Please Review Two of my Sites

[Webzcas]

Ok I have two sites I would like you to have a look at. The first one Online Casino Reviewer (http://www.onlinecasinoreviewer.com) came out of the sandbox last October. The site has been indexed in google since August 2004.


It has some pretty strong serps in google such as #1 Online Casino Reviews. However, the big big money terms such as online casino and online casinos I have only managed to ever get into the top 20. Online Casinos it now ranks #18 and online casino in the top 40. I just can't seem to break the top ten.

The next site is my new baby as it were. Registered and indexed in google since June 2005. I have only recently in the last few weeks, started work on this site - BetSage (http://www.betsage.com) - There is still a lot of off site and indeed on site seo that needs to be done, as well as additional content. The site is still in the box of sand at the moment though I fear.

Any tips, advice etc you can give me on improving my serps would be most appreciated.

Finally if anyone is in the gambling sector and is up for link exchanges, please by all means send me a PM :-D

[Paz]

Hi Webzcas,

I'll start today with online casino if that's OK!

But it's such a great site and so well optimised... where do I start...haha

I'm gonna dig deep for this review though, because we're very grateful for your help in getting us started!!

SEO is pretty much about links and I can see you've got lots of authoratitive backlinks, but I'm wondering if you will need even more for the primary keywords you are targeting.

Also I see your backlink campaign is supplemented by reciprocals etc. but I don't see any evidence of article submissions? We've found them very effective, still, and I'd recommend you knock out a few articles and submit them to the few quality article directories that are still out there.

Looking at the titles and meta tags I can see that every page is very highly optimised, and I couldn't see any wasted tags at all. Same applies to the internal linking, but I would think about redirecting index.html to the root "/". Also I'm very suprised you haven't redirected your non-www pages to the www versions with htaccess.

I like the usage of CSS, particularly with flexibilty it gives you with bold text, but I'm wondering if you've over-cooked it with the h1 tag on the home page; it just looks too long for me, but that's just my instinct and not based on any specific tests or anything.

I always say about 1000 words of text is the optimum for SEO, and I see on the home page there are 1047 words (excluding anchor text); so I'm feeling pretty vindicated.... :razz:

It reads OK for visitors though, because of the use of banners and other graphics, which help break up the text.

And of course there is a useful articles section to help build up the site as more of an information resource, for Google in particular, and I would just keep going with that. I also think it helps if you can make your articles more "current". In other words if you see any big news stories relating to online gambling, and there are plenty at the moment, I'd get in the habit of bashing out an article on the same day any news story breaks. You could do that easily via a blog, and of course you could set up an RSS feed. The downside to an RSS feed is that people will scrape your content, but if you embed the blog with links, they will show up in Yahoo for sure, and other important search engines.

On the same lines, the forum's a great idea because people will add relevant content for you, and it's also great place for webmasters from the same ilk to meet up and make exchanges. Also you've reminded me - we must get a header up in this forum with some links back to key pages!

What else can I say? It's a great example of how you can find a compromise between optimising a page for search engines and yet still looking attractive to humans.

Good luck with it!
Paz.

[Webzcas]

Wow Paz thanks very much for the feedback. With my new site BetSage, I am using a different strategy, obtaining deep links and only linking out to other sites naturally - ie no recip links. I also have rss feeds syndicated for all the news articles.

OCR, the off site strategy I am going to keep the same. Why brake something that works :D

What is interesting is that since I linked to this forum from the webmasters page on OCR. OCR now ranks #2 in google for ' Casino Webmasters ' - Whereby beforehand it was #4. Linking to Digital M as an additional resource, is the only thing I have done, offsite or onsite to that page.

Looks like Trust Rank and outbound linking relevancy in work :)

[Paz]

LOL... it's cool that we have some trustrank already despite the fact that we spend a lot of time criticising Google.. haha

My first impression of BeSage is that it looks fantastic. Did you design it yourself? It looks like you are setting it up for `intermediate` exchange linking aka three ways, but it's not clear to me what plans you have for the site because if you intend to use it for link building, it doesn't have to rank at all. As I see it the sandbox isn't an issue because it only needs to be indexed reliably and pass PR (and trustrank).

Off the top of my head; I know you have robots meta tags, but I would still add a robots.txt and favicon to keep your server logs manageable - they must be full of 404 Not found errors! Also there are a few image alt tags missing but you can fix those next time you get a spare hour or so.

I always think a sitemap, about us, and privacy statement pages are important - I've always found that they are the first pages to be indexed for a new site but it's just a gut feeling that they are important; nothing else. Also I notice that when I switch off my javascript the rollover links don't work, but you seem to be well indexed even without the sitemap and I like the look of the rollovers.

I see again the code is pretty much hand written, but its need tidying up a little because there are 80 errors on the front page from tags that aren't closed properly to other typos such as <tr style="height:165px"">.

Also I'm seeing this line of unwanted?? comment text appearing in the body:
<!-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAIN ARTICLES
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------>

But otherwise I can't fault the site at all. As for it's future as a portal, I guess you could add a gambling directory, and maybe an articles resource (dashboard is an excellent article directory manager).

Cheers,
Paz.