounds well, “absolutely free”, in Romanian not so much;
7. What’s that – a “normal” client? How do you define what’s normal?
“Un client normal”;
8. “sin e” => “si ne”;
9. You end the page with a call-to-action, but you don’t provide a phone number or email:
“Ce mai asteptati? Cand doriti sa veniti?”;
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C12. Permanent laser hair removal

+I love the fact that you have a page dedicated for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ);
1. The page should contain FAQ in the title;
2. “Majoritate” => “Majoritatea”;
3. “medicatii cat” => “medicatii, cat”;
4. “multe melanina” => “multa melanina”;
5. I don’t think you used this word right: “conservativa“;
6. “24- 72 ore” => “24-72 de ore”;
7. “bronz- fie” => “bronz – fie”;
8. “2 saptamani” => “doua saptamani”;
9. “melaninei Este” => “melaninei. Este”;
10. Huh? “parului – raderea”;
“spatele – cat”;
11. “melanina nu” => “melanina, nu”;
12. “Foarte rar, pot” => “Foarte rar pot”;
13. “pielii- caz” => “pielii – caz”;
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C13. Manicure and pedicure

+I love the fact that you list fashion tendencies, it’s a good idea;
1. Unfortunately, the time for the latest tendency on your web site is a bit outdated:
“Tendinte toamna–iarna 2009″;
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C14. Milesman Premium Laser Diode

+I really love the FAQ;
1. “1999 – 2001″ => “1999-2001″;
2. (idea) Whenever you talk about something, put a photo or even a photo gallery; a video would be even better; so, if you talk about a treatment, help me visualize and put photos;
3. “Certificat EC?” – what’s that? Link or detail;
4. Instead of:
“FDA (Food & Drog Association)”
you should obviously have:
“”FDA (Food & Drug Association)”"
5. Lose the comma:
“lume, dovedit”;
6. “undaƒ,energie” => “undaƒ, energie”;
7. Huh? “ÂşC”;
8. (repeated) “discomfort” => “disconfort”;
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C15. Differences between laser and IPL

+Good explanations, nice use of tables;
1. This:
“Atat laserul cat si IPL, se”
should be either:
“Atat laserul cat si IPL se”
or:
“Atat laserul, cat si IPL, se”
2. “absoarte”?
3. “din-prejur“?
4. I would avoid writing ALL CAPS texts:
“NUMAI SI NUMAI”;
5. “par –fara” => “par – fara”;
6. “intervala” => “intervale”;
7. “par dar” => “par, dar”;
8. “Realizarera”?
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C16. Types of equipment

+Lots of explanatory texts;
1. “frecuenta”?
2. Sometimes you say:
“810nm”,
other times you say:
“810 nm”;
You should be more coherent;
3. Remove the comma:
“eficienta, este”;
4. “doi parametrii” => “doi parametri”;
5. Instead of:
“importanta cu”,
it’s either:
“importanta: cu”
or
“importanta – cu”;
6. “2000W comparat” => “2000W, comparat”;
7. “cuvine”?
8. “2-4J/cm2, fiecare/secunda” => “2-4J/cm2 fiecare, pe secunda”;
9. “2-2.5 ori” => “2-2,5 ori”;
10. “ca.” => “cca.”;
11. “8nm- 15nm” => “8nm-15nm”;
12. “nanometrii” => “nanometri”;
13. I would love to have seen explained what nm is right at the beginning of the page;
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C17. The page of a product

+You have photos of the product, that’s nice;
1. (idea) I would like to see more photos of the same product, perhaps even a video, at the products pages;
2. What’s with the price?
“Pret:90,00RON”;
Why so many decimals?
3. “Pret:90,00RON” => “Pret: 90,00 RON”;
4. (idea) I would love to have a button to recommend a product to other persons, this is missing to you;
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C18. The checkout page

+I love the fact that the labels of the fields are on the left of the field, makes it so much easier to read;
1. You say “the address below”, but the address in on the right:

2. Why a dropdown menu with only one item?

3. I really think that the “Cancel order” button is a wrong kind of thing to have on a page; why would you want to help the visitors give up their order? Make it either less visible or disappear completely; very bad button; if I press accidentally, the results are very bad;
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D. Detailed SEO Analysis

