SEO tips for a friend

Aesthetics
There should be an icon link in the code. This is always more pleasing and attractive to the eye and give the page character when being viewed in a browser. It’s a small detail but I consider it important. It is the code that places a small icon in the left hand corner of the tab as well as in the address bar in the viewers computer.

-Here is one of my sites without it
http://findalllinks.org/auctionebooks/

-Here is one with it
http://www.letstravel.org

The code looks like this.


Color
Your color scheme is pretty good, it places all the focus on the product. The only problem with that is when somebody wants to navigate to any other pages; the color scheme does not make it evident that there is anywhere else to go.

Links
Speaking of navigation. A quick fix to that may simply be to place the important links on the bottom of the page. That was the first place I looked when trying to figure out where to go for more info. It can be done without detracting from the clean simple look of the site.

Coding
The tags look good. I would probably add a few more items though in the keywords meta tag. I would add: windows, vista, computer, mp3, music, calendar, convert from Microsoft

When the robots go through and scan, they will identify and index these key words for your site. Your site may not show up in the top 100 for them, but at least it will be indexed so that when a user types them into Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, etc, there is at least a chance that they will land on your pages.

I would also add alt tags to the image so that they too can be indexed properly, maybe “mac vs pc” or “mac to pc.”

Advertising
Organic SEO involves simply having more incoming links to your site in order to increase pagerank and popularity. That’s a long slow process. You need to add your link to directories, blogs, and search engines. This will increase the number of incoming links to your site thereby increasing the rankings in the search engines…popularity breeds popularity. One of my favourite places and probably the best place is the DMOZ.org. When Google used to have a directory on their more products page, the information populating that directory was being pulled from the DMOZ.

The other type of web advertising is Pay Per Click (PPC) through a number of different tools. The best ones are Google Adwords, Yahoo Overture, and MSN’s. I also really love Facebook because you can really drill down and have the ad shown to very specific demographics. These tools are effective in generating targeted traffic but they also cost a bit and really need to be maintained closely. It’s a simple effective process…at least it should be, but the metrics need to be carefully measured. If you’re keywords for these type of ads do not generate a high conversion rate- meaning that the people who click through don’t actually buy- then you may feel the expense was a waste. In other words, PPC can bring a lot of people to your page and from there it is the content, ease of navigation, and reputation that will sell the product for you.

Miscellaneous
I like the domain name and concept. I can see you eventually offering MAC machines, software, and accessories (kind of like what I do with this site I am playing with http://www.eccuelectronics.com/apple) at some point in the future.

One glaring issue is that nowhere on your site does it actually tell a potential customer how much the product costs. They will hesitate to hit the buy now link if they don’t know pricing. Also, I would suggest small type letting people know that they will be redirected to a secure SSL encrypted site to execute the transaction.

That’s it for now. If I can think of anything else, I will let you know.

BTW, I think my best site with the most potential is this one http://www.findallmodels.com
But I have not figured out my final concept for it yet.