Review of Rich Sage
I promised you an example of an in depth review and here it is. I know this is a little late but I wanted to provide you with the best review that I could.
Content
Content, it will make or break a site. If you don’t have it, then you might as well not have a website. The content on Rich Sage seems to be well thought out and it seems to geared towards traffic building. The site likes to use article submission sites and from the reports they make good use of them. The articles that they have on the site are very informative but they sometimes seem to be a little incomplete. I understand that we could always write an article to death but we need to find that line of where we should stop without leaving our readers uninformed. One other thing to watch for is grammar and spelling. It doesn’t make the site unreadable but it comes close at times. Is the content worth the visit though? I would say so, there are many tips on the site and I am sure it would keep you busy just trying to implement 25% of the tips.
Site Layout and Design
The layout is easy to navigate and easy to read. I kind of like the 3 column layout but I wonder if it would look better to have one big sidebar with all of the elements of the two sidebars that the site currently uses. That could also serve to even up the sidebars and get more of what you have in the sidebars closer to the top. I also noticed that the site navigation is in the sidebar and in the header. The one in the sidebar could be eliminated to help clean up the sidebar a bit.
Advertisements
There are not too many ads on the page but most of the Google ads compete with his own affiliate links. It would be good to figure out what links are competitors and put them into the competitive ad filter. The money made from a click on a competitor may be okay but you have just led someone away from your site that could have been one of your customers. You could also get rid of the extra small adsense block; there is no need for it. It just looks out of place. Maybe try using some in post ads every third post. You may see an increase in clicks that way. They say that is the best place for any advertisement.
Categories
There are a few that you could get rid of and maybe fold them into another group. One example is the Journey and travel categories. I know how easy it is to get carried away with categories, on one hand you may be thinking about SEO but on the other you make a long list of items that your readers may not want to dig through to find what they want. I also noticed that you had a traffic building and a marketing category and they both seem to be about the same thing.
Final Points
Use your static pages wisely. They should be information packed and as close to a stand alone page as they can be. Make them work for you and try and make sure they are pages that people want to link to. Your wisdom page information could all be included on your about page. The wisdom page could be used for the most important nuggets of information that you want your readers to find. That is the page that I was first drawn to on your site so make it work more for you. How about your make money and affiliate tabs? The make money tab has the wrong name, name it review me or something like that and name your affiliate tab “make money”. Once you do that you can not only highlight your affiliate programs but also things like adsense, or any other program you are involved in. Then keep it updated and tell everyone when you updated it with a main page blog post. Last but not least you need to make use of your forums if you are going to have them. You need to try and start discussions and point people to a thread in your forums that you will started. Forums are real hard to build but once you get enough active members it will become viral and will also help you build active readership for the whole site.
Check the site out for yourself; head on over to Rich Sage Share This
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