And now for something completely different…
Psychic Dollie 4 months ago // 3 responses // Potluck Introductions

Hello and welcome Psychic Dollie.

A critique / web site review of psychicthing.com

I like your site, psychicthing.com, simple and to the point, but very friendly and personable. While I wouldn’t have thought to use those colors, they work, somehow feeling mystical and soothing, er, dreamy. Though I would consider making the page a fixed width and maybe centering the layout to the browser. On my 1680×1050 screen everything spreads out so much it doesn’t feel as good. But when I size my browser to 1024×768 (I use the web developer extension for Firefox for quickly checking things like that.)

I really like the ripped paper quotes at the top of the pages.

While I am always leary of self proclaimed psychics, I found your offer of free psychic charm an endearing tool, that even encouraged trust and belief in a cynic like me. The testimonials always help. Maybe you could add a vertical ripped piece of paper in the sidebar under the navigation and share some more testimonials there.

I would definitely remove your email address from the page and the “mailto:” link. This is only going to get you on every spam list out there. If you want to show your email address it is best to that with an image, as the unscrupulous out there are constantly scraping sites looking for email addresses to spam.

Like all new sites, you should definitely start finding people and places to link to you to help increase your Google PageRank. When posting here you can always add live links to your site. While we don’t allow html we have a vast assortment of “markdown” style tags (we use textile/redcloth). When you are posting to the community blog, if you scroll down below the post form you will see some of the most common formatting and options. There is also a “formatting tips” tab on post and edit pages to help you further with more indepth examples and help.

For example to make a link to your website:

• psychicthing.com

...would be entered as…

• "psychicthing.com":http://psychicthing.com/

And you can also just type the full address and it will just convert if for you, but it doesn’t look as good and you don’t control over the keywords that GoogleBot sees related to that link. That would look like this: http://psychicthing.com/

As for SEO stuff, your meta descriptions and titles are very good. The content itself is well written, sometimes over-friendly and colorful, but I assume this goes in line with the type of service you are offering. Lord knows if I’m paying for a psychic reading by email I want that email to be as long and colorful (and obviously useful and accurate) as possible. But then I’m a cheapskate.

You might consider adding an “about” and “privacy policy” to the site, as this is both useful to your visitors and to the GoogleBot. Shameless self promotion: You could even add a link to your SPOT here at CoTradeCo on the new about page to help build trust and credibility :) .

To help get more presence in the search engines, you might also consider writing some articles about the history of psychics, psychic science, any of the various skills and tools you use, and so on. This would help get you some traffic and exposure from people who weren’t directly searching for psychic readings, but were obviously interested in psychic things. Also Google gives importance to larger sites with original content. And (another shameless plug) you can post some of these articles on sites like CoTradeCo with links back to your site for still more Google-juice and to demonstrate to other communities your vast knowledge on your powers and profession. But more importantly, people might find those articles and choose to link to them as reference, further increasing your PageRank potential.

The most refreshing thing about you and your site, is that it breaks away from so many of the cheesy cliches surrounding the less scrupulous of your powers. You present an endearing down to earth message for an out of this world experience.

Thanks for getting a SPOT

And lastly thank you for offering the special free mini-reading offer to CoTradeCo visitors. Hopefully you can get some extra attention and traffic. For free no one has anything to lose.

Thank you again for joining the CoTradeCo community. We will be adding a health and wellness community soon, and perhaps your psychic service might fall under some kind of mental wellness topic.

Take care psychic dollie.

You have a typo in the post title.

Also, I am starting a new website review site and appreciate the opportunity to review your site. When I get my new service up and running I will give a more thorough “reading” of your site in exchange for a testimonial. An added bonus to my review service will be free public review/plugs for sites that I like and think are doing something original or useful (for who they say their visitors should be). And I think your site qualifies for that.

If anyone else is interested in a free review of their website for technical, content, and marketing purposes I am extending this free offer while I finish my new website.

Take care everybody.

Zoe! Thank you so much for the warmest welcome and for doing a review of my website! I have been racking my brain about how to appeal to the google bots and I appreciate the practical and user friendly suggestions on how to increase page rank. Your service is a very valuable one and I wish you all of the best up and coming success. I will be working on what you have outlined in the next week or so and I look forward to an on going partnership.

Thank you and look for me here again soon!