http://www.plentyoffish.com, Site Review Please Options

[markus]

It looks like my site went from PR 0 to PR 4 with the current update. What else can i change to improve this site ahead of the next deep crawl?

http://www.plentyoffish.com

Markus

[Joe]

Quick suggestions, I would:
Reword your Title tag by either putting "Plentyoffish" (I thought you might be a fish merchants) to the end or even removing it completely. I always try to get my number one target phrase at the very beginning of the Title tag, like:
Perth Scotland independent city guide, or
Fawlty Towers the classic British comedy

Unless you are well-known enough that people will be searching for you by name then it is better to add your name to the end of the tag if you must have it at all.

Also, you desperately need some well-written and researched body copy for the home page instead of straight into a list of people. Whatever keyphrases you are targetting (some of the phrases from you Meta Keywords tag I guess) needs to be worked into the body copy.

You are in a very competitive market so good luck.

[markus]

Well now now its 6 or 7 months later, and i have 10,000 users about 2k uniques a day, but only a few hundred google visitors a day . What can i change on my site to make it better? Note its come a loooong way since march.

Markus.

[Patzee]

Markus:

Where are you ranking in Google for your keywords and key phases compared to your competion?

[markus]

ranked Between 5-8 for free dating thats about 18 visits a day

free dating service about 9 visits
free online dating about 8 visitrs etc.

Man it sucks what kind of numbers should i be getting?

[bragadocchio]

Hi Marcus,

Back in March, one of the responses to your initial post was this one:

Also, you desperately need some well-written and researched body copy for the home page instead of straight into a list of people.

To a large degree, that's still pretty much true.

There are a lot of things that you could do to build content for your site, and articles would be a great thing to add. But be creative with them, have fun, and make them very enjoyable to read.

How about some columnists - male and female? People willing to be photographed and willing to go to interesting places, conduct interviews with members of the opposite sex about dating, and so on. Brainstorm and come up with ideas.

Add an article a week, every week -- maybe two articles -- one from a male perspective and one from a femal perspective. Show a compelling burb from the front page directly to the article, and after you have more than five or six, create an index page to place links to older articles. Have a whole lot of fun with the creation of this articles, and share that fun. Make them fun for your readers.

Potential topics:

What to do on a first date
What to say to break the ice
Best food for a date
Best and worst date movies
Are libraries and bookstores good places to meet that someone special?
How to talk to someone you're just meeting by IM and email
Clothes: good choices and bad for a first impression
How to introduce someone to your parent.
How to tell someone that you are a parent.

If you run short of ideas, there are a million magazines that have been published which you can look towards for inspiration. Have your columnists create fresh material by doing things such as conducting surveys in nightclubs or other places where they might get some interesting responses.

Use your imaginations, and come up with more. The topic will help determine keywords for pages, but the fact that you're focusing upon specific topics will keep you in line for your targeted audience - just as long as you write articles that those people might want to read.

[JohnScott]

I'd drop the header graphic full of fish. It gives the impression of a site being about fish.

Not to be mean, but the design did not strike me as attractive or professional. Unprofessional design tends to create a feeling of distrust...

[London_Calling]

Hmm, I guess a dolphin is a fish, but I’m not sure it’s what the phrase ‘plenty more . . . ‘ is supposed to portray. Otherwise it would be ‘plenty more dolphins in the sea’ . . I’m a pedant, sorry. Anyway, I’m sure that even if you do have dolphin activists or marine biologists amongst your audience, they’ll have other things on their mind. Like that Russian chick on page 7. Phew. What is it with Russian chicks, anyway ?

Yep, it’s weird. Firstly, no one seems to search for ‘100% free whatevers’ in relation to dating so you’re wasting Title and Meta Description space, and it means you haven’t done your research, either. Naughty, naughty!

Your description seems run-of-the-mill average in comparison, so that’s not knocking you back disproportionately (imho) . .

Don’t know what to say about this:

Overture: ‘free online dating’ generated 9,157 in June = (apparently) 8 visitors a day on Google with a ranking of 6th
Overture: ‘free dating service’ generated 19,939 in June = (apparently) 9 visitors a day on Google with a ranking of 8th

And Google is an entirely different ball game. I don’t know how you’re counting your numbers and doing your keyword research, but I’d suggest those numbers aren’t correct.

[sanity]

John's got a good point about the fish - as the page started to load I thought it was gonna be about an aquarium.

I also find that white font on the dark blue background very difficult to read.

[markus]

I'm going to change the site layout once i come up with something i like, the major problem is the site colours aren't warm and inviting.

I get as much searches for 100% free as i do for online dating, etc. As for my recording of searches, every time a new session is created on the site the referer is saved to a database and then i can extract the search terms, you can't get more accurate then that.
Dating is very tough to rank high on, and there are many link farms that you just can't compete with without creating hundreds of pages deadicated to individual search terms. Here is a link farm with 700 domains allinurl:463.us

[GregCSotD]

The dolphin/fish idea is clever, but as Sanity said, it looks like an marine life site. The colors convey this as do the images (and I also don't like the light blue on blue, bad especially for folks that are color blind). Think clean and simple. Start with a white background and add things in one at a time until it looks clean, smells good and is easy on the eyes.

[sanity]

Hey GregCSotD don't think I've seen you here before so welcome

That's some good advice you give too. Personally I'd be using people in the design not fish. After all that's what the site's about - connecting people yah?

[GregCSotD]

Hi Sanity! I am new to the forum, so the welcome is appreciated. It's fun to give advice and even more fun to learn from the advice of others!

I agree, people would make more sense. If you are going to use fish at all, make it one, and perhaps a cartoon-type of thing so people don't associate it with actual fish. The Cool Site of the Day logo is a good example (if I may be so brazen):

[Black_Phoenix]

hi i dont mind the concept of "plently more fish in the sea" may be animate a guy/gal fishing catches nothing || then guy/gal catching a tyre || then guy/gal opens a laptop and a mermaid leaps out of the water

mb some kinda banner

i had a v quick look on the site one thing would do is get the images of the ppl at the correct image size, the current images are sqished and squashed making the ppl look odd

i've not looked into the tech of how u get the images up there but u can set max settings on width height and file size

i know if i sent an image of me i would want it to look like me

bp

[markus]

I just got rid of the dolphins about 10 mintues ago and now there is a nicer logo. Any comments on the new logo ?

The images are only resizing to a square for thumbnails, the profile pictures are resized to correct demenions. Basically i copied this idea from other sites as they do the same thing.

Thx for all your advice!

Markus

[bragadocchio]

Hi Markus,

I noticed a lot of typos and spelling errors in the posts from members of the site on the front page.

It had me thinking that you might consider building a spell check program into the submission form for them to cut down on that.

[bragadocchio]

Just to follow up on this:

http://bigmarketing.wordpress.com/2007/06/...oogle-ad-dough/

Markus now has one of the most visited sites in North America in plentyoffish.com, and there was a great feature on him on nationwide television in the US yesterday morning.

Congratulations, Markus.

Let this be inspiration to all of you toiling away on a website, and wondering if success might be a possibility in the future.

[Wagon]

I read about this in here a while ago. That is just awesome - good for him That makes me optimistic.

[A.N.Onym]

If you are inspired, feel free to read this thread:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum23/4496-3-30.htm

It talks about how much and what kind of knowledge went into building such a website. Markus is the only one managing millions of visitors per day on 4 servers, not 200.

Great job and it only tells us that, to quote Ruud,

Yes, it is possible. In every case where I've been involved with such a venture there was content first. You need to have people want to be on your site, want to use your resource.

The times when this has resulted in significant income were always when the topic was a specialty of the writer.