This first critique will be for the multibrand.blogspot.com website.
Harry asked me to critique the site which is intended to provide viewers with information about Indonesia and its laws and regulations.
General Comments
The site looks well put together and has some interesting posts. It uses the blogger platform. It may be worth setting up Wordpress for a top level domain as it is relatively inexpensive and provides SEO advantages.
There are categories to help visitors navigate the content as well as posts organized by month and year. There is an about page. I would like to see a photo of the author instead of a free stock photo. I believe that a photo of the author would add credibility to the site. I would also like to see information about the author on the about page.
There is a section on the right for user comments in addition to comments for individual blog posts. I am not sure that this adds value to the site, but it is interesting nonetheless. I like the recent visitors section in the sidebar as it adds a sense of community.
The page seems a little thin. If possible I would try to use the horizontal space better. Perhaps a left sidebar for links to pertinent sites instead of way down on the right.
Niche
When choosing a niche, it is important to take care of the fundamentals. This blogs name is Multibrand. I am unsure how that relates to Indonesia and its laws and regulations. Perhaps a better blogger URL would be indonesialawsregulations.blogspot.com. Google puts a lot of credibility into the domain name, so choose wisely. Even better would be to register a top level domain.
The title of the blog is also Multibrand. I don’t know if Blogger will let you change this. If it is possible, I would change it to something that represents the niche. Likewise the subtitle would be served well to include niche keywords.
Some of the blog posts mention Indonesia. It is mentioned early on in the article and is also in bold type. This is excellent use of SEO as the search engines pay more attention to the first paragraph and also to emphasised text.
Some of the posts seem unrelated to the niche. For example the post about Matt Mullenweg appears unrelated to laws and regulations. If possible I would see if there was an angle where I could mention something about my niche.
In looking at links to this blog I notice that they contain the link text “Multibrand” too. It would be far more useful from an SEO perspective to have them use the link text “Indonesia laws and regulations.”
I would like to see a category for regulations and more posts in both the law and regulations categories.
Outbound links are not critical, but I would seriously think about removing links to unrelated sites such as the stock photography and greeting card sites. People looking for laws and regulations for Indonesia are unlikely to be looking for free stock photos.
Conclusion
The site is well put together and has some very interesting posts. If the goal is to make it onto the top 10 for Indonesia laws and regulations, then with a little work I believe it will be possible. There needs to be a concentration in the chosen niche. Specifically:
- Consider a new domain or sub-domain name
- Put niche keywords into the meta data if possible
- Concentrate on niche-based blog posts
- Focus on niche-based outbound links
- Request back links to contain niche keywords
Posted under Uncategorized
This post was written by john on February 5, 2009
Hi John,
Thank you very much for your kind in put, which reaslly means a lot to me.
Actually I already have a blog on wordpress using same name, but contents imported from the blogger. I’ll work more on wordpress then.
Best regards,
Harry Nizam