New site launch :)
- Thread starter Sagalout
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I'm just offering my advice.
I infact, am a perfect case for this. I've never heard of Giraffe. I won't be searching for Giraffe expecting to find a restaurant. When I look for restaurants I use the type of food, the location and sometimes the style/price point.
It doesn't exactly take a marketing genius to realise these are key factors to be exploited with SEO to attract the audience that doesn't yet know about Giraffe.
I'm just here to offer some criticism, and its totally up to you whether you take it on-board.
You haven't used the title tag effectively and you haven't used H1 tags to effectively draw new custom. If you want to look at a decent example of a big site using SEO effectively take a look at HSBC.
I infact, am a perfect case for this. I've never heard of Giraffe. I won't be searching for Giraffe expecting to find a restaurant. When I look for restaurants I use the type of food, the location and sometimes the style/price point.
It doesn't exactly take a marketing genius to realise these are key factors to be exploited with SEO to attract the audience that doesn't yet know about Giraffe.
I'm just here to offer some criticism, and its totally up to you whether you take it on-board.
You haven't used the title tag effectively and you haven't used H1 tags to effectively draw new custom. If you want to look at a decent example of a big site using SEO effectively take a look at HSBC.
Soldato
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- 27 Oct 2006
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- London
Looks like a web 2.0 wannabe site from a couple of years back.
Very dated indeed ... It gets worse as you stroll on to the Engage website.
BTW did anyone find the
" pretty interesting location finder "
I'm still looking, can't find it !
Very dated indeed ... It gets worse as you stroll on to the Engage website.
BTW did anyone find the
" pretty interesting location finder "
I'm still looking, can't find it !
What the hell does "Web 2.0 Wannabe" mean?
And the location finder is on the main page if you click "Find your nearest Giraffe" or if you click on "Restaurants" on the main menu, you couldn't of explored the site very much.
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Fair enough, and in many instances I'd agree, however in this case the SEO market for restaurants is sewn up by the directory sites. It takes a huge budget to break into it with any sort of generic terms so its not worth trying.
Haha, care to offer your own site as comparison?
That's not what I said at all. Your introduction of a strawman in this discussion is most strange in any case.
For Giraffe's budget (and I'm sure they've discussed this with the client) they would be better looking at PPC and other marketing tie-ups/sponsorships with local websites. Giraffe are faily well known in the South and especially in London.
Perhaps one SEO strategy might have been to setup a dynamic page for each restaurant they have, e.g. www.giraffe.net/restaurants/oxford and for that page to pull data from the database specific to the Oxford restaurant - opening times, location, etc. The problem is, that the first results on Google are Google local results, and then after these come generic restaurant review sites (oxfordrestaurantguide.co.uk, inoxfordmag.co.uk, .oxfordcityguide.com, .viewoxford.co.uk). And that is just for Oxford. For a multi-national restaurant chain to develop one site compete within these niches, and every single local area niche where they have a restaurant against people who are working full time on one single website concentrating on one single niche is not a good allocation of time or resources. The return on investment just isn't there for them.
I'm not an SEO expert but let's discuss things like adults and not patronise people who disagree.
Soldato
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- 27 Oct 2006
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- London
How about this one...
http://www.mcbd.co.uk/
Released this time last year but it's now showing it's age.
Seen it, didn't see anything that a simple mashup created 2 years back couldn't do.
All I'm saying is that I cringed when I saw the flickr/twitter feeds - It was like someone had turned the clock back a few years
That is truely awful The OPs is far better and more useable in my opinion.
Rolled my eyes as soon as an all flash opened.
Possibly true. Its been a while since I consulted on a restaurant website and back then I didn't have 1/10th the SEO knowledge I do now.
You clearly have strong technical ability and I think its a great design, very quirky, very modern. Everything works and is good quality. The only factor I have found that lack are these elements and they are growing in importance.
If you look at it from Google's perspective and the HTML spec. You're H1 tags are all the same, which isnt exactly incorrect, but doesn't exactly do much for the information architecture on the page.
The menu's in particular, any SEO firm would/should tell you to lose the H1 tag for the general site information. Put the page title as "Lazy Morning Brunch - Our Menus - Giraffe Restaurant". H1 tag is Our Menus, H2 is Lazy Morning Brunch, H3 for the food titles.
Apologies to Daz too, didn't mean to be patronising.
Soldato
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- Woburn Sand Dunes
there's only 41 of them on the entire continent lol, there's probably more than 41 maccy d's in london alone
To be fair thats a good call on the H1 tags - we made the title tags dynamic but cant harm to do the same with the headings. Ta for the tip 
We're not an SEO company and dont offer it - we're only 4 strong so concentrate solely on what we know, ie code things correctly and advise the client that if they want proper SEO competitiveness to appoint a seperate SEO agency.
We're not an SEO company and dont offer it - we're only 4 strong so concentrate solely on what we know, ie code things correctly and advise the client that if they want proper SEO competitiveness to appoint a seperate SEO agency.
A development house of your demonstrated capability could easily be implementing a low level SEO data service. So you don't have to follow-up with analysis or market research, but you do set up the site with optimised information architecture, which is the easiest part of SEO.
Just something for you to consider really. I think it would be quite a fruitful bolt on to your existing services, and you are already doing some of it..
Anyway, good work!
Just something for you to consider really. I think it would be quite a fruitful bolt on to your existing services, and you are already doing some of it..
Anyway, good work!
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A development house of your demonstrated capability could easily be implementing a low level SEO data service. So you don't have to follow-up with analysis or market research, but you do set up the site with optimised information architecture, which is the easiest part of SEO.
Just something for you to consider really. I think it would be quite a fruitful bolt on to your existing services, and you are already doing some of it..
Anyway, good work!
tbh, any web company worth anything should be doing onsite seo as standard.
Meh, we're but tiny minnows compared to you guys in terms of resources and budgets. I suspect the average budgets we work to wouldn't get past the scoping stage with an agency the size of yours so I dont want to end up in an inter-agency slanging match when comparing apples with oranges!
Theres some lovely work on that site...however, if I did have the resources of 90 staff working on just 15 client accounts I wouldn't have chosen that site to demonstrate the best of it, and the attention to detail is a bit lacking, both on the site posted and the others I went to, but maybe we're a bit OCD.
Our site itself is due a refresh as it launched almost 2 years ago now, but I think its aged pretty well
