17 replies to this topic

[interval]

Hi,

Please, give me a bit of your precious time and see this site
http://www.askmenhealth.org

I volunteered as designer and because my experience is not
very big, I need advices to improve it.

Regarding PR and Link popularity.
I add new content almost daily, Google and other SE search it
every two days, but I cannot see PR yet.
Is It penalized? (to many links in a short time)

Please take a look
Advanced thanks.


General
Is this site completed or under construction?
For a moment I consider it complete, but I think to develop more
the section related to 'other conditions' next year

If completed:
How long has the site been up?
The site is 4 months old

SEO
Do you have incoming links?
Yes, about 350

What keywords are you targeting?
main keywords are 'men health questions'
but every page has new ones related to its subject
such as obesity, prostate, diabetes, andropause and so on.


Do you want your code reviewed for errors or improvements?
I'll be gratefull, it is my first PHP experience.
I also want to receive suggestions to improve the look and management
of forum (blog)

Marketing
Who is your target audience? Think about:
Gender: both men and women
Nationality: all
Age Range: older than 16
Income/Education level: no discrimination
Likes/Dislikes

The more you tell us about your target audience, the better. We don't know them- you do!
Main target are men, but women are life partners and interested in. On the other
hand, children needs both parents

Why is your site different from sites selling/offering similar info/goods/services? Why will someone want to do business you?
It is known that men do not like to speak with doctors/relatives/friends/people about their own
problems, especially the doctor is woman. Every man in a 'macho' for himself considering health
problems as a sign of weakness. On the other hand, believe or not, men are more shy than
women when coming to speak about private problems.

Well, my site encourages men to write, to ask. The embarassing face to face meeting is avoided.
This might be the first step in considering the problem as a serious one. Every time receives an answer
man is advised that nothing could replace his doctor, so the recommendation is to go visit him/her.

On the oither hand the information is better structured related to male interests. Received questions
are a way to see what area is for visitor's interest and suitable for development in the future.


How important is usability?
Hundred percent

What is the purpose of the site? (inform, sell, online community, support B&M business, contact info only, etc)
Provide information

Design
Do you want design suggestions?
Of course

Many thanks for your time and attention
interval

[nina]

Well, there are a LOT of words and no images on the home page - this makes it neither attractive nor easy to know where to go.

I would suggest adding an image (a female doctor?) (a nurse??) to add interest and then really decide what you absolutely want people to know about this website/company. Then I would draw more attention to where you want them to go.

Have fun!

[aduncan]

I would have a professional copywriter, or even a friend of yours with good grammar and English language skills, read the site and provide feedback. That would be something quick you can do to improve it.

[Lorinda]

You've got some great content on your website, but I agree it needs some copywriting help and some images to spice it up a bit. I find it a little difficult to pick out the important parts. Perhaps adding some more section headings to call the reader's attention to key points would enhance the "scannability" of the home page. Also, making the questions on the left column a different color from the answers might help them stand out more.

In addition, do you have a privacy statement? As a consumer, I would want to know this before posting a question that requires my name and email address. I noticed many questions have the person's name, city, and state posted along with the question. You mentioned that men are shy when it comes to talking about health concerns. I would think having their name and location posted would be a deterrant for some people. I understand you want cut down on spam by having them provide a valid email address, but what steps do you have in place to make them feel comfortable about maintaining their confidentiality? There should be something on the site that specifically addresses this and makes people feel at ease asking a question. Sorry about the rant, but in my former life I was a nurse and understand how timid people are about their medical concerns.

Also, I think there should be an "about us" section that talks more about who you are and what your qualifications are in regards to men's health.

FYI, on the home page, there are some typos on the right column "To accomplish this goal we ask your contribution to help us providing de most targeted health info men need" and "We wonn't make your email public." There may be others, but I didn't look that closely for typos.

All in all, it's an informative site and provides a great service to many people. Keep up the good work.

Lorinda

[Ahmed]

Here's a quick review hope it can be of some help

- As people have said before get someone to check over it and edit the text. "mapsite" just doesnt sound right to me (i could be wrong :O) but anyway I think "sitemap" is the right word here.

-Your website title is pretty bad "men's health questions related prostate diabetes andropause obesity". I'm not sure if this is supposed to be an SEO strategy - it might work for search engines but for users it wont make much sense.

- Your website description is "info, news, hits and reviews related to men's health". Maybe you can expand on that and write something that will entice visitors to click on your link in the SERPS. Include your keywords in the description as well (if it doesnt make sense to include those keywords then find different keywords).

- I think you have great ideas that you want to get accross to people you just need better copy.

