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I was browsing Craigslist today, and came across an ad by a person claiming to charge only $250 for a website. They also claimed there was no need to hire a professional and a website is a website. I also followed their portfolio link, and I will dissect just one of their websites. Almost all of them had the same errors.

The website I'll be reviewing today is http://www.thetaxguy.org/. I'll be taking many screen shots just in case they get a hold of this article, and revamp the site.

At first glance, this looks like a great, expensive website, but I'm going to briefly tell you why this website will NOT generate any substantial business.

Appearance

As you can see from the image above, there is a lot just graphically with the sites home page. It has 4 large menu buttons in the center of the screen.

• The first of the four menu buttons is capitalized, but the other three are all lower case.
• There are two reflections for each button, busy and confusing to the eye.
• The image of the gentleman is mirrored for no reason.
• The footer menu links are inconsistent also, see the example "refund Time"

On Page SEO

They claim to offer search engine optimization also, but I honestly see almost nothing optimized about this site.

• The webpage title will only return results for the phrase "The Tax Guy".
• The website address uses "index-2.html" instead of "tax-services-overview" or something similar.
• The content on the page is not very keyword rich either. Google would have a hard time recommending this site to people searching for a tax professional.

Background SEO

This is my favorite part! This is what Google sees when it visits your site. As a non computer programmer, what jumps out at you? Probably not much other than a bunch of code, arrows, and bubbles. Here's what I see wrong with this site:

• The target market "Tax guy" is only listed 3 times on the entire home page! How is Google supposed to recommend a site which basically has no content.
• In the blue highlighted area, that is the computer code for the four menu buttons and their link addresses. They used "index-1.html and index-2.html" for the web page addresses. Big SEO mistake there, Google has no idea what's at those links.
• There are no title tags for the links either, for example when you hover over this link website performance increase you'll notice a small pop up bubble explaining what the link is to. This servers two purposes, first it lets users know why they want to click that link, and second, it lets Google know what that link is about.
• The images for the buttons are just named "m1.jpg, m2.jpg" and so on. This is bad for the same reasons as the link titles. It gives no information about what is there. And there is nothing in the alt tags there, they should have put a small description of the button there. For example "Custom tax services" would be fine.

Let me rewrite just one line of his code to be better search engine optimized.

• As originally seen on their site:
  <li><a href="index-2.html"><img alt="" src="images/m2.jpg" /></a></li>
   
• Rewritten by 416BC for better Search Engine Optimization
  <li><a href="/tax-refund-season" title="Tax Refund Time, Tax Season is upon us!" target="_self"><img alt="Tax Refund Time, Tax Season is upon us!" src="images/tax-refund-services.jpg" /></a></li>

There are actually a few more SEO things they could have done better, but I don't want to make this too long. Just check out our free price quotes or contact us today to see what we can do for your site.