SITE REVIEW: SEO Ireland

Hi again guys and gals,

I completed my new site last night, it provides Search Engine Optimization resources such as forums, articles, news etc..
here it is http://www.seo-ireland.com/

Can you have a look? Comments appreciated.

Luck of the Irish.

Nice looking site. Everything is neat, tidy, well organized, and loads quickly.

Ironic for a SEO site that doesn't have any content entered in its Description and Keywords Meta-tags....hmmm. See your article on your site. (

Good job.

IE 6
WinXp
Cable

the colors go well together. and its a really clean site. no clutter. i see you also use phpBB lol
but overall its a very nice site.

Good structure and good color scheme. One of the first things I noticed is that you've included the same menu in your footer as you do in your header, you dont need to display something twice. You can instead put your Copyright and Contact information within that bottom footer to fill in the content.

As I browse over to your article page, I realize that you're including article links twice, once on the left hand side menu and again in the centre column. It not entirely a bad thing, but when you start getting 100+ articles, the screen is going to have one nasty vertical scrollbar. Maybe only include the "Most viewed Articles" or "Top 10" in that left menu item. Viewing the articles themselves was very good, no big problems there.

The forums, the login screen is at the very bottom, which I dont like. It looks like you just put it down there to make room for the ads. Doesnt look good. Also, the other links at the top (Faq, Search...) look out of place, like they appear out of nowhere. They're not in line and look naked all by themselves.

The news section is another forum ? And not only that, its totally out of whack, it has a login/register field at the top, why do you need to register to view the news? Plus you lost the username/password login box that you had in your forum. I'd definitely re-think the way you display your news, you definitely dont need a forum for it.

Your code also includes a lot of   which you should replace with spaces, just to be professional. Also, as a SEO site you have your meta content/description blank? Weird. You have a really good site with a great concept and all the right ideas. I think that with a few changes you're on your way. Overall, job well done.

The words in the top portion don't get my attention. Maybe get contrasting colors so that the message becomes the focus of the site.

Well done site though, it looks good.

hehe the META tags, my bad! In such a hurry to but up the site I overlooked them. Slap on the wrist then.

Regarding the articles listed twice, yes I agree 100% that when more articles are added it will be a problem but I will defintely have some fix to solve this when it happens.

Having the news integrated into the forum is more so that people can comment on the news. Now I realise some people may not like this but currently I am a bit stuck for development time so it will have to do for now.

BTW the site was created from scratch in 3 days and I had no knowledge of PHP previously so I think I did pretty well with it

Thanks for the comments guys and gals. Of course more are welcome.

Unlike daremedy I think your site has TOO many colours. It makes me think of a site aimed at children. I find your logo not strong enough.

I think you could improve both your top & side navbar layout. Right now your entire site doesn't seem to flow smoothly.

Your footer layout could also be improved. Right now I would even have noticed there was any content listed after the two side boxes had I not scrolled down. If possible bump up the google ads a bit so that the footer will display at first glance without having to scroll down or make your right side navbar text size smaller so the box isn't so much longer than the left side navbar. This of course if for the first page, the main page.

I'd make the titles in your link-popularity.php page larger than the actual content under it.

Your "back to top" brings the user back to the top of the TOC when it should bring them up to the top of the actual page, in case they don't want to view the rest of the items on that specific page.

Your "news" section is a forum. I'd change that to just be a page that lists the news without using a forum. Maybe even make it part of the main page.

If you're going to use the exact same navbar for the header, footer and side at least keep them consistent. The left side navbar items are not listed in the same order as the header or footer right now.

Don't forget alt tags on your images.

Your meta keywords are good but if you want to get lots of hits and this being an SEO reference site, you should really extend on the keywords. Look at your competitor sites for ideas.

Use css to declare font styles instead of inline font tags.

Good luck with the site keep it up!

Great advice as always flavah. Some of the suggestions I agreed with immediately and I have made some changes already. Have a look

dude, your home link is not with the news and forums pages. missed out?

broken links of home in news and gloss pages as well

need a change in logo as well. heheh. it looks very atari... get a word logo in there. Something that looks like a personal signature, at 30 -40 degrees angled. mebbe it will look good on yr site..

just my thoughts.

Much better than the previous design that's for sure! Good pick of colours. Logo still could be improved some more but it sure is a step up from the previous one.

I'd remove the white background on the top navbar. Just make the background colour the same as the rest of that top bar and add some styles to those links. Kinda like what you did for the footer navbar. Maybe even improve that one a bit as well.

yes i agree flava

hi there. nice site overall. "does what it says on the tin" as they say. colours are a bit mundane i thought. similar colour scheme to the IBM site. i noticed that the same menu type has been used for the bottom as well as the top.

what i have always stood by is to have graphics to break up the text. if your scroller is thin and you have a lot of text are you really expecting people to troll thru it all? especially if what they want is further down to the bottom than nearer the top.

i personally hate scrolling which is why i try and break things up: have more pages, include little graphics - textual or picture orientated graphics to break up the textual content.

site loads quick and the text is a nice size. not too small