Site Review

[BigSlickPokerShop]

I took everyone's critiques and changed up my site so if anyone one could review or re-review my site and let me know what else i could do i would appreciate it. i am still working on a few pages so some pages may not be complete. I am open to any suggestions. Thanks
Big Slick Poker Shop

[Newjabber]

I dident see what it used to look like but my first impression here is good.
I find it ehhh.... weird/interesting that you want to add a forum :-)
I would think it would be pretty tough to get up and running at a poker shop!
Do people really still by poker books btw?

[TheShortStack]

Ok, a few things from me:

• Firstly, your <title> tag. Change it - it's not doing you any SEO favours at the moment. I don't know what sort of keywords you're targetting, but you'll do a whole lot better by changing your title to something like "Poker Books - Read up on Poker Strategy at Big Slick Poker Shop"
• Secondly, there's no real welcome text. Not only should you probably add this to let the visitor know what they've stumbled on, but it's also a great excuse to get a few more keywords into Google. There's very little textual content on your home page at the moment which means Google's really not going to have much of an idea what your site is about.
• Next up, your URL's. Having pages with the address of http://bigslickpokershop.info/?page_id=414 is once again not going to help you rank highly in Google. I don't know what sort of CMS you're using to run your site, but you need to get those URL's changed so that they look like something like http://bigslickpokershop.info/poker-news. It's a lot more search engine friendly.

In fact, as I go through your site, I'm not quite sure what you're trying to achieve with it. I first of all thought it was a poker book shop, but I've just come across a strategy forum, some room reviews and a load of poker news.

It looks to me like you're trying to do too much with the site. Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm guessing this is your first site and you've decided that you're going to try to cover every base and make it the best poker site out there.

Seriously, don't. I did exactly the same thing when I first started and it becomes very, very difficult to promote. Just to stick to a particular niche (i.e. A poker book shop OR a poker strategy site OR a Poker News site etc).

There's so much to learn when you're new to affiliating that having to update so many areas of your site with so much different information means that you end up becoming demoralised really quickly.

That's not to say you can't do it, I just think you'd be better off starting with a smaller site focusing on one nich while you learn the basics of important stuff like SEO and once you've got a grip on that, then you can start working on more complicated projects.

You'll probably ignore me though, because when I was in your shoes I did exactly that

[Newjabber]

It looks to me like you're trying to do too much with the site.

This says it all :-)

Apart from that, solid advise shortstack.

[BigSlickPokerShop]

Thanks ShortStack, i was thinking it was getting too generalized myself. I am going to create a new site with a particular niche. The question i have for you is, do i need a niche that has keywords that are popular? Because the ones i have in mind only get about 50 searches a day from some keyword popularity checker.

[TheShortStack]

Hey - thanks for taking the above post in the manner it was intended.

I don't know what keywords you're targeting, but to be honest if you can get 50 hits a day by dominating your niche, then you're doing pretty well for a first site (as far as I'm concerned anyway!)

The other thing I've learned is that if you can get those keywords into your domain name then you'll be doing yourself a big favor.

One of the reasons why The Short Stack was so hard to promote was because I didn't have any keywords in the domain. Yeah, it sounded great as a branded domain, but it's going to taken an awful lot of hard work and cash to get to the point where branding started paying off.

Certainly, for your first attempt if you can get the keyword 'poker' (and whatever other keywords you're going for) in there somewhere then it will help with your SEO rankings - which is where ultimately people are going to be finding you.

Basically, start small, promote it well and then grow from there. I'm certainly not trying to put you off from building a site that encompasses everything ... but just make sure you've got the basics down to a 'T' first!