Donna,
Great post. I really like the principles that you developed. Marvin would be well served by paying close attention.
I also think that Charlie's suggestions about headings and creating excitement work well within those principles.
Marvin,
Welcome to the forums.
This page on
Writing for the Web emphasizes writing text so that it is both easy to read, and easy to scan through. Adding headings (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.) can help make it easier for people to read your pages. Large blocks of text can be difficult to read on a monitor. If I can help it, I try to break up text into four or five lines at the most, and use headings, bulleted lists, and infrequently bold and colors for emphasis (don't use too much colored text or bold - when you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing).
For the images that can be clicked upon to see more, rather than a link to the image, how about putting those on html pages, with text that describes what we are seeing there? Sure, images are worth a thousand words. But images and words together can be even better.
The html tidy program that Charlie pointed out can be helpful. It looks like you used Word to create your pages, and saved them as html. While that is definitely one way to do it, it can create pages that have a lot more html in them than they need to have.
Pagerank is pretty much an indication of the quantity and quality of links to your pages, and not necessarily a measure of how well optimized your pages are to be indexed in the search engines. A drop of pagerank may mean that you lost a link or two, or that a page that linked to you dropped in pagerank. The solution is to get more links to your pages. Submit them to some of the larger directories, and to smaller regional and topical directories.
I agree on the use of the frames. If possible, see if you can have the site rebuilt without using frames. Once those are gone, you can start optimizing each page on your site for the search engines, with their own unique page titles, meta tags, and links from within the site on other pages, that use keywords to point to each page.
Speaking of meta tags, you have quite a few that are unnecessary, or are unnecessarily redundant. Again, after getting rid of the frames, make sure that the </title> is the first thing that appears in the <head> section of each page, and that each pages title is unique, and reflects the content of that page. If it also includes a keyword phrase that describes that page and is something that people will use to search for your site, that will help you get visitors to your page. Use a meta description and a meta keywords, and get rid of the rest of the tags that start with <meta...
Your list of keywords is way too long. Once you have pages that aren't in frames, try to keep the amount of keywords for each page smaller, and use keywords that only apply to those specific pages - unique keywords for each page, as well as unique titles and unique meta descriptions.
Stick with it, and please feel free to ask questions here as you work to develop your pages. You have some great text and images, and hopefully we can help you get some traffic to your pages so that more people can appreciate both your words and pictures.
