Next step in my quest for perfection

[crounauer]

This post is deleted!

[RyanKent]

Hello Simon,

There are potentially dozens of areas which can be focused upon to improve your site. A few quick tips:

1. For your logins, offer users the option to log in with their social accounts. The ability to register and log in with a single mouse click using facebook or other accounts is an excellent user experience. Most users do not like to remember new user names and passwords for every site.

2. Get social! Your home page has no social indicators. Set up a page on the major social sites (twitter, fb, g+, possibly linkedin and/or youtube) and offer to connect with users on your site.

3. You presently offer a "Submit a Link" page. Generally speaking, that is a very bad idea. If you provide follow'd links to other sites and they are penalized, you can be penalized too. Be very careful who you link to. Additionally these links can be viewed by Penguin as manipulative.

4. Your content is very thin. The longest post I noticed was not even 300 words. I am not suggesting you add any fluff to your content but rather to ensure each page is informative and genuinely helpful to users.

5. Discuss related topics of interest? For example, what about the different dialects of French? French is spoken in Quebec but it is not the same as what is spoken in France. What about famous French people? etc.

[crounauer]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for your informative response. I guess I still have a lot to learn!

[crounauer]

Hi Ryan,

Since your last post I have been working hard to make the changes you suggested.

1. User can now login via their social accounts.

2. I have added social indicators on all pages now.

3. The "Submit link" has now been removed.

4. I am adding content on a daily basis and like you suggested.

Thanks again for your comments.

Do you have any other constructive criticism?

Thanks,

Simon

[RyanKent]

Great to see you have been improving the site Simon. A few more suggestions:

1. Add a Responsive Design mobile site. Mobile usage is huge and some experts forecast mobile usage exceeding desktop usage as early as 2014.

2. Your home page title is too long: "French Language Courses, Learn To Speak French Online, French Language Schools". Pick one keyword and focus it.

3. Numerous images are missing the ALT attribute.

4. Choose image names which represent the picture. For example, intro_img.jpg is not a good name from a SEO perspective.

5. Your home page has 30 coding errors. Many are easy to resolve such as adding ALT tags. Try to address them all, then check your other page templates used throughout the site.

Items 2 - 4 are easy to fix. Item 5 can likely be completed in a day or so. Item 1 will require some time but for a good site the benefits are fantastic.

To be clear, there are many exceptional aspects of your site. For example, it is not only well hosted (fast server response) but the code is optimized for speed as well. Keep improving the architecture and your site will be betters both from a user perspective and SEO.

[crounauer]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks again for your detailed response. I will make the mobile site my next priority, just need to get my head around it first!

All images now have text but I have a question with regards to the 30 coding errors. I use Microdata in my breadcrumbs, blog and forum pages to highlight relevant information. The coding errors that are being generated are to do with these microdata attributes. Try as I might I cannot seem to validate the "itemprop" attribute and many others associated with Microdata.  From what I have read in various forums there is no answer. Would you agree with this?

Thanks,

SImon

[RyanKent]

Hi Simon,

The goal of HTML validation should be to ensure your web pages will display properly in all major browsers, devices (iPads, smartphones, etc) and can be crawled properly by search engines. The goal is not necessarily to get the green "This document was successfully checked as ...." badge.

In brief, the w3c validator tool has not been designed to handle that specific metadata. The issue has been reported as a bug and, while the bug has been marked as "fixed", a solution has not been offered yet.

For now you can either use validator.nu or Google's Rich Snippets testing tool to test your microdata.

If you yearn for the green "valid code" stamp you can move your microdata to javascript although that action simply hides the code from the validator tool. Your code is no more or less valid either way.