Dragonfly Media Curacao

Sentro Orto Fisiko Korsou is the practice of prosthetist Tom de Windt on Curacao. SOFK helps people that need a prosthetic limb. He helps local people as well as people from abroad that want to combine a holiday with getting a new prosthesis.

It looks like nothing much has been done on the website for the last few years and it is past due for an overhaul (or at least a content update). The website has been around for a while (since 2000, domain registered in 1998). Seeing that the first Curacaoan websites stem from 1997/98, 7 years is a respectable age here.

The numbers

*: MSN’s interface to see the incoming links has been off-line for a while so we can’t see this number.

Explanation

This website is a tricky one to do this kind of report for. There are several issues with it that can be resolved easily, but the main problem here is the content. When you look at this website it is pretty obvious that it’s an old website and it looks like it has been a while since it has been updated. This makes people distrust the information on it. When people distrust the information on a website, they leave.

Besides the content there are some general SEO points that should be taken care of. The title, description meta-tag and keywords meta-tag should be unique for every page. The keywords in the keywords meta-tag should actually be present in the page for them to do any good and header-tags should be used for the headers in the page (search engines can’t read visual cues like a human can, they need structured layouting).

The elements that work in favor of this website in the ‘eyes’ of the search engines are the age of the domain and the fact that this website is in the ODP and Google directories. The idea that the age of a domain name is important stems from the reasoning that longevity is a good indicator for a website’s importance. If your website is no longer important, why would you pay to keep it up?

If a website is in the ODP, Yahoo and/or Google directories this is a vote of confidence from those directories. As these directories are human-edited it means that an actual person looked at it and approved it. An added benefit of being in these directories is the fact that a lot of new websites use the data of these directories for their own websites. This means that the link to your website will be used by others without you having to do anything for it, i.e. instant link spawning.

The main element that we want to talk about here is the visitor. Of course, it is important to make it easy for the search engines to rank your website, but eventually it is the people that they send that you want. The search engines are just (important) facilitators. It’s better to have 200 visitors per day of which 10% buys something than 500 visitors of which 1% buys something.

Besides the outdated content sofk.com has some other issues when it comes to ‘visitor satisfaction’. The first thing that happens when you go to the website is that you get a message telling you that you have to wait for the main page to load. The only reason I can see for this being done is that there is a counter on that first page. For the rest this extra page is just a nuisance.

The second page you get to is a page where you can choose your language. After you have chosen your language, you get a page where you can choose a subject and only then do you get to the content. This means that only on the fourth page, after three clicks, a visitor can get the information he/she is looking for. Chances are that many visitors leave the website before they get there.

This roundabout way of getting to the information can easily be fixed by making one of the content pages the homepage and adding the counter and language choice to this page. This is a benefit in two ways; your most important content is on the homepage which makes it more important to the search engines (giving the keywords on that page more weight) and your visitors can start reading and digesting straight away.

Another improvement would be to work less with animated gifs and blinking text. People’s eyes are drawn to blinking content. This makes it rather difficult to digest other content on the page and will eventually lead to people clicking away and not reading your content. If you want to use moving images, you could make it loop once and then stopping it. The eyes are then drawn to that content once and after the first loop has ended it stops distracting.

And a third improvement in ‘visitor satisfaction’ would be to not paginate content. On some pages there are “fwd”-links that take you to pages that can not be reached in any other way. The really cool thing about the internet in comparison to books is that a website does not have to be linear and people don’t expect it to be. They should be able to move freely through the website and not be ‘caught’ in how the person that built the website thinks they should move.

Medical tourism is currently on the rise on Curacao. Private clinics like the Curacao Dialysis Center and the Laser Institute are doing very good business and many of their clients are from Holland and the US. And why shouldn’t you combine a holiday with getting medical care? The internet is the prime way for these companies of informing and seducing people to come to Curacao to get treatment. If Sentro Orto Fisiko Korsou would take a look at how these clinics made their web presence and improve its own website, we’re sure it will help business in a positive way.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 7:35 am and is filed under Curacao SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.