I’ve had a few comments from the author of The Intelligent Workout on my fitness blog, the guy always posts some good comments, so I’ve decided to review his site. The site review will look it at the site both from a content point of view, but also from the point of view of search engine optimisation and potential for revenue generation.

My first impression of the site is that the theme he has chosen (or had designed) is very dark. This is clearly not a problem for search engines, but for readers of the site, it can be problematic. I don’t have a problem with black sites per se, but if the contrast between the writing (content) and the background colours is not great enough (as is the case with this site), I find it had to read. Incidentally, I find I have to read this site without the stylesheets - I must be getting old!

The content of the site is excellent. I’ve only really read the most recent few posts, but they have been very good. Well put together articles that provide a lot of value to the reader. My only slight comment would be that there is so much good content in “The Four Health Hoaxes That Are Destroying Society and How to Stop Them” that it could have been spread over four different posts, thus providing more pages to the search engines, and making it slightly easier for a reader to get a “quick fix” of content, and make them come back for each subsequent “hoax”, until they had completed the series of articles.

As the blog is using WordPress, it’s difficult to say too much that is wrong with it from an SEO point of view, though I do have some comments:

Firstly, the author hasn’t activated permalinks, this is where WordPress uses URL re-writing to convert a query string into a static URL, which helps search engine robots to crawl and subsequently rank the pages within their SERPS. The reason you want this is to ensure you get more valuable keywords into the URL for each post.

Secondly, the title tags on each page contain far too many keywords, to the point where it looks a little bit like keyword spam. It isn’t, it’s merely WordPress outputting the blog title, category and then post title in the title tag. It would be better for SEO purposes to just output the title of the post in the title of the page.

I believe that if these two issues were corrected, the site would see a boost in the search engines. It will depend on a few other factors whether this site becomes really successful in the search engines, but despite off-site factors, it’s still worthwhile making the best use of on-site factors before worrying too much about off-site factors.