Liveblogging the Distilled Live Site Review

Here are the key questions during the site review:

• What are your goals for the site?
• What is your key conversion?

Then, we get to the follow-ups:

• Your calls to actions are weak.
• What are your keywords?
• Are you saying that search is not the right channel? It's a B2B site (http://meridameridian.com)!? Rand Fishkin suggests using LinkedIn to find the right people. Site is now getting a lot of suppliers in China looking for distributors, but that's not their market.

Then we get to technical details:

• Are you using Zemanta (suggests links to related content as you're writing your blog post). It's a way of getting relevant links and connecting to other web sites. You connect to them; they connect back to you. Works on blogger.
• Use facebook pages vs as a human.
• Don't pipe twitter directly into facebook. Add it manually. (this is all about social media)
• Use FollowerWonk to find twitter followers in your area both semantic and geographic.
• Build out local pages to get into local directories.

Now, onto Leading Authorities. They're an agency for speakers. Can get individuals to rank well.

Immediate suggestions:

• About me: Example Tom Critchlow. Make the site's about pages look more like this.
• Most advice centers around getting the clients to link back more directly back to you.

Now on to Soccer Tickets:

• Use facebook comments. They're indexible. You put a widget on your site to increase engagement. Use the activity plugin for Wordpress that aggregates activity across your site.
• Next suggestion: Make the site look more authentic. Looks like you're trying to rank for SEO.

Now SunglassWarehouse.com:

• Panda (a google search index update) affected long tail keywords, not big ones. However, if you had a lot of low quality content, it will drag down your whole site.
• Key insight here: This is a commercial site. How can you get other commercial sites to link to you? Offer them a service like a sunglass finder.

Finally CostumeSuperCenter.com:

• Hit by Panda for site format. Looks too much like an ezine. Key issue: Don't go into popups. You have to have the same amount of unique content as you do advertising.
• After all SEO details are covered: You know this page likely won't convert well either.
• Get on facebook and get people to tag your brand on facebook.
• Overall gist: Make the whole thing more human interactive.

Random tips:

• Advanced google search like: best * interior *, to get sites you're interested in.