Site crit and domain question

mattmos

mattmos

mattmos

Associate
Joined
16 Apr 2009
Posts
273
Location
Kington St Michael
Hi all,

I've redesigned my site a little to make it more search engine friendly - before it was all images with no alt tags. Be great to get some feedback!

www.matinai.com

I've also registered www.matinai-animation.com as a domain, and was thinking about switching over so I could crowbar a keyword into the url. However it makes it a lot longer and a pain for email addresses etc - do you think it would be worth switching and gain a better search ranking?

Main search keywords would be 'animation studio bristol' I guess.

Cheers!
 
You don't necessarily need a keyword in your domain name. Plenty of successful websites don't [and I am not just talking about businesses who can afford to spend thousands on SEO!].

If you think people would be put out by typing a few extra characters in an email address, then stick with the old domain. You could also redirect the new domain to the old one - though I am unsure these days if that would have a negative affect on your search engine rankings.

You could have emails sent to the old domain redirected to the new domain, so while your web address may be a large name, your emails can be more compact.
 
Thanks for the reply - I'll stick with the original name for now and see how much difference my recent attempts at SEO have helped. Takes google a while to update eh?
 
right, as it's a Wordpress site have you got some seo plugins running at all?
all-in-one SEO seems ok, google xml sitemaps will help with google,bing and yahoo submission.seo friendly images seems to help too. also I use w3 total cache, although minification is knackered in the latest version. get them installed and have a play, that will help I'm sure!
 
That's an oldish version of the plugin. I've used both and there is a tradeoff between 1 plugin that does plenty or a cache plugin which you then need additional plugins to minify stuff. Between the 2 I hardly see much difference in page load times, but on my home server there is quite a bit of diffeence in cpu cycles. I often say try w3tc because it's just one plugin rather than several, but I suppose they both do a similiar job. This is now getting to be an inherent problem with Wordpress, plugins number in the thousands so how do you choose which one?
 
Thanks for all the info! The yoast stuff was very interesting, as I hadn't dug into wordpress seo at all. Will install an seo plugin next week and see if it helps. For now just changed the post url to /%postname%/

What I've done so far in terms of seo for the main site is to remove the specific about page and put all that info on the main page (it was images only before). I've added alt tags to every image, will title tags help that much more? Made sure the pages were w3c strict validated. Added an xml sitemap. I've changed the names of the internal pages from 'work.html' to 'animation.html' and from 'contact.html' to 'studio.html' - the images still direct people around the site ok. Using google webmaster tools the keywords 'work' and 'contact' were quite high, so I figured replacing them with more useful keywords would help.

Let me know if there's anything else that could help :) How do people rate google adwords?
 
adwords is fine, industry standard in fact. Google sitemaps xml plugin will automate your submission to google etc. and will generate your sitemap.xml without you having to, and only slows down admin slightly. seo friendly images will add tags automatically to help your image seo too. enjoy the world of wordpress, it's great once you start digging into it!
 
blade007 said:
I like the site very much, very creative!
Click to expand...

Thanks very much!

billysielu said:
Took me ages to realise Work, Blog, and Contact were links. Needs to be more obvious.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback. I was hoping that the characters could be read as icons and because of the placement they would come across as natural link elements. Would be interested to know if other people didn't find the nav links easily?
 
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