Benchmark Contest website I am working on. What do you all think? Does it look ok?

your link does not work :-(

got it working by deleting stuff in front of it

serge

<a ref="http://improve-search-engine-rank.cattle-ramp-software.com">How to improve search engine rank

i would suggest breaking up the paragraph on your home page into smaller sections, perhaps with appropriate headings

i like your colour scheme as it makes it easy to read

i find the scrolling of the text in the other pages a bit annoying as it restricts how much of your page i can see on my screen

had a look at your keywords and am not sure that they are good ones to use in the sense of they are keywords that people are actually using in searches

hope this helps

serge

<a ref="http://improve-search-engine-rank.cattle-ramp-software.com">Improve search engine rank

I would suggest reconsidering your approach to screen resolution. According to these two sites that deal with web trends:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp (halfway down the page)
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm (second section)

Over half of webusers use 1024x768 or higher resolution. If you think about your audience, it's safe to assume that your percentage of high res users will be much higher than average. On my 1152x864 screen, nearly half the screen is wasted by your pages. I can't tell if you pages are designed for 640x480 or 800x600. At the very least, they should be designed for 800x600. Less than 1% use 640x480 in a NORMAL audience.

Overall the site looks nice tho.

... there is some strange artifact in the top right of the page behind your logo ...

thanx for the tips guys. The site was designed with 800x600 in mind, but that can be changed if you think it is that bad. Also that artifact at the top right behind the logo is the copyright message of the guy that made that background. BTW Serge what do you mean the keywords aren't good ones? They match what the site is about.

Note the end of Serge's comment: "in the sense of they are (not) keywords that people are actually using in searches"

I haven't looked at your keywords, but he is suggesting that your keywords are not keywords that people typically type into search engines.

I used some software at one time that was supposed to help you optimize your keywords. One thing that it did was have you list keywords and it would tell you how popular that keyword was in search engines.

The ideas was that you might used the key word "overclock" but searchers more often used "speed up cpu". That's obviously a bad example, but hopefully it gets the idea across.

For some reason my browser here won't open the view source page, so I can't see your keywords, so I don't know what Serge was thinking.

you're right don . . . i was able to view the source page and had a quick look at the keywords listed

nerm, for example "benchmarking" is one of your keywords . . . accoring to overture this word was searched 13,012 last month which is good but google reports 1,670,000 hits in its results which means that although the keyword is searched, you also have a lot of competition

consider another keyword "overclocking"...it was searched 10,325 times last month and google reports 2,280,000 - again a lot of competition

you can use the free program "good keywords" from www.softnik.com to check on how often a keyword has been searched last month and then enter the keyword into google to see how many web sites target that keyword - kinda supply and demand

analyzing the 2 keywords above show too much competition if you want to be listed in search engines and you want people to find your web site through search engines

also single keywords are not the way to go as most people would use 2 words or more - goodkeywords makes suggestions of 2 or 3 words based on the one keyword you suggest + how often it was searched

hope this helps

serge

Ah yes, I forgot the other half of the question, how many hits on your keyword.

If you are one hit out of one million, you probably won't be at the top of the list.

Thanks for the tip about softnik program Serge. I'll keep that around for next time I need to do that. Last time I paid $200 for a program that I used only once. I still have the program, but would have to pay for updates to make it useful.

you are welcome don

you might also want to have a look at http://www.related-pages.com/searchEngineOptimizationKeywordSelection.aspx

it does both the demand and supply

serge

improve-search-engine-rank.cattle-ramp-software.com

All points made are valid, I would just like to add 1 more. The background image is very slow to load on an ISDN connection (some of us still cant get broadband!) so would be painfully slow at 56k. You may want to consider sacrificing some of the image quality for higher speeds by reducing the image size. However this is a fairly small point and on the whole its looking good.

Wizard ICT. Microsoft Certified Professional