The first step in applying what we’re learning about findability to my psychotherapy site seems to be to compare my site to the nuts and bolts findability techniques. No tools or analytics or cool stuff yet, just the basics:

The Good

• The site has a lot of content and the content tends to be fairly keyword rich. This is largely due to a 17-page Questions & Answers section.
• The titles of each page start with “Psychotherapy in Atlanta, GA: Susan C. Litton, Ph.D. — ” and then have the name of that section, e.g., Philosophy of Therapy, Articles, Questions & Answers: Attachment Disorders, Questions & Answers: Personality Disorders, etc.
• The URLs contain some form of the main word for each page, e.g., the URL for the Philosophy of Therapy page is http://www.susanlitton.com/philosophy.html.
• I built another psychotherapy site for all the therapists in our practice and my personal page on that site includes a back link to my main site.
• I have links to my site in a signature I use for a mental health message board I monitor for iVillage.com.
• There are meta tags for both keywords and descriptions for each page on the site.
• There are a fair number of internal links on the site and the text of the links tend to be keywords. Again, the best example of this tends to be on questions pages, e.g., Abuse Questions.

The Bad

• With a couple of minor exceptions, the only changes I’ve made in content to the site are the yearly updates to the copyright date. There have been years that I haven’t even gotten around to doing that.
• The URLs could be done a lot better. For example, in the Questions & Answers area, although the main keyword for the page does appear in the URL, the keyword for each question page is prefaced with “qa” and the keyword for each answer page is prefaced with “ans”. For example, the URL for the page of questions pertaining to abuse is:

• Headers for each page are graphics and although they do have ALT tags, the anchor tags don’t have title attributes.
• The layout was done with tables and the tags have none of the attributes that would help search engines locate content.
• There’s no sitemap.

The Downright Ugly

• The home page is in Flash. There is a link on the home page to a non-Flash version but I don’t know how effective it is.
• The site doesn’t validate. There’s some real scary stuff in there.
• The site doesn’t even give a nod toward accessibility standards.

As you can see, the site needs some serious help. Stay tuned next week for the upcoming installment in this findability project.