Following on from my request for websites to review, today I will be taking a look at www.terryandtammy.com
I have to say that on spending some time on the site I think it's really very good for several reasons.
1. The home page intro is short and sweet swiftly followed by some options for the visitor. Very good, although I would possible change some of the wording.
2. There is a wealth of information available to the visitor. It shows that a lot of effort has gone into the site which is always a good sign. It shows that the visitor isn't just been sold to, the site is offering plenty of free informaion and userful tools to help the visitor which gives the visitor that all important "feel-good" factor.
3. There are various instances throughout the site where they try to capture the visitor's details. Excellent. A website should always make the most of every opportunity to grab the visitor's contact details. That is essentially the main purpose for the website.
4. There is a pleasent absence of "flashy" stuff (I'm getting technical now!). There's nothing distracting the visitor from the important "routes" through the website.
Ok, enough praise now. What's missing from the site?
1. "About us". The visitor isn't getting to know anything about Terry and Tammy. We can see what they look like but who are they? We need to get to know them before we get totally comfortable giving them our details. We want to know more about you please! Even if it's just a link to your AR blog.
2. Testimonials. I've mentioned this before. Testimonials are so important, I cannot stress this enough. You need some on the site to add credibility and show you are a trused pair.
3. Privacy policy. The site is constantly asking people for their details. It's therefore important to add a privacy policy explaining to people what you are going to be doing with their details. There are standard templates you can use and you should link to the privacy policy from every form on the site. It all helps to overcome objections.
Ok, now let's talk search engines.
This is where it really falls apart.
Look what happens when we check Google to see which pages from that site have been indexed:
Oh dear. All the pages have exactly the same Title tag (shown by the main heading in each result). Some even have the same description meta tag (shown by the descriptions under heading).
EVERY page on a website MUST have a unique title tage and description meta tag. The title tag in particular is VERY important for good search engine placement. If the title tag doesn't tell the search engine exactly what the page is about then it's just not going to rank well, or as well as it should. The title tag and meta description tags should also contain relevant keywords related to each page.
Terry and Tammy, you need to get all these changed. Easy job to do.
Also, note that the home link on the site points to "http://www.terryandtammy.com/custompages_home.php" but it should point to "http://www.terryandtammy.com". They are the same page but as they have different names the search engines will interpret them as different pages. As the content is the same there is a duplicate content issue, so good practice is to make sure you only ever link to one version of a home page.
In terms of links, well, Yahoo site explorer only shows 16 and they aren't good links. You need to get some good links (submit to directories is a good start) and also link from your AR blog under the links section. Just make sure that you link using the text "Tennesse real estate".
All in all though, I think it's a good site but it needs to be optimised better and with some more links to get the traffic to it which it's really missing.
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