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D1. First impressions

1.1. Usability;
I have looked over each individual page of the web site and have detailed usability in that page.

Basic thoughts:
- The site can be easily navigated-through via the menu;
- I can easily understand the architecture;
- You have a missing site map (the “site map” means something likethis);
- There is no search function;
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D2. Accessibility and ease of navigation by search engines spiders;

2.1. Navigation without:
a. JavaScript
- I can navigate the site without the JavaScript activated, which is fine;
- You can see here why it is important to have JavaScript activated;
b. Cookies;
I couldn’t order an item, that’s a big issue; so, I can’t even order something from your web site; also, I get no error message for this;
c. Flash
The flash animation is really not an important issue, I can navigate without Flash just fine; it’s just for decorative purposes, and it’s only a line, that’s Ok with me;
d. CSS;
I can see the web site, even without CSS activated just fine, which is a good thing;
You can see your web site without CSS very simply if you have Mozilla Firefox and do View => Page Style => No Page Style;
Hint: Search engines do not interpret CSS very well, that’s good for your site to see better without CSS;

2.2. Robots.txt presence;
I expectrobots.txt file first to exist, and then include a link to the file sitemap.xml, so that search engines know that you have a sitemap in. xml (It’s OK, both file files are, but you should know that the robots.txt would be good to have a link to sitemap.xml, and right now it doesn’t; also, sitemap.xml does not seem to contain all the pages on your web site, which is bad)

2.3. Testing the site navigation (crawling);
We tested the site with this solution and found no major problems;
The alternative to Smart IT Consulting is the solution offered by Google, which is also very good, just see Section Crawl errors of Google Webmasters Tools and see there some potential bugs when Google is crawling your web site; other search engines have similar options with Google Webmasters Tools: Bing and Yahoo! Site Explorer;
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D3. Google health check

3.1. Site: sitename.com:
A. Are most of the pages indexed?
I compared sitemap.xml with a Google search;
Thus, sitemap.xml has listed 31 links, but the actual number shown by Google is 98 results; you should make sure that the sitemap.xml contains all of the important pages on your web site, which currently doesn’t happen;

b. Is the first page when doing a Google search?
Yes, www.marazul.ro site is first in the above search; this shows that the homepage is considered the most important page (probably, because most links are to that page);

3.2. Search Google’s brand name;
If I search for [marazul in Romanian] (name of company), you are the first ones;
Also relevant to positioning on Google are some keywords like:
[epilare definitiva];
[tratamente cosmetice];
[produse cosmetice];
Unfortunately, you are not in the first ten positions for any of the searches above.

The result is not very good.

3.3. Google cache:
a. Content hidden;
For 5 pages on your site (123,4,5) I looked in Google cache. I selected all the text on the page and saw if selecting text indicates a written text the same color as the background, then for each of the links above I chose to compare the results stored on Google’s server in text-only version; I did not find problems with hidden content;
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D4. Duplicate Content

4.1. Search site Google content (a sentence);
I made several searches (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) looking duplicate content to Google for 5 pages on your site (123,4,5). Problems encountered:
- You should check out these web sites: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 since they seem to have copied text from your web site;

4.2. Check the two versions: with www. before the site URL and without the www. before the site URL;
Currently marazul.ro redirects, as it should do normally, to www.marazul.ro. It’s good that you have a redirect to the same page, you solved the problem of duplicate content! Note that there are other solutions: 1,2;

4.3. Check all areas / business sites; Site Check IP;
Using selfseo.com, I found that IP of www.marazul.ro is 66.147.242.162 and is assigned to the United States;
And using this: yougetsignal.com I found out that there are over 1,063 domains hosted on the same web server as marazul.ro (66.147.242.162), including, naturally, www.marazul.ro;
It seems to me a rather large figure – 1,063; my solution? I would try to find a hosting service that provides fewer sites hosted on same IP; please note that if at least some of the other sites are marked as SPAM, you may experience problems with search engines on your web site;
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D5. URLs

5.1. One URL per page (you avoid tracking URL / different parameters);
I said above that the problem with www. and non-www. is not a problem for your web site, very well;
I noticed that in general there is a single URL for a content page, no URL parameters; good examples:
www.marazul.ro/tratamente-cosmetice-faciale-si-corporale
www.marazul.ro/echipamente-laser
www.marazul.ro/milesman-premium-laser-diode
If in the future you will have more URLs to the same page, you should to either set acanonical URLs or redirect one page to the another;
However, URLs with parameters are not a problem now;
As a problem: have a look at this:
1, 2 and 3;
1, 2, 3 and 4;
These are problem URLs;

