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sdilley14
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Mar 28, 2011, 01:11 PM
 
I work for a mortgage company here in WI. Right now we have a pretty decent website.

Imagine Home Lending

The website gets our message across, contains the content we want to deliver to our customers, and the layout/navigation isn't too bad. Having said that, I know there is a lot of room for improvement in nearly all aspects.

I am looking for a few things...

1. Any and all suggestions for improvements. This work is done in house, so this isn't going to be a world class, cutting edge web experience...but I know we are capable of improvements.

2. Direction to any examples related to the suggestions (I'm a visual learner and visual representations help tremendously) and direction to any resources that may help make said improvements.

3. And most importantly...where do I begin to improve search engine visibility? Ideally, I would like to be able to type in "La Crosse WI mortgage", "La Crosse WI home loan", "La Crosse WI mortgage broker" and a few other similar phrases and have our website listed at the top or towards the top of the results. Right now the reults that come up for those search terms are very generic and I think there is a good opportunity for us to take control of this opening...I just don't know the best way to achieve this.

Thank you!
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besson3c
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Mar 28, 2011, 02:44 PM
 
Recoding your website with code that doesn't look like something you'd find in the 1990s or early 2000s would help a great deal with your SEO. The visual design seems influenced by the same time period.

I would keep this narrow version of the site for iPhone displays, and come up with a wider display for the main site.
     
andi*pandi
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Mar 28, 2011, 03:16 PM
 
Your site is pretty busy, perhaps identify the most important things to put on the home and then putt he rest in drop-down navigation.

Design aside, you don't have any keywords or meta description tags in your code. You need that for search engines.

For instance, this page has this in the head, to help others with these questions:
Code:
<meta name="keywords" content="Website,questions,Website questions, apple, ipod nano, macintosh, news, mac news network, macnn, mac, ipod, g5, video ipod, power mac, imac, ipod accessories, ipod news network" /> <meta name="description" content="I work for a mortgage company here in WI. Right now we have a pretty decent website. Imagine Home Lending The website gets our message across," />
     
sdilley14  (op)
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Mar 28, 2011, 03:21 PM
 
Delete
( Last edited by sdilley14; Mar 28, 2011 at 03:32 PM. )
     
sdilley14  (op)
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Mar 28, 2011, 03:23 PM
 
Originally Posted by andi*pandi View Post
Your site is pretty busy, perhaps identify the most important things to put on the home and then putt he rest in drop-down navigation.

Design aside, you don't have any keywords or meta description tags in your code. You need that for search engines.

For instance, this page has this in the head, to help others with these questions:
Code:
<meta name="keywords" content="Website,questions,Website questions, apple, ipod nano, macintosh, news, mac news network, macnn, mac, ipod, g5, video ipod, power mac, imac, ipod accessories, ipod news network" /> <meta name="description" content="I work for a mortgage company here in WI. Right now we have a pretty decent website. Imagine Home Lending The website gets our message across," />
Wow...I haven't actually looked at the code (I have a basic understanding of HTML so I can identify some of the elements). I had no idea there were no meta tags on our site. Thank you for pointing that out!

Also, I completely agree that some of the content needs to be grouped/organized and should be accessible via drop down menu.
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sdilley14  (op)
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Mar 28, 2011, 03:26 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Recoding your website with code that doesn't look like something you'd find in the 1990s or early 2000s would help a great deal with your SEO. The visual design seems influenced by the same time period.

I would keep this narrow version of the site for iPhone displays, and come up with a wider display for the main site.
If I wanted to re-design the website and get it more up to date, are there any design programs you'd suggest? Hand coding an entirely new website top-to-bottom simply isn't an option right now. Like I said, we aren't looking to reinvent the wheel...we just want a clean, easy to navigate, aestheticly pleasing website that conveys the information we want to get across and can be found on the major search engines.
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besson3c
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Mar 28, 2011, 03:26 PM
 
Originally Posted by andi*pandi View Post
Your site is pretty busy, perhaps identify the most important things to put on the home and then putt he rest in drop-down navigation.

Design aside, you don't have any keywords or meta description tags in your code. You need that for search engines.

