Please Add Me To The Tch Fam!

[webgyrl]

1. http://www.natalie-brown.com

 

2. Official Natalie Brown Web Site

 

3. Official Website of Award Winning Contemporary Urban/R&B/Pop Vocalist/Songwriter Natalie Brown. With an impressive 4.5 octave vocal range and a talent for writing thoughtful, relevant, catchy songs, this is an artist to watch. Natalie has gathered an impressive list of accomplishments, among them being noted by Billboard Magazine as one of the Top 10 Emerging Talents. Web: buy CD, audio, pics, bio, fan club, message board, street teams and more.

 

4. TCH Link is on the Home page (at the bottom) and also at http://www.natalie-brown.com/links.htm

 

Rank Evaluation, pretty please

 

Thanks

 

Natalie

[SEO]

You have been added to our Extended Family - Commercial Sites page.

 

 

 

Rank Evaluation, pretty please 

Oh man.... I am all over it! [but it still may take me a little while]

[webgyrl]

You have been added to our Extended Family - Commercial Sites page.

 

 

 

Rank Evaluation, pretty please  

Oh man.... I am all over it! [but it still may take me a little while]

Thanks!!!

 

And no worries on that eval, take ya time!

 

'Preciate it

 

Nat

[SEO]

Well Nat, regarding optimization...

 

You are in Google's Index and you have number one ranking for the keyword phrase you selected as most important 'natalie brown'. You can not ask for anything more!

 

I would ask, is there a better keyword phrase to optimize for? Do not get me wrong, you would obviously want your name to rank top but is this the phrase that most people are using to find your sites content. This is something that would take some research... maybe 'contemporary r & b' or 'r & b vocalist', 'r & b writer', etc. Again, this would take proper research.

 

Keyword phrase analysis is the most important and first step in properly optimizing a site.

 

 

General comments regarding the site (from an SEO point of view).

 

1. Your Title tag is too long... I would use 'Natalie Brown - keyword phrase' where keyword phrase would be R & B Vocalist (or something similar).

 

2. Way, way too many keywords! (cut down to say just 300 )

 

3. Description Tag

 

How about: Natalie Brown, Contemporary R&B Vocalist / Songwriter - Official Web Site.

 

4. I do not like frames and your layout really does not need them (again this is speaking in SEO terms).

 

5. Too many external links from your home page. These are bleeding PageRank. You could create secondary pages to link to with more information regarding that particular reference and then link directly to the 'source' from the secondary page.

 

Make sense?

 

6. Get rid of the scrolling title... your site is too classy for such movement.

 

[this is a complement and a non-SEO comment ]

 

 

Would have more to say if I knew your best keyword phrase.

 

Good luck (and love the voice Thumbs Up ).

[webgyrl]

dsdemmin,

 

Thanks for such a comprehensive look at things!

 

I would ask, is there a better keyword phrase to optimize for? Do not get me wrong, you would obviously want your name to rank top but is this the phrase that most people are using to find your sites content. This is something that would take some research... maybe 'contemporary r & b' or 'r & b vocalist', 'r & b writer', etc. Again, this would take proper research.

From looking at webstats, most people type in "natalie" or "natalie brown" to find me... but I am seriously going to study things over the next few months and I will most definitly be re-doing the keywords in the meta tags for the Christmas revision. I'm thinking that 'R&B vocalist' might be the main one with other terms like s'ongwriter', 'singer', 'music' etc in the keyword section. How would you go about determining what phrases would be most important? There are so many phrases or words that people could type in to find an artist, and it's hard to know what is most important to include. But I do agree with you that revision and analysis is in order!

 

1. Your Title tag is too long... I would use 'Natalie Brown - keyword phrase' where keyword phrase would be R & B Vocalist (or something similar).

Good point. I'll revise that.

 

2. Way, way too many keywords! (cut down to say just 300 )

Ha Ha! I know, I know... we went keyword crazy and I haven't revised the list in a long while. My bad!

 

3. Description Tag

How about: Natalie Brown, Contemporary R&B Vocalist / Songwriter - Official Web Site.

