Fishy site?

[PlasticNavy]

http://www.plasticnavy.com/ is my powweb site. it's about kayak angling in SoCal. We run tournaments as well as try to offer good content in the form of articles, howto and maps. Our biggest problem is search engine ranking...thoughts? Advice? Criticisms?

Thanks!
Drew

[gardensafari]

I like the lay out of your page. But I looked at the source and there is almost no text in it. Everything seems to be done by pictures and javascripts. However search engines will not see this. They'll concentrate on the contents and expect certain words (like in your case fishing and kayaking) to pop up at least a few times. This doesn't really happen, so they have no idea what your page is focusing on. They do hardly use the key words anymore, as there was too much abuse of these, especially by porn makers. Also put as many unique words in the text as humanly possible. There are lots of sites about kayaks in the world, so be more precise (brands etc.).
I do not know when you made the pages, but it may take some time for search engines to fully index your pages, even up to 6 months!
It helps to change contents regularly.
There are lots of sites that will give you additional information on how to become popular with search engines (link exchanges always help!), but each search engine has its own preferences and it is very difficult to please them all.

[YvetteKuhns]

The website has an appropriate color scheme, is easy to read and navigate, and looks well organized. When hovering over the text links, the text changes to orange which is difficult to read on the gray background. Orange is one of the colors in your logo, but maybe you can change the gray background in the horizontal menu to another color such as green. Then change the text to white.

Paragraphs of text should align to the left. There should be some space between the edge and the text. Compare the text on the left side of the home page with the text on the right side in the gray columns. The home page has a blue horizontal division with some photos and Google ads below it. That part of the page may be ignored since scrolling is required to view it.

Placing the Google ads to the right side of the screen will make it viewable without scrolling. The three square images can be removed and the text beside them can be text LINKS. Move the photo of the week up on the left. Just try to fit the contents below the blue line into the web page to eliminate that division.

When viewing http://www.plasticnavy.com/launches/ , the text appeared bigger. Check your style sheets. The forum looks as though the color scheme was trying to match the website. While it doesn't look perfect, the effort is noticeable.

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">
Include this line in your code to prevent that stupid image toolbar from appearing in Internet Explorer when the mouse points at an image.

The forum, blog, articles and other contents are great pages to be indexed by search engines. The photo pages offer little contents that get good ranking, but are good contents for visitors to enjoy. Links pages are where you can include links to fishing, travel, california, wildlife or other related websites that will link to yours. Link popularity is helpful to your Google ranking, but also, people may click the link from the other site to yours.

Another way to improve search engine ranking is to get listed on many other search engines and directories. The directories can be geographic (United States, California, Southern California, etc.) or topical (fishing, kayaking, outdoor sports, etc.). The directory at DMOZ.org is a huge directory that is very helpful in which to be included.

[PlasticNavy]

Awesome feedback from you both, I really really appreciate it.

We had let this site sit stagnate for a good while - little or not changes took place from October 2004 until two weeks ago. Since then we've added 20 pages of content (emphasizing text descriptions of launch locations and fishing articles) and have redoubled our efforts to get listed in directories.

I will take your recommendations to the table and see what I can accomplish with those things. Thanks!

-Drew