Pls. review utopianliving.com

Hello All,

I've been trying to modify www.utopianliving.com for a while, but can't for the life of me get Google to index or crawl anything more than my homepage. Google has crawled it twice so far. Any thoughts or ideas on how to fix this?

Much appreciated!

Clay

Love the design! Though I would have gone with a simplified heirarchy for the center catalogue on the main page, a la www.yahoo.com. Look at the way their heirarchy is set up:

Main Category #1
-----------------------
sub category #1, subcategory #2

Main Category #2
-----------------------
sub category #1, subcategory #2



These subcategories are good triggers for people who can't find the right main category. I also suggest this because I think you have too many "Main" categories in your index page.

For example, Organic Fitness Bras, Organic Mens Clothing and Organic Pants could all be UNDER the main category "Organic Clothing", so it would look like this:

Organic Clothing
---------------------
Fitness Bras, Pants, Mens


I'd recommed getting your main catalogue page down to only 10-15 "main" categories. Currently there are 60.

Hope this helps.

Christopher,

Thanks for the advice! I will definitely work on a better heirarchy.

Unfortunately, I still don't understand why Google can't index past my first page... possibly there is some kind of error in the programming of my site that is preventing them from doing this.

By the way you have a great site as well!

Cheers,

Clay

How long has your site been up for? Sometimes with new sites it can take google a good month or so to go much past the index page... especially if you don't have many backlinks coming in.

...and, from the quick look I just had - I'd say that's your main problem, just did a search for www.utopianliving and it only returned your index page, plus one other PR0 page... you really need to concentrate on getting more backlinks to your site - once google sees a few of them, it'll consider your site to be a bit more important and crawl a few more pages... otherwise it could be months before it gets around to it.

Other than that, everything *should* be alright, googlebot should be able to handle most of what you've got there - you might want to look at the links you've got at the bottom of the page though (about us, site map etc.) - you've got six links there, all with the same 'title' attribute, you should make these different for each link - it's possible that google will see it as keyword stuffing and ignore them.

Backlinks seems to be your main problem though - get a few quality links, and googlebot will be frolicking through your site in no time ;)

Toasted,

That is music to my ears! I've been pretty concerned something major was wrong. The site has only been up for a month, so that makes sense.

Two other questions if you have time.

1. On the backlinks I keep reading things about having keywords attached to your backlinks. Is this just matter of giving someone the "Description" to add with your link on their page?

2. Lastly, I put the category links in the middle section, b/c I thought Google might not crawl my site deep enough to see them unless they were on the home page. I wasn't sure if Google could crawl my drop down menus or get to everything from my category links. Any idea if this is necessary or for most part will Google crawl you entire site given enough time?

Thanks!!!


Clay

Clay,

I uploaded some stuff to http://www.gladcity.com/clay/ for you to look at. It's an old comp for a client who never paid. It's got a pretty simple hierarchy, nothing special, but I think it would fit that middle section pretty nicely. So go ahead and, erm..."borrow" it if you wish.

But what I guess it comes down to, is your linking structure is going to be affected by both the change in the heirarchy and the drop-down Java menus. I would expect that those drop-downs aren't getting spidered at all, so just forget about optimizing those (they look nice though, I'll ask you about that code one day... If you can call some of that javascript from an external file, it would be much better though...

SO - optimizing comes down to your heirarchy menu, the header and footer menus (eg sitemap, privacy policy, shopping cart), the random items displayed on the left and bottom, and the articles on the right side.

My first suggestion is to turn your header and footer navigation into Java links. These 8 or 10 links are draining PR away from your main page to non-essential pages. You don't want Google to push pagerank into your Privacy Policy and Shopping Cart, do ya?

In fact, if I were handling this site, nearly everything would be Java link EXCEPT that heirarchy in the middle of the page. Like the pages on the right, left and bottom are really just "supplemental" pages, and if the 'bots get to them eventually then so be it.

What you really want to get the bots to focus on is the heirarchy in the middle. Right now, it is essentialy a site map of the main categories of your site, right? So, doesn't it make sense that if everything else on the page is JavaLinks, then the first link the spider will see is the first category in the heirarchy right?

As far as graphic design goes, you've got a REALLY good start here. Very clean, very professional - very minimal, too, which fits the theme of the site very well. However I do have some nitpicks:

(1) Move the "Environmental Superstore" down to the heirarchy, like the title of that menu (see the URL above to know what I am talking about...)

(2) Move the strapline (a) closer to the logo on the top left, either just to the right or just under the Utopian Living logo, or (b) where the "Environmental Superstore" used to be.

(3) On the product pages, I would have less products on the main category pages. Put one "Featured Product" (random) really big, and then three similar products to the right of that under the heading "Similar Items". And then put a link that says "See more like this -->" so they can see all of the products.


That should keep you busy for a while! But seriously, I only enjoy picking apart the sites that are really really good, and you're almost there bro. Just have some tiny things to clean up and it will be a polished product.

Hope this helps!

Christopher,

You rock! Thanks for the great info! You're right that will keep me busy for a while. On the drop down menu, we actually bought the code from opencube.com.

Best Regards,

Clay