Critique My Site (April 2007): The Dumb Dog

[Ina]

Keith Yockey of South Carolina sells on eBay and says he was inspired to start his own website after the 2006 fee increase. He uses Front Page, hosts his site with FreeYellow.com, and uses PayPal checkout. "The nice thing about using PayPal on my website is that customers do not have to be a member of PayPal to make a purchase, and PayPal offers one of the lowest fee schedules around."

Keith specializes in dog toys and training aids. He did a lot of research on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and tweaked and edited his titles, meta tags and descriptions for the search engine bots to find.

Keith tried Yahoo Search Marketing for 90 days, but "with conversion rates hitting around $70/item, in spite of Yahoo's staff telling me I was doing all the right things, I found the results very disappointing," he said. With a budget of $450, he said he had 6 sales after 120 days from the pay-per-click campaign.

"Paid search is an easy way to throw away advertising money. I would like to know who the "smart" paid advertising sellers do it and what kind of conversion they get for their advertising dollar."

Keith is looking for feedback from readers for a general review of the site, and advice on search engine rankings.

As for the name of his site, Keith said, "I wanted to name a site with catchy words that folks would remember, so The Dumb Dog (as in there is no such thing as a Dumb Dog) was born."

Visit The Dumb Dog, and let us know what you think!

http://www.TheDumbDog.com
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Ina Steiner, AuctionBytes.com

[iamzippy]

Keith, I'm impressed. You're clearly an enterprising and resourceful individual. I can gel with the move to an independent online outlet, though I haven't dived right into it myself yet. Soon.

My two cents: here's three little things you can easily improve right off the bat:

Make your corporate name a common part of your pages' TITLE element. The content of this element will likely appear as the title in the SERPS, in the browser title bar, and in the default name given to any visitors' bookmarks. Place your corporate name to the right of the page's unique title. Large it up, in other words!
Remember that the contents of your DESCRIPTION element may be displayed in the SERPS, too. Consider how effective an impression you might make with that. It's your 'first impression' opportunity.

Use H1 for your on-page title text (you're camouflaging it in a P at the moment). Heading tags are powerful food for SEs. Use STRONG and EM to show the SEs which phrases in your content are important.

Be careful with 'FONT FACE=', particularly the number of fonts you use. Many visitors may not have your font set installed, and they'll likely not see what you think they see. Consider settling on one of the generic sans serif fonts, and use it with gusto. (But if you use a certain font for your printed stationery, that's another matter.)

There's eleventy zillion bits of advice flying around the net on SEO. I wish you the best of luck, mate!

iamzippy

[xcergy]

Thanks for the post, iamzippy.

LOL, you are making me goto Google to freshen up on acronyms

I will add the website name to titles and descriptions. The site has close to 50 pages now, so it will take a while

Keith
www.thedumbdog.com
_________________
xcergy
www.thedumbdog.com
www.xcergy.com
stores.ebay.com/key-products

[DizziPinz]

Hi!
Congrats on opening your own site. I have just opened mine about a month ago and am really enjoying not being dependent on eBay.
I'm not skilled enough to give you SEO feed back or feed back on the structure of your site and will leave that to the other skilled persons on this forum.
From a marketing persepective, your site is very clean and easy to use and I think that's very important. I do agree with the comments on the font made in the post above. I had to struggle with that myself as I wanted to use a different font but acquiesed to using a simple, generic font for almost everything - a font that everyone should be able to display.
On the left hand links you have DVD's and Collectables in Bold face and everything else in normal font. Is there a reason for that?
Just FYI - it took me a while to realize that the "There's no such thing" and "as a Dumb Dog" went together. It's not readily apparent.
The one other thing I might suggest is that you change the line "Welcome to My Store" to "Welcome to the Dumb Dog" or perhaps "Welcome to your online resource for pet products" or "Welcome to your store for the Dumb Dog," etc. IMHO the title should engage the user with reasons to stay and shop. And while I might not be persuaded to shop at YOUR store I might be persuaded to shop at a Pet Store.
You might also write an article or two on training old dogs, new dogs, etc. That should help with SEO as well.
Just a few thoughts. Overall I think you have a great, easy to use site with great products that will appeal to the dog lover.
Best of luck to you!
_________________
Make it a Magical Day!

DizziPinz
Collectible Disney Trading Pins
www.dizzipinz.com

[dimesio]

Overall, your site is very easy to navigate. I do suggest adding a page explaining your shipping and return policies.
Visually, I found the background pattern distracting, and the color of it clashes with the bright red letters of your heading. The palette in general seems unfocused--it's as if you chose the colors at random, without considering how they might look together. A more coordinated selection of colors would help better direct our attention on each page.

[xcergy]