Please Review this site - www.sunninghillnews.co.za

[trojanpu]

http://www.sunninghillnews.co.za - tell me what you think...:-P

[Paz]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Looks like a nice little site - can I ask what CMS you are using?

You're up against it in your markets, news classifieds etc. so I'd look for a niche eg Cape Town or Western Cape to start with. The problem with a niche is that the traffic is low, but it's better to have some traffic to start with rather than wait for months for more generic traffic.

That means changing key pages from "Classifieds" to "Western Cape Classifieds" and "Events" to "Cape Town Events" so that you are more likely to rank well in the search engines for these less competitive searches.

Some of your pages are empty, eg the directory part of the site. Search engines don't like to index empty pages because they tend to be duplicates and they have enough duplicate pages. I'd add a couple of sites to each myself, maybe local charities, associations and goverment bodies so that these pages get indexed and start to drive traffic.

I'd also add an RSS news feed to the home page to give it a bit of a fresh content boost.

How much time do you have to spend on this site?

[akhanna18]

nice site .......good look ..will definately be using it.........but i think you need some content in it

[trinitybrown]

It looks nice, well it appears that you have used some template to develop it, anyhow good job and i like its banner the most

[convalescent]

HI trojanpu

firstly design:
sorry to say the design look very template driven (ie bland, sorry i was designer before becoming an SEO) @Paz just have a look at the source you'll see they are using a wp installation. the top image on the landing page isn't very sunninghilly, incidentally i live on paulshof (the suburb next door) check out paulshof.org

so my piece of advice is because it's so NICHE that you might want to make it more niche spceific by having images of the actually suburb.

secondly what is the purpose of the site? what are you trying to get the user to do?


sign up to the site?
sign up to the community newsletter?
report a crime?


there is an old addage in web design philosophy: "don't make me think"

ie what i'm trying to say is establish what the goal is, once that's been done make a call to action to the user. you'd be surprised how people will react when given a simple instruction like click here to "sign up to the official SH news letter". they tend to follow it

generally my tactic is this. the sites images are completely static except for the image that is ultimately the goal make that animated.

in terms of search you might want to look at diversifying your title and tags the seem pretty static with the only variation being home | ads | etc

elongate your meta descriptors and make them more descriptive.

eg:


<title>Photos | Sunninghill News | Sunninghillnews.co.za</title>
<meta name="description" content="Sunninghill photos" />
<meta name="keywords" content="photos" />


is just not going to cut it, try.



<title>Photos of Sunning Hill, Johannesburg | Sunninghillnews.co.za</title>
<meta name="description" content="Images and Pictures of the Joburg Suburb Sunninghill" />
<meta name="keywords" content="photos" />


hope that helps