5.2. URLs are short, descriptive, no ID number
Fortunately, the URLs of the site looks pretty good:
www.marazul.ro/epilarea-definitiva-cu-laser
www.marazul.ro/echipa
www.marazul.ro/istoric-si-prezentare
There are still some problems:
www.marazul.ro/index.php?page=shop.browse&category_id=14&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=73
www.marazul.ro/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=&product_id=39&category_id=13&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=11
I would look for a solution not to have ID number in the URLs;
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D6. Site titles

6.1. To be unique
Using a Google search and 100 results per page, I looked over the titles that Google displays on your site within the first 100 results and I found a problem: you have several pages with the same title: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
In the future, I would find a solution that pages do not have the same titles, it might be a pretty significant problem, Google can treat those pages as a source of duplicate content (which is, of course, bad);

6.2. Be descriptive; Brand name and keywords;
I noticed that your Marazul brand name is used in all the titles of the web site, at the end of the title; for the titles which have “Marazul” at the beginning of the title, I would look for a solution to this;
The titles are generally descriptive, I am pleased with how it looks right now;
I avoid having more pages with the same title (you can verify that a script automatically checks the title when you insert a new page);
Also, I would suggest you to use more keywords in the title, to make it more SEO friendly; a lot of titles mean close to nothing when searched on Google;
So, instead of:
Marazul: Descopera placerea atingerii pielii perfecte!,
you can have:
Clinica pentru epilare definitiva cu laser: Marazul

6.3. Not too long;
The titles are not too long, yet have a look at this title:
Marazul: Descopera placerea atingerii pielii perfecte!
It’s on a lot of pages (see above), and it’s too long;
I would suggest that the titles should be limited to 65-70 characters;
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D7. Content

7.1. It is enough text content on the site?
I saw that you have a good amount of content on the web site, a few pictures, that’s fine;
On the other hand, most of the content was generated by you, not by your site visitors; I would try to empower my visitors to generate some content;
Also, I would think how to encourage more comments on the site; it is a bit risky though, you might receive negative comments;
Also, it would be nice to have a human voice through a blog, I would recommend to have a person to deal with the Web 2.0 site (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blog, etc.);

7.2. H1 Tags
I saw that you use H1 tag on the homepage for the logo, on the other pages for the page title; also, you use the h2 tag for menus;
My suggestion would be to continue to use h1 for title pages, and also use h1 for title in the homepage;
I would use h2 for subtitles;
H3 tag does not really matter; Go here for information about this tag, and a resource also says:
a. H1 tag: Keyword Use as the first Word (s) in the H1 Tag – 45% moderate importance;
b. H2-H6 tags: Keyword Use in Other Headline Tags (H2-H6) – 35% Low importance;
So even use H1 tag for the page titles;
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D8. Meta tags

8.1. Keyword Stuffing?
You use the Keywords meta tag on all pages; had this tag be important, you should have something more keywords in the fields (up to 200 characters for all fields);
My suggestion would be to avoid struggling to write your meta keywords tag, it is useless, the only search engine that it was never used Yahoo, but it will be taken over by Bing, so avoid it altogether;
Regarding the site’s content, I noticed that you don’t do keyword stuffing, you avoid bolding keywords and repeating them obsessively;

8.2. Meta Description:
a. Does it exist? All pages on your site have a description, excellent!
Unfortunately, a lot of pages share this description:
La Marazul Estet gasesti servicii de epilare difinitiva cu laser, tratamentul garantat Universal Contour Wrap, servicii de cosmetica si poti cumpara online produse cosmetice profesionale.,
instead of each page having its own description;
It would be very good to have a custom description for each page (but please note that only has a minor importance, helping up the visits, but not rankings in Google);
Why is it important to describe each page? Apart from the fact that Google takes that description and usually displays it as a snippet in search results (the small texts that are displayed in search results under the title page – information on this here), Facebook takes that description and uses it for the links

b. usability – this implies that people would be inclined to click on results from Google:
i. directly (“Enter our web site” / “Click here” / “We invite you to the web site”);
ii. By giving benefits (“Site offers X and Y and Z”, “The advantage of using the site is that A, B, C”);
Your current description don’t invite people to visit the web site and generally don’t give a specific advantage for visiting it;