For instance, this page has this in the head, to help others with these questions:
Code:
<meta name="keywords" content="Website,questions,Website questions, apple, ipod nano, macintosh, news, mac news network, macnn, mac, ipod, g5, video ipod, power mac, imac, ipod accessories, ipod news network" /> <meta name="description" content="I work for a mortgage company here in WI. Right now we have a pretty decent website. Imagine Home Lending The website gets our message across," />


Actually, not to contradict you, but AFAIK search engines completely 100% ignore the meta keywords these days, and the meta description is just there for a human friendly description of your site - it doesn't affect search results.
     
besson3c
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Mar 28, 2011, 03:29 PM
 
Originally Posted by sdilley14 View Post
If I wanted to re-design the website and get it more up to date, are there any design programs you'd suggest? Hand coding an entirely new website top-to-bottom simply isn't an option right now. Like I said, we aren't looking to reinvent the wheel...we just want a clean, easy to navigate, aestheticly pleasing website that conveys the information we want to get across and can be found on the major search engines.

The whole WYSIWYG editor thing kind of went out with the whole Web 2.0 thing however many years ago that was, so no, I can't recommend any programs that would help improve what you have now in any substantial way. These days, the best sort of turnkey solution is to find a premade WordPress template from a site like templatemonster.com and go from there with building a WordPress or other template-driven site.
     
sdilley14  (op)
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Mar 28, 2011, 03:37 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
The whole WYSIWYG editor thing kind of went out with the whole Web 2.0 thing however many years ago that was, so no, I can't recommend any programs that would help improve what you have now in any substantial way. These days, the best sort of turnkey solution is to find a premade WordPress template from a site like templatemonster.com and go from there with building a WordPress or other template-driven site.
I actually thought of trying to go the WordPress template route. My concern was that it may not be very visible on the search engines as I was under the impression that site "uniqueness" was one of the major factors that influenced the results.

This is definitely more of the direction I'd like to work towards though. Some of the templates look really nice...FAR better than what we have now.
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besson3c
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Mar 28, 2011, 03:50 PM
 
Originally Posted by sdilley14 View Post
I actually thought of trying to go the WordPress template route. My concern was that it may not be very visible on the search engines as I was under the impression that site "uniqueness" was one of the major factors that influenced the results.

This is definitely more of the direction I'd like to work towards though. Some of the templates look really nice...FAR better than what we have now.

Actually, the opposite is true.

Search engines don't care about your template in terms of content analysis, they care about the content on your site. However, if they have to wade through all of this crufty code in your template to get to the content, your results will be penalized. The templates almost always embrace nice modern coding practices, so you will be rewarded, not hurt by using them over what you have now. What will make or break your search engine rankings is your actual site's content.
     
sdilley14  (op)
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Mar 28, 2011, 03:54 PM
 
Something like this...

Free Full Package Templates

or this...

Free Flash 8 Templates | Free Flash 8 Template | Template Monster

or this...

Free PSD Templates | Free PSD Website Templates

would be perfect. Of course things would need to be tweaked, but these are all nice examples of clean, easy to use, well organized, professional looking websites. I would LOVE to be able to model our website after one of these.
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besson3c
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Mar 28, 2011, 04:05 PM
 
Go for it, although the Flash templates are not going to do you much good as far as their deliverables since you will not be building a Flash website (which is a good thing

I'd suggest getting your feet wet with a random WordPress theme before focussing too much on finding your perfect theme and tweaking it to your liking. You'll have to learn how to use WordPress. I'd suggest creating yourself a free site at wordpress.com to get used to the GUI, and then finding a host where you can setup and install WordPress with your own theme acquired from Templatemonster or wordpress.org or wherever. Your current host is Windows based, your new host will have to be Linux based in order to run PHP, which WordPress requires.

WordPress will have many upsides for your company as well, particularly the ability to let others edit the content on the site as well without it having to go through a single person, and the ability to update from any computer anywhere as well.
     
sdilley14  (op)
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Mar 28, 2011, 04:27 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Go for it, although the Flash templates are not going to do you much good as far as their deliverables since you will not be building a Flash website (which is a good thing

I'd suggest getting your feet wet with a random WordPress theme before focussing too much on finding your perfect theme and tweaking it to your liking. You'll have to learn how to use WordPress. I'd suggest creating yourself a free site at wordpress.com to get used to the GUI, and then finding a host where you can setup and install WordPress with your own theme acquired from Templatemonster or wordpress.org or wherever. Your current host is Windows based, your new host will have to be Linux based in order to run PHP, which WordPress requires.

WordPress will have many upsides for your company as well, particularly the ability to let others edit the content on the site as well without it having to go through a single person, and the ability to update from any computer anywhere as well.
Thank you for the suggestions!

