Website Reviews

Another great fitness blog that I’ve come across is that of Colin Timberlake, a fitness freak from America or Canada. He writes about his running training weight training, giving all the information about what times he does a run in and how much weight and number of reps/sets he does for his weight training.

What is different about this blog, is the numerous inspirational people that Colin writes about, and the reasons that he finds them inspirational. For instance, one of his inspirational figures of the day was Madonna. Not (I’m guessing from what he writes about her) for her personality, but for the fact that at over 50, she is still in very good shape and can most probably out-do most women half her age!

It’s these daily inspirational figures that populate the site, and they range from sports personalities, actors, singers, musicians, fighters and of course, a few choice bodybuilders, including the great Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The site is built using WordPress, or a similar blogging solution. The theme looks to have been custom made or at least an off the shelf theme that has been tweaked to fit in with the author’s content and style.

The design is clean and easy to read, with a two colum design that favours the adverts and navigation on the left hand side and the content on the right hand side. My only issue with this is that the advertising is far more prominent that the website navigation, and there does seem to be an awful lot of advertising and affiliate links.

For instance, the left hand column has two Google Adwords text ad blocks, a Doubleclick image ad block and two Amazon widgets that contain affiliate links to various fitness related books and inspirational (or just preferred viewing) films chosen by the arthur. I’m not against monetising a blog, but I don’t believe it should be done at the expense of the navigation.

I would also argue that the Google ads may be more successful if they were integrated into the blog posts, as would the Amazon affiliate links, if they were integrated into the posts and related, so for instance, if he wrote about how Madonna inspires him, he could have an affiliate link to Amazon to a Madonna products page, which could contain books, cd’s and dvd’s of hers.

In terms of the search engine optimisation that has been done on the website, I can’t see that any major sins have been committed. There are no spammy site-wide links which is good, but there is also no tag cloud, which is bad, purely from the point of view that he could be missing out on some easy long tail traffic. I know from my own blog that I get a bunch of random search engine traffic that is directly resulted from my tag cloud.

Last thing to say on the SEO side of things is that the author hasn’t disabled the blog title from each title tag. This means each page title has “| colintimberlake.com” appended to it, which neither adds any extra meaning to the visitor nor the search engines, and in fact will reduce the relevance of the words in the title tag. A small issue that can be resolved easily, and may as well be to maximise the benefit of on-page optimisation.

What would make the biggest difference to the search engine optimisation efforts of Colin’s blog would be to get more links coming into the blog. I could only see six inbound links according to Google, and as the blog has been online since January, that’s measly 1.5 links gained per month so far.

All in all though, it’s a well written blog, the title’s of each page are well thought through to include varying keywords and each page of content contains the keywords and is good quality content which search engines just love.

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.