8.3. Robots meta tags;
It would be advisable to have this tag only for pages that do not want to give access to search engines (the administration pages of the site could be examples);
You are currently not using this tag on the site, which means that you allow the search engines to index, there’s no harm in it, it shows that you do not want pages to be indexed;
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D9. Redirect sites

9.1. Live HTTP headers
I visited some pages on your web site, even nonexistent pages, and I found out:
A. Most often the web site returns codes 304 for files that have not changed from last visit – very well – and 200 for new files – good;
b. Good part: if I choose to visit a page that doesn’t exist, I get error message 404;
Unfortunately, it would be more appropriate to have a search box and a brief summary of the site; since I didn’t accomplish my mission in finding the right page, please give me something to do on your web site;
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D10. Internal links

10.1. Number of links;
The homepage has 33 links and other pages you’ve checked have 31, 31.
According to Matt Cutts – webspam team manager at Google -, it is optimal that any site (yes, and yours too) has less than 100 links;
You successfully meet this requirement, congratulations!

Hint: install the Opera browser, open a page on the site in Opera, let it load completely, visit Tools=>Links, copy all links in Excel and see how many links you have;

10.2. Anchor text:
The vast majority of situations, you have the correct anchor text, and alt text for images (I checked all the opera, see above – View => Images => No images); What interested me was how relevant is the ALT text for images (you can get substantial traffic from Google Images search by keywords);
All right, anchor text is good; still, I did find a page where no ALT text for image was given;

10.3. Check Nofollow; If there is not also see if there is, see that there are no links to spam sites;
Since there is no reason for using nofollow as a page sculpting method anymore, I’m glad that you didn’t use nofollow on your web site;
For the future, use nofollow strictly if you have a possible spam on the web site (potential spam comments, potential spam in forum signatures);
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D11. Geographical location;

11.1. IP Country site;
IP is in United States of America (see above), which is less good, but you can still specify country site in Google Webmasters Tools, and tells you to do this (however, the country was probably already recognized by Google, there are usually no problems here even if IP is from another country);

11.2. What the TLD?
The site has a .ro domain, which fully satisfied me, this is very good for searching in Romania;

11.3. On the contact page to have a physical address;
You do this very well, the engines can properly see your address;
I saw you put in the footer the physical address, that’s awesome for the engines;

11.4. Register on Google Local;
You can do this by using Google Maps (create a KML file and then add it to Google Webmasters Tools, or alternatively, add a location on Google Maps);
With this method, you would help some searches who are not well placed (like the word [epilare definitiva bucuresti]);
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D12. External links

12.1. Anchor text to be consistent with what the destination site;
Yes, that happens in most links I’ve seen on your site;

I can analyze using Google some links that you have;
And Yahoo says this;
in my opinion that you have only 1 link listed in Google is not necessarily a realistic indicator, but if I had to give it credence that number, you have a problem with the number of links;
A solution is, simply put, trying to increase the number of links you have;
Also, I suggest you to look in the Google Webmasters Tools, and its counterparts at Bing and Yahoo for webmasters;
There, you should analyze the anchor text, you have access to many more links there; For example, Yahoo! tells me that he found 408 links to you;

12.2. Deep links? Check that you do not have any links to the homepage;
Most links go to the homepage;

12.3. The links look natural?
Yes, profile links look natural, just that there are only a few links visible;

12.4. Pages with links to external sites;
I have seen pages with external links (to other sites) on your web site;

12.5. Enough links?
I am quite dissatisfied with the number of links, you may nevertheless increase the quality of links (so both more links to you, and also of better quality);
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D13. Semantic HTML

13.1. Pages that load slowly?
I saved the pages I found FireFox and pages sizes: 15, 15, 15, 17 (only HTML file), if we add the rest of the file (s JavaScript, CSS, links, images), the average size of a page the site is somewhere to 98-99Kb; it’s pretty good, you can still find solutions to optimize the files that are loaded with the HTML file;
Romania is forth (link) on the percentage of broadband connections out of all Internet connections, but still a problem if you have large pages;
If you check out this link, you will find the following loading times:

It’s a pretty good result, things are fine.

