Hannes Johnson dot Com

You might remember that a few posts ago I picked the winner in the Technorati Top 100 contest. Well, one of the prizes was a review on this blog and I finally finished the review :)

The site I was asked to review is Royal Tours Africa dot Com. I’m going to go over some SEO, design and monetization points - what’s cool and what can be done better. If you have a website yourself you can probably see if any of the things I cover fit your own website.

E-mail Marketing

In the left sidebar there is a “Montly Updates” box (sidenote: that’s actually a typo - it should be “Monthly”) where people can sign up for a newsletter. That’s very smart - it’s a good idea to collect your visitors’ information so you can contact them (get them to visit the site again, send them special offers or just some tips). But I would give this box more attention. Right now the background is transparent and I don’t think that looks so good - I would make the background white (like in the “Main Menu” box above). I would also list a few benefits - why should people sign up, what can they expect to receive? Also, having something like “I respect your privacy!” or “I will not spam you” should help get more people to sign up - risk removals always help with conversion. Another thing - I would add the optin form to as many pages as possible - not just the front page. Use every opportunity to get a new subscriber - people might not even see the front page first, for example if they come through the search engines.

Link Popularity

When I check the front page of royaltoursafrica.com my Live PageRank add-on tells me that page is only PageRank 1. I would definitely focus on increasing the PageRank. Getting it up to PR3 shouldn’t be that hard - just work on getting more sites to link to Royal Tours Africa - for example through submitting articles, press releases, finding related sites to exchange links, add a resource to the site that people want to link to (aka. linkbait), etc. The PageRank might even increase in the next PageRank update because royaltoursafrica.com is now a featured site on this blog.

One of the key phrases Felista (the owner) is targeting is Kenya safaris. I used SEO Elite to see where royaltoursafrica.com ranked for Kenya safaris: It’s #68 on Google and #7 on MSN (Live Search) - but it’s not in the top 100 on Yahoo. I would focus on ranking high on Google because that’s where the majority of people go when searching for something.

One way to increase your PageRank and increase your rankings in the search engines is through reciprocal links (although it’s not as effective as it used to be). I can see that they have a link directory with a lot of different categories. Although a link is always a link I would reduce the number of categories and try to get links from sites that are related to royaltoursafrica.com - anything related to tourism, travel, Africa, safaris, etc. But I’m not sure how people are supposed to submit their link to this directory - the “Exchange Links Now” link points to addyourlinks.com - this is probably something that needs to be updated.

On-page SEO

The on-page SEO is pretty good. The <title> is “: : Kenya Safaris:Animals in Kenya : Discount Travel : African Safaris” which includes the primary key phrase as well as a few related keywords - which is good. Personally I wouldn’t start the title with “: : ” - but that’s just me ;) There are two h1 tags: “Kenya Safaris” and “Montly Updates” - having your primary key phrase in an h1 tag is one of the oldest tricks in the book and it’s still important.

The images have alt attributes with “Kenya safaris” or other related keywords - which is very good. The keyword density is pretty good. “Kenya” and “safari” is mentioned several times - that should definitely help in ranking for those keywords. On the front page there is a big “headline” that says: “RoyalToursAfrica” — I would split it up into “Royal Tours Africa” so the search engines will recognize each word.

Search engine crawling and navigation

Right now there are 162 pages indexed on Google from royaltoursafrica.com — that’s pretty good, but I don’t know the total number of pages on that domain so maybe there is something that can be done to help Google find the rest of the pages. There is a sitemap which is a good way to help the search engines find the pages on the domain - but that sitemap should perhaps link to more pages.

Having a good navigation also helps the search engine spiders crawl your site. The “Main Menu” looks pretty good - just make sure you’re covering all the main categories/sections of your site. On the front page there are also links to some keyword targeted content pages like Kenya Holidays, Why a Kenya safari, Kenya food, Kenya culture and Shopping in Kenya. Having sub-pages targeted at related long tail keywords is a good idea. The <title> of those sub-pages matches the targeted keyword so that’s also very good. But I think there is something missing on those sub-pages — What should people do next? Often if it’s not obvious where the visitor should go next he’ll just close the browser. Don’t make the visitor have to think - make it clear what you want him to do next. Something at the end of the article, like: Read another article (”Here are some related articles” might help), a link to a form to book a safari tour, etc.

Design

In the right sidebar on the front page there is a “Login Form” - I’m not sure what the purpose of this is. Can visitors sign up to get access to special material? If so, where do people sign up? It’s often a good idea to have the front page (and any other landing pages) as simple as possible - don’t have anything that will only confuse the visitor. It should be clear what you want the visitor to do (sign up for a membership, join the mailing list, visit a particular page, etc.).

I’m a big fan of large fonts - I think it make the page more readable and some people have a hard time reading small fonts. That’s why I think the font size of the body content could be a little bit bigger. Another thing - on the front page there is an “Air Travel Deals to Kenya” column with links to a few airlines that fly to Kenya. That’s a good idea - nice to provide this kind of a resource. But I would put it on a separate page and not on the front page - you don’t want to lose your visitor as soon as he arrives on your site. At least add target="_blank" to the links so they open in a new window ;)

Monetization

At the bottom of the front page there is a PayPal banner with an affiliate link - I don’t think that’s the best choice if they’re interested in earning a little bit more through affiliate marketing. I would find an offer that’s more suitable to the visitors of this site - something related to traveling, tourism, etc. Just search through the affiliate networks - like ClickBank (search the CBmall), Commission Junction, etc.

Other methods of monetization could be for example Google AdSense, selling links, CPM banners, optin co-registration, getting resale rights for eBooks related to travel and selling them on the site, etc… But I think affiliate marketing could be the best move. Although… it all depends on the focus of the site - how much is each visitor worth? Do you want to keep the visitor on the site as long as you can or are you willing to sell a click away from your site for a few cents/dollars?

Well, what did you think of this review? Anything else that I should have covered? Anything you want explained further or covered in more detail?

Do you want me to review your site/product/service? Let me know - we can probably work something out :)

Keywords: pagerank, website review, email marketing, optin, linkbait, landing pages, monetization, web design, search engines, key phrase, link popularity, alt tag, spiders, cpm, long tail, conversion, reciprocal links, resale rights