Thread: Review my Haunted Castles

Please review the MostHauntedCastles. Looking forward to everybody's feedback on this site and it's castles in Scotland and Ireland.

Thanks!
H.

Hi,

I like the site color it's great for that type of site. I clicked around a bit

I am not a fan of Tags just a personal thing. If I would change anything it would be the sidebar. Move Latest Articles to where the tags are it would also allow the other google ad to be closer to the top.

Sami

The site looks very nice and it has a good domain name.

I am also not a big fan of tags or large numbers of links on a page. Too many links makes a site look confusing and dilutes the effectiveness of inheritance factors that you want to pass to the inner pages. There are over 160 links on the home page. From my viewpoint, anything over 50 is probably too many. I've seen too many sites with inner pages that never rank well due to an overuse of links in the internal linking structure.

Doing a castle tour of the UK is actually on my bucket list. I did that several years ago in Germany and really enjoyed it. When I get the chance to fulfill the UK goal on my list, I will use your site as a reference.

Great-looking site and bags of content, plus good on-page SEO.

I just noticed a heck of a lot of HTML comments in the source code that serve no purpose for visitors to the site and should ideally be stripped out when the template is uploaded to the web.

Thanks for the review, removed tag cloud and changed the ad position as you have suggested. The ads are different on the home page and post pages for example. Not sure if the home page image ad in the sidebar should be changed to text as well. What do you think?

Originally Posted by Sami4u

Hi,

I like the site color it's great for that type of site. I clicked around a bit

I am not a fan of Tags just a personal thing. If I would change anything it would be the sidebar. Move Latest Articles to where the tags are it would also allow the other google ad to be closer to the top.

Sami

---------- Post added at 22:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 21:50 PM ----------

Thanks for your review as well Über Hund! I reduced on the tags, there should be less links now on the home page, willl do a count later today. There are more haunted castles articles planned, so when you make your UK castle tour my site should really be helpful as a guide.

As you might have noticed I also have a site dedicated to England, haunted places in England. I just mention it because the site you have reviewed is about Scotland, Ireland and Wales. If the design on my new site is a success in terms of CTR then I might change the old site to the new theme as well.

The England site needs to see many changes as well, I know that. There are some early posts which will have a makeover, yet the new articles are really worth reading.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

The site looks very nice and it has a good domain name.

I am also not a big fan of tags or large numbers of links on a page. Too many links makes a site look confusing and dilutes the effectiveness of inheritance factors that you want to pass to the inner pages. There are over 160 links on the home page. From my viewpoint, anything over 50 is probably too many. I've seen too many sites with inner pages that never rank well due to an overuse of links in the internal linking structure.

Doing a castle tour of the UK is actually on my bucket list. I did that several years ago in Germany and really enjoyed it. When I get the chance to fulfill the UK goal on my list, I will use your site as a reference.

Thanks Andy! I noticed this before, and I guess the theme developper uses it as a form of advertising
As you have probably found out the site runs on the HeatMap Theme which I can really recommend checking out!

Originally Posted by Andy101

Great-looking site and bags of content, plus good on-page SEO.

I just noticed a heck of a lot of HTML comments in the source code that serve no purpose for visitors to the site and should ideally be stripped out when the template is uploaded to the web.

Originally Posted by Habaku

Thanks for the review, removed tag cloud and changed the ad position as you have suggested. The ads are different on the home page and post pages for example. Not sure if the home page image ad in the sidebar should be changed to text as well. What do you think?

Hi,

I like this so much better

As far as the image ad at the bottom it seem to draw your attention to the image I would leave it if the clicks are not making you what you hoped for change it later.

This a very well laid out nice and square site IMO.

Sami

I like that much better. The conglomerate of tag cloud links on the right side was very confusing.

Users are comfortable with sites that stick to a standard design layout. When you stray from that too much, you will see your bounce rate go up.

Thanks again for the review guys. Now I am tackling how to rank well, not only for most haunted castles. I would also like to rank for the particular castles.
I intend do some one site SEO by inserting links to relevant sites. Backlinks seems to be the more difficult part, the niche is relatively small. Any good ideas are welcomed

Nice site, images of the interior would be good if you can get them and information as to whether the castles are open for ghost tours. Have been on a few and a site that provides the details for all the ghost tours in the UK would be a great idea, can also have a section for other haunted buildings, but the main thing would be more imagery.