I agree, a Flash based website would be a horrible idea...I just liked the aesthetics of that particular design.

So right now our company hosts our website on our own in-house web server. Are you suggesting that we would need to host it on a third party server that supports Linux? Or would it be possible for us to install Linux on our server and use the same host machine we are using now? Which method makes the most sense and would be the most efficient/cost effective?
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besson3c
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Mar 28, 2011, 04:31 PM
 
Originally Posted by sdilley14 View Post
Thank you for the suggestions!

I agree, a Flash based website would be a horrible idea...I just liked the aesthetics of that particular design.

So right now our company hosts our website on our own in-house web server. Are you suggesting that we would need to host it on a third party server that supports Linux? Or would it be possible for us to install Linux on our server and use the same host machine we are using now? Which method makes the most sense and would be the most efficient/cost effective?

Well, what does your server do now? Why do you run your own server? Who is responsible for maintaining it?
     
andi*pandi
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Mar 28, 2011, 05:28 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Actually, not to contradict you, but AFAIK search engines completely 100% ignore the meta keywords these days, and the meta description is just there for a human friendly description of your site - it doesn't affect search results.
I don't know about all of them, but you are right at least for google. However, the SEO company that my company hires still insists we use them.
     
sdilley14  (op)
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Mar 28, 2011, 05:41 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Well, what does your server do now? Why do you run your own server? Who is responsible for maintaining it?
Honestly, I couldn't answer the first two questions. One of the original founders of our company set up our entire network...servers, website, everything. He doesn't have ownership in the company anymore but he still handles the IT work that needs to be done. I'm not really sure why we have our own web server. I think we did it just because we "could". A lot of things were done in a bit of an overkill fashion back in the day here.
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besson3c
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Mar 28, 2011, 05:56 PM
 
Originally Posted by andi*pandi View Post
I don't know about all of them, but you are right at least for google. However, the SEO company that my company hires still insists we use them.

Really? I wonder what for?
     
besson3c
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Mar 28, 2011, 05:57 PM
 
Originally Posted by sdilley14 View Post
Honestly, I couldn't answer the first two questions. One of the original founders of our company set up our entire network...servers, website, everything. He doesn't have ownership in the company anymore but he still handles the IT work that needs to be done. I'm not really sure why we have our own web server. I think we did it just because we "could". A lot of things were done in a bit of an overkill fashion back in the day here.

Well, if you can afford to hire staffing to run, maintain, and secure a web server for around $10/month, then go for it, otherwise I wouldn't suggest hosting your own website unless you have very specific reasons for doing so.
     
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Mar 28, 2011, 06:00 PM
 
Originally Posted by andi*pandi View Post
I don't know about all of them, but you are right at least for google. However, the SEO company that my company hires still insists we use them.
Not to derail the OP, but spending time on Meta Keywords is worthless. Now that Yahoo is using Bing to power their search results, no major search engine algorithm is using them.

As for getting a search friendly site, your structure should change as has been previously suggested and you should start creating pages of content that focus on the keywords you want to rank highly for. Always make sure you have your Title Tags in order and that you have a strong Meta Description that entices people to click (not deceptively so, but gives them a true representation of what they'll find on the page). While Meta Description is primarily for the human user, if it's good enough copy and people start clicking b/c of it, it can have a very positive impact on your relevancy score.

Some random things:

Make sure your site is listed in DMOZ.

If you have a physical location, set up a google places page.

Add content to your site regularly. The more it's updated, the more the search spiders will crawl it.

Avoid having anchor text such as "click here" to link to a page within your site. Rather use the keywords you want to rank for as the anchor text.

Site wise, make sure each page has a Title Tag, Meta Description and a Headline. Make sure pics have alt-text and that their file names are descriptive as well (example: instead of DSC003.jpg make it Jane-Smith-WI-Mortgage-President.jpg).
     
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Mar 28, 2011, 07:39 PM
 
Be wary of some of the "Free Wordpress Theme!!11!!" sites out there. A lot of them are saddled with hidden ads and nefarious code.
Use the Exploit Scanner and Theme Checker plugins to see that they're free of that crap and up to date for WP 3.1+
     
sdilley14  (op)
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Mar 28, 2011, 07:45 PM
 
Wow...all GREAT suggestions that I am certainly going to follow. Thank you very much!!
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