The site looks quite pretty but it loads extreeemely slow. If I wasn’t intent to have a look I would have clicked away. I never even got to the content because I gave up when the article page wouldn’t load. The slow load is due to the image heaviness, the table based layout and all the foreign templates that need to come from somewhere. A simple CSS & HTML design won’t be as pretty but will be much quicker and more effective.

The page title of the home page is “Welcome”. There are millions of pages that start of with welcome. You just can’t beat it. It should be “The Path of Faith” or something that relates to the content.

Ditto for the file names. The articles page url is http://www.thepathoffaith.com/gpage2.html - The search engines pick up “gpage2″ and it is meaningless content nobody will ever search for. Rather change it to http://www.thepathoffaith.com/faith-articles.html

The meta keywords are: “christian,articles,faith,prayer,sexual addiction,children,parenting,seniors,care giving,trust,stories,crisis,” This is all over the place and not reflective of what is on the home page. You should use every meta keyword at least once on the page it refers to. It indicates a consistency in what you are presenting. I also think that there needs to be a space after the commas for them to be picked up (nobody knows how clever the Googlebots really are). Every keyword is also very broad. Combinations such as “christian articles” would be much more effective.

These are three small changes (including speeding up the site) which will not turn the boat around or make a huge difference in itself. But with websites its all the small bits adding up (or subtracting) that makes them successful or not.

Yes, ThePathOfFaith.com is a very pretty site. I take it, then, that you are saying there is nothing technically “wrong” with the site — that it just isn’t generating enough traffic at the moment, because of no links, to appear high up on the Google search. Is that right?

Randy, you are helping me — one of those technically challenged one! — to overcome my fear of doing something “wrong” and a website and crashing my computer! You blogs on websiting are a blessing.

1) First, I Googled the actual URL of the site: “www.thepathoffaith.com”. (I didn’t enter the quotes, just what’s inside them.)

The result was one single entry, the home page of the web site. We conclude from this that Google knows this site exists. That’s the first step. The site is not being blackballed for some strange reason.

But there are obviously no incoming links to this site, because if there were, the search above would have found them.

I did the same test for my site and got two hits but I leave my url everywhere (mostly forums) and I know it is linked back to my site. I am in the links section of a number of friends but they don’t show…

Any ideas?

One of the first things I do when I come to your blog is scroll down and your products that you have for sale disappear from thought and the possibility of action.

To give my idea some feet, I put a sample graphic and a web page together for you at:

http://www.epictales.org/other/ForRandy.htm

For the graphic, I tried to match it to your site as carefully as I could, but the font doesn’t match what you have at the top, so that would probably have to be redone. Either way, it gives you an idea.

I broke the graphic into four parts, so the three on the right can be made into links that would go to product-group specific pages.

Anyway, you might think it too cluttered to put this in between your posts, but really, Randy, your blog posts are VERY long (read: very helpful), and I don’t think any of us would mind an advertisement in between!

What does everyone else think?

(a) Should Randy promote his own stuff more?
(b) Should he encourage us more often to take action and buy his products?
(c) Would you mind seeing an ad in between his blog posts?
(d) Any other ideas on how Randy can improve his site?

My blog is only a month old, so the fact that it shows up at all has to do with the backlinks to it.

Randy’s site is plain, easay to read, and I like the fact that I don’t have to skip over his products between every other paragraph. I know what Randy sells, and I have bought nearly all of his products. They offer very good value for the price, better than most I’ve seen.

Blessings,

Barbara Lighthizer