13.2. ALT text for images (especially those with links)
Yes, images have alternative text in general, I am satisfied; I have given above a link to a page with a picture with no ALT text;

13.3. Incorrectly formatted text pages;
Whenever I encountered this problem, I have mentioned it; generally speaking, your site has easy text which is easy to read;
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E. Generated ideas

1. I think having a dictionary with terms used in your industry would be most welcomed by people strangers to the field, such as me;
2. Scenario: I enter your web site, click on “Catalogue”, select:
a. A price range; or
b. The list with top sales; or
c. The cheapest products; or
d. The products with most views from the visitors; or
e. The products that have price discounts; or
f. New products on your store;
g. Products from a certain producers;
h. Products that have been given good ratings by your viewers;
i. Items that you, as a store, recommend;
j. Products that have been recommended by your viewers to their friends, using a function such as “Send to a friend”;
k. Most commented items;
I would love this scenario to be put into practice; right now; I enter “Catalogue” and only see a list in a given order; I would prefer to sort the products on your web site using various criteria, to filter the results; this would really ease my decision-making process;
3. I would love to see on the Contact page also an outside photo of your building; there are also some 3D maps (see Norc, for example) which could help me get to you faster;
4. Also interesting to see on the Contact page would be some photos of your employees, it would make me get a better understanding with whom I communicate;
5. You give me a form to fill-in on the Contact page; yet you give me nothing about the protection of my data, how will you use my email address, when will you phone me if I leave a phone number, what do you do with the list of persons who contact you? Help me get a glimpse on what’s behind a contact form;
6. Wouldn’t it be nice if on the Contact page there was also a link to a Frequently Asked Questions page? I would love to see such a page;
7. After creating an account, I would love to have a discount page, which should list the possible discounts I’d get for ordering more;
8. I would love that on the Presentation page you also list some CVs of the doctors; it would be very nice to have a good understanding of the person that will treat me; put photos, CVs, even some small videos with them talking, it helps create a friendly atmosphere; and some photos with the whole team would be nice also;
9. To better trust your company, a list of testimonials, with full name and phone number would be great; this would help me decide better;
10. Even cooler than testimonials would be a list of case studies – a person came to you and you did this and that and those were the result; and, finally, the person has this and that to say; very good selling points;
11. Whenever you talk about something, put a photo or even a photo gallery; a video would be even better; so, if you talk about a treatment, help me visualize and put photos;
12. I would like to see more photos of the same product, perhaps even a video, at the products pages;
13. I would love to have a button to recommend a product to other persons, this is missing to you;
14. I would like to see a box which says “We call you”; in it, I should write only one phone number, you would ask for a name and / or captcha so that are not assaulted by SPAM; and you call the clients, who only leave a phone number;
15. I would love to see an option to recommended a page to others as easily – put the links like “Send via Yahoo Messenger”; You can also include networks such as FTW.ro, problogger.ro, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hi5, communications protocols like Skype and the list goes; pick two or three out of these and put them on the page;
16. Suppose I visit your site on a mobile phone; it would be useful option to see a version with only a few pictures, or at least a mobile version;
17. You yourselves would benefit from a presence on social networks: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn;
18. I would like to see the site a few things:
a. Value Selling Proposition (VSP) – I wish you to answer me the question “What value brings the site? What are the benefits of your site?” And, on a dedicated page or on the FAQ page, answer these questions;
b. Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – another question to answer: “What do you do and others (in your business) are not doing?” and also “What do you have and others (in your business in general) do not have?” That might be what differentiates you from your other service providers; what makes your site unique and how are you better than others; Why you and not others? – this is a key question that deserves an answer;
c. Guarantee – I buy from you, I do not like the service; I buy from you and I change my mind; I buy from you and you don’t deliver to my expectations; I would like to know what happens in each of these situations before I buy;
d. Testimonials – What other customers who bought from you say about you, it should include names, photos and names of companies they work for; do you have thousands of customers? I want to see them;
e. Case studies – I would love to see a person coming to you with a problem and leaving you with a solution; detail the exact problem and the final solution and you’ve got a case studies; do a few of these and put them on the web site; do a clip and I’m in seventh heaven;
19. It would be helpful if every page of the site would be read by a graduate of letters faculty and make corrections;
20. A list of your pages that have the most visits would be most welcome;

Final words: I like the web site marazul.ro, everything is well done.