KaTom Restaurant Supply

We are not just a web based business. This is a traditional 27 year old brick and mortar with more than $2M inventory that successfully added online sales in late 2001. We gained online customers by using PPC and have been heavily dependent upon it from day one. We have the highest customer service ratings when compared to competition on shopping.com and other sites with customer evaluations. We have a wide selection of products with more than 13,900, and most of those are offered at the lowest price available. Customer service is open 12 hours per day from 8am to 8pm Eastern.

However our website does not rank highly in Google, Yahoo, MSN or other search engines when compared to our competition.

Our site runs on Miva Merchant that is heavily customized with third party and custom modules. All pages are static for quick load. We offer shipping prices for items in the shopping cart whether it ships via UPS or freight truck in the 48 US states. Outside the lower 48 states we do freight quotes via email. Pricing and descriptions are updated nightly through use of a FoxPro program that was written in 2001 and modules adjusted over the years as needed. Category HTML static pages are generated by Miva Merchant Optimizer, most of which contain custom HTML with pictures aiding in navigation of the site. Product HTML pages are generated by FoxPro and posted to the site via ftp.

One area (certainly not the only area that I need constructive criticism on) that I struggle with is when we have thousands of products that are similar. For example, we sell a LOT of restaurant refrigerators, and we have thousands of choices. Getting customers to the products that fit their needs is tough without overloading them with choices. Take a look at these links to get to our most popular refrigerator--> Home > Equipment > Restaurant Refrigeration > Reach Ins > Bottom Mount Solid Full Door Refrigerators > 598-T49
That's a LOT of clicks to get a customer there! For PPC we get them as far down the path as we can to start with, but Google, Yahoo, MSN and others just aren't indexing our products. That's why I implemented the FoxPro version of the product pages a couple of weeks ago in place of the Miva Merchant Optimizer product pages.

I am not that familiar with certification of html to standards, in fact I am not even sure which standards I should be evaluating against. We have heavy use of tables...and it if takes rewriting the product page template to get better results I am certainly open to that, I just don't want to reinvent the wheel if that isn't going to improve things.

I have tried to remove frustration from the description above and just provide facts, but when you are as close to something as I am to this, and have as much of yourself invested in it's success it is really hard. I have a passion for the restaurant equipment industry and in this website particularly. What do I need to do to improve:
conversions?
search engine optimization so our product pages are shown?
search engine optimization so our category pages get higher results?

We are constantly adding manufacturers, working to improve warehouse efficiency, reducing shipping costs, and working with manufacturers to reduce costs of products...what are some things we can do to improve?

One quick question that pops up after reading around on this site...is it worth if to get rid of tables and start using <div> on my category and product pages? Product pages are FULL of nested tables.

From what I read many of you will suggest that it is worth it to transition. Is there someone you can recommend to me that is experienced and could develop one product page using the newer standards? With one page done correctly I can work from it to update our template.

Yep.
It would be a massive job, but you must at some point ditch those tables.
Pages are too wide and caused horizontal scroll on 1024x768, this is a major turn-off.

You said this yourself, but I'll say it again:

- Loose tables and follow standards such as CSS and xHTML.

- Search engine optimization is a must. You could be doing a lot better with the amount of content you have. PR4 is ok for a small website, but you should be aiming for at least 6/7.

- This is a great tool to get you started. It examines various aspects of your website and tells you where to improve.
http://sitescore.silktide.com/

- I ran a test and here are the results:
http://sitescore.silktide.com/index....sIgnoreCache=1
You scored low on accessibility and popularity.

- Validate your website: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/#validators

- Examine your competition and see where you can improve.
http://www.jeansrestaurantsupply.com/
http://www.acemart.com/
(top 2 results on google search for 'restaurant supply')

- Your URLs really don't help SEO. They're all product codes or 'x-something.html'. I'd recommend finding a solution so you can have URLs like this:
http://www.katom.com/Fryers-and-Acce...tertop-Models/
instead of...
http://www.katom.com/062-301HLD.html

Improving this website will be a big project, but it has a lot of potential.

Thank You...excellent feedback. I agree, big project, necessary project, and I am already negotiating for some help with a product template in CSS/XHTML. Chipping away at it a little at a time...just need a little direction from someone that knows more about the new standards, and I do appreciate it VERY MUCH.

This is the right forum for you... We're constantly nagging at people to follow standards and there will be plenty of help available.

Let us know how you get on...