• Archive through July 2, 2001 07/02 09:48am [25]

Matt- love the site great job.

Hilary- Great looking site also but I'm not a big fan of using an image map for primary navigation, but since you do have alternative navigation at the bottom it works
George

By Cheftim (Cheftim) on Monday, July 02, 2001 - 12:49 pm: Edit

Matt and Hilary,
Your sites are great.

Hilary since your thinking about a redesign the only thing that may be done better is optimizing for better search engine/directory.

The different search engines use different formulas for placement. Taken to extreme search engine/directory placement can be a full time job but some simple things can be done to help.

When using the KEYWORD meta tags (I think this applies to most everyone who has posted their sites here)the keywords and phases should actually be words used on the page. The word/phrases should also appear rather close to the top of the actual html file.

Close to the top means if there is a lot of coding or images in the file before the text content with the key words appears the search engines/directories will give those keywords less weight in there placement formula.

Another point is using to many keywords or phrases. Using more than 3-5 waters done their impact on the formulas.

One of the newer techniques is optimizing each page for different single keywords or phases. Each page has text content concerning a specific market or product, then each page is submitted separately to the search engines and directories.

Using keywords or phases in the text content to many times can have the effect of getting your site banned from a search engine/directory for spamming. ( BTW did you know that the word spam comes from the Monty Python spam routine?)

George knows more about this than me and I'm sure he can clairify some of these points

tim

By debord on Tuesday, July 03, 2001 - 07:15 am: Edit

Hilary, you have alot of good things happening! I imediately want to sample your work, your descriptions/or menu choices are great (very up-scale). Your photo under wedding of a buffet is lovely and a good selling visual even with-out showing food (because I can envision my party there).

A couple things I do think you might think about: Your name...I thought you were party planners not caterers, actually no where do do say which you are.

Under wedding, when you give your menu choices it gets a bit confusing with
"choose one". How about "choice of salads, choice of entrees etc... because as you scroll down it becomes a bit confusing...what are you choosing, how many of which am I choosing and what's all the differences about?

I like how you've used bold type under your corporate thread (with your menus) but then your choices become to tightly written with too small of type. It's written paragraph style where as your wedding section the menus are written completely differently scrolling downward. If you could combine both approaches you'd be perfect!!!!!!!!

You do have a really clean fresh look and I find myself interested in trying your food (which is the number one point)! Not much to tweek....

By George (George) on Tuesday, July 03, 2001 - 11:13 am: Edit

Tim is right on with all he said about search engines.

Some additional rules of thumb are:

• Not to repeat a keyword more than three times in your keyword metatag
• Use common misspelling also
• Have the actual name of the page be the keywords you are using.
• Use the keywords in the alt tags of your images
• Have the hyper links to subpages use the appropriate keywords

By Hilary on Tuesday, July 03, 2001 - 11:42 pm: Edit

Thank you all for your comments. Some of the more technical stuff I will pass onto our web builder.
Have a great holiday
Hilary

By Matt (Matt) on Wednesday, July 04, 2001 - 12:09 am: Edit

Thanks everyone for all the comments on my site. It makes me happy to know that all the work I have put into it has paid off.
As for the search engine stuff, cheftim and george, thanks for the info. I have been recently in the process of getting our site listed correctly and getting the keywords right etc... Search engines are quite a bit of mystery to me and I have always had a hard time trying to use them to my advantage and your advice is very helpful.
George, I am currently trying to get listed on the dmoz.org as you suggested and they are VERY particular about how they want things done. I've already been rejected once today for not trying to list in the exact category. I hope I can get it right this time and I hope it pays off.
Thanks again to all of you.
Matt

By Hilary on Wednesday, July 04, 2001 - 12:24 am: Edit

Matt, Cheftim and George, where and how does one go about getting ones site listed? Is it something a novice (like me) can do? It all sounded so "greek" to me.
Thanks for your time and assistance
Hilary

By Cheftim (Cheftim) on Wednesday, July 04, 2001 - 01:42 am: Edit

Its a good idea to optomize the site first and then do the submissions. If you try to submit the site too often it can be banned for spamming. Some say once a week some two weeks some once a month. To be on the safe side I, myself, sick with a month.

Hilary every serach engine's and directory's front page has a link for submiting sites. It will say something like "submit a site" or "add a URL" the URL is your adress - http://www.mysite.com.

Always take you time and read all the information and instructions, some get thousands of submissions a day so you want to do it right.

Like George says the dmoz directory is a good place to start. A good way to decide what catagory to submit to is do a search on some of your keywords.

While I'm on the subject of key words I think its a good idea for caterers to use location words like their city and/or county as key words. When someone living in New York is do a search for a cater in their area their going to us "cater/er/ing New York" in the search.

tim

By George (George) on Wednesday, July 04, 2001 - 08:03 am: Edit

Regional wording is very important for caterers and bakers. Using the name of the city, county and what the local jargon is for an area can help a lot. Also creating several phrased from them can help.

Example-
Words-
Catering, Caterers, Receptions, Weddings, Wedding, Weding, Long Island, LI, North Shore, Nassau County, Gold Coast.

All of these are words that someone might use to search for a Caterer on the North Shore of LI. But the phrase used for a search will vary. The closer you get to the actually phrase searched for the better you will do.
Example- Weddings North Shore LI, Wedding Reception Nassau County, Reception Nassau LI Caterers for Wedings LI.

All of these and dozens more are possible search combinations that someone looking for you might use.
Note the misspelling of Wedding, you would do extremely well if that mistake was made and it happens all the time. (Keep the misspellings in your meta tags NOT on the readable part of the page)

Using all the keywords and combining the phrases into your copy will help folks looking for you find you.

Another note- Once you have a site up that is getting traffic be sure to look at your web logs to see what key words and combinations are being clicked on to bring visitors to your site and emphasize those.

By Kevin Sullivan on Friday, September 14, 2001 - 09:23 pm: Edit

Hi Group,

I am looking for a catering database that is
already set up to work as the back end to a
catering web site? Anyone have any
comments or experience about this?

I appreciate your time. Thanks, Kevin