Is it better to keep these shorter? I had put in this description what people woudl find at the site as I know this is generally the text that shows up underneath the Yahoo, Google etc listing first and lets people know what to expect at the site.

 

4. I do not like frames and your layout really does not need them (again this is speaking in SEO terms).

I've seen you say this to other people, as have I heard the same comment from other web designers. I am curious as to what the disadvantage is to using frames in a design. Does using frames make the site inaccessable to certain visitors? I'd be interested in why some don't like frames. The new design I am working on for my next release and website re-do has no frames. I could revise this current design and put the navigation bar on each page. I just figured it makes things cleaner and less stuff to change should edits be made to the nav bar by using a frames based design. I'm all ears on this topic.

 

5. Too many external links from your home page. These are bleeding PageRank. You could create secondary pages to link to with more information regarding that particular reference and then link directly to the 'source' from the secondary page.

 

Make sense?

Yup!

Ok, I'll keep that in mind and re-work some things. How does having too many external links on the home page create "bleed"? Does that mean I am giving rank to the sites that are listed on my homepage when they might not otherwise attain that rank? I'm a bit unclear on how all that works.

 

6. Get rid of the scrolling title... your site is too classy for such movement.

It's a done deal!

 

Good luck (and love the voice  ).

Thanks!!!

 

I really appreciate all the feedback. I want to make my site the best it can be within my means! I'm willing to learn and very open to opinions on how to make things cleaner, better and more efficient!

 

You rawk!

 

 

Nat

[Deverill]

How does having too many external links on the home page create "bleed"? Does that mean I am giving rank to the sites that are listed on my homepage when they might not otherwise attain that rank? I'm a bit unclear on how all that works.

This is so vastly simplified that it bears only a resemblance to the full explanation, but, as I understand it...

 

Pagerank is based on a very complex formula that tries to measure how important your page is to the world. To do this it considers how many pages point to you, whether those pages are relevant or not, and how many pages you point out too. I guess the theory is that if you link your page to others then you're not that much of an expert, but I'm just guessing.

 

Anyway, if I link my church web page to you it counts for very little since your page is not a churchy kinda thing. If I link my recording studio web page (as if) to you then that counts for more because that's your kind of thing.

 

The "bleed" comes from the minuses in the formula for links from your page to others.

 

The explanation I saw of the pagerank was at www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/ which is kinda scary with all the calculations but if you skim it you can get the gist of it without the headache I get from too much math.

 

Hope it helps!

 

[Removed direct link. Sorry, stingy about outbound links. D. Scott Demmin]

Edited August 24, 2003 by dsdemmin

[SEO]

Nat:

 

To your questions,

 

1. I like to keep a description concise, descriptive and keyword rich. Remember that the more 'words' you use, the less each individual word becomes important (I call this dilution).

 

[that is a good one, a description should be descriptive ]

 

2. There is a lot of evidence that strongly suggests that spiders do not index framed sites as well as non-framed. You will have many people argue this point but the evidence (i.e. ranks) speak for themselves.

 

3. Regarding PageRank Bleed.

 

First, thanks Deverill for your explanation. You can read our elaboration on Google's PageRank. In addition, review link structure.

 

Think of it this way: a given page has a specific quantity of 'credit' it can give another page. All of that 'credit' can be passed to one page or divided up into numerous pages. Now think in terms of a 'site'. Generally, your home page has the highest PageRank (PR). Do you want distribute that PR to other pages within your own site or squander it to external pages? Squandering it to external pages (pages outside of your own site) is what I am referring to as 'bleeding PageRank'.

 

Make sense?

 

Hope this helps. If further explanation is needed.... we are here!

[SEO]

Oh, sorry Nat forgot to address your first question.

 

How would you go about determining what phrases would be most important?

This is actually quite involved but, one way you can at least see how some people are using phrases: Overture- Search Term Suggestion Tool.

 

This should help.

[Deverill]

Great explanation ds! Not that I understand all that I know about PR but if you keep that up I may one day! Thanks!

[SEO]

Great explanation ds! Not that I understand all that I know about PR but if you keep that up I may one day! Thanks!

 

That is why we are here