- As for design -- I really like it. You just need to use the same design for your forums and blog. Going to the forums or blog seems like leaving your website. You should make them all have the same look and feel -- just a web standard I guess.

Last comments:
- Google doesnt update pagerank very often - many websites are at 0. If you're indexed by google you're most likely fine.
- It seems to me you're going for such general keywords, its really hard to rank for them. You should do better keyword research - maybe add in "male" to the keywords. Only going for one keyword per page is bad also - you want to go for more keyword phrases that are less competitive but will get you a good amount of quality traffic.
- Just do a bit of research and you should be able to change your blog and forum layouts to match your website, its a good learning experience and will help a lot

Great work -- good luck.

[Conspicuous]

A few observations:

Once a visitor clicks on either the blog or forum link in the main navigation, there is no way to return to the main site (other than clicking back on the web browser). It seems that all your new and dynamic content is being generated in one of those two subdirectories and with no link back to the main site, that new content is not generating or passing along any link value to your main site.

The Page Rank status icons at the bottom of the page - I'd lose them. They're not going to mean anything to most of your visitors and the ones who do understand what it is are going to see a big fat zero. The linkback they may give you is not the kind of quality link that is going to generate good traffic for you.

As mentioned before, your title tags need some serious work... it looks like you've just keyword spammed them.

Good luck with it!

[interval]

Hi,

Many thanks for your comments.

I already considered some of them and I work to consider the rest.
Once again, many thanks

[Ignoramus]

Had a very quick look and the first thing that caught my eye on your home page was this text...

It is our clear intention to cover this gap. To accomplish this goal we ask your contribution to help us providing de most targeted health info men need.

That is appalling English and grammar - it's what everyone gets every day from spam emails promoting Viagra and related products.

These mistakes are littered throughout your home page. If you use Google Analytics take a look at your 'bounce rate' on your home page.

[Golferstube]

The first thing that caught my eye is the home page is covered with text. Way to much text. As soon as the homepage came up Im thinking do I have 30 minutes to read whats on the homepage? I would definately make it more pleasing on the eyes with a few more pictures and ALOT less text. Throw in a few links here and there. Space out some of the text with smaller paragraphs. Baically only include the important text on the page so it doesnt look so cluttered. You want to make visitors experience to website as easy as possible. Make your stats and purpose jump out to the reader within the first 30 seconds of looking at the site. Hope that helps.

[interval]

Thanks Golferstube, this si one of comment I was waiting for.

We had a debate in our group about how much text to put in our site (pages).

Half of us (including me) think that the information should be as much complete as is possible, that means a lot of text. We think this way we could cover the lack of information regarding men's health (this is our main goal). Of course we can use more images to avoid a boring look, we can remove some stuffy text and we can organize it better using bullets and tags. But this is not a commercial site to act like a hook and people interested about health must have enough time to read it.

The rest of us share your opinion. They say this site is an educational one of its purpose should be to attract the interest and attention of male visitors, knowing that men are reluctant to health issues. And, from this point of view, we have to much text.

I'll be glad to know more opinions about this issue, but I'm afraid the solution is the middle way, as always.

Many thanks

[torka]

Actually, the solution is to test it and see which way works best for your customers.

Doesn't matter what you think, or even what the majority consensus is in your office. What matters is what the customers want.

If you don't already have testing tools installed, go to www.google.com/websiteoptimizer and sign up. It's part of AdWords, but you can use it to test any page of your site, not just AdWords landing pages. And you don't have to spend any money on AdWords to use the tool; it's free.

If you haven't done testing before, start with a simple A/B test: short copy versus long copy. Google offers demos and tutorials to help you get started. Set up is simple and it won't cost you a dime.

Don't guess. Test.

--Torka

[kemot20]

Hi there,

I definitely like your content, here's few tips I DON'T like:

1) work on your code, too much useless code "<br>" etc.
2) link titles
3) i don't see meta specified keywords
4) give alt tags to all your images

Cheers
Tom

[Golferstube]

Your welcome Interval. Let me know if you have any more questions and I will review it in more detail.

[Marcel Mouta]

Kemot20, i go to add some tips

1) work on your code, too much useless code "<br>" etc.
2) link titles
3) i don't see meta specified keywords
4) give alt tags to all your images

* Meta Keywords is not important fact for Serps, anchor text, reciprocal links and quality content are importants, but... use in your code

5) Use CSS and validator your code in w3c
3) Works heading (h1,h2,h3,...) more.
5) Use <strong> <em> in your keywords
6) Create links with your keywords

For facilitate use some optimization program..
I am not a professional, I am like you..
If I will be wrong, help me too

[rose77mary77]

Very good lay-out and attractive colors especialy who want to know about related to medical, add some more images related to your field, it will improve your site lay-out......