How do you improve web rankings for your website?

Question

I've got a travel agency and website www.otravel-holidays.co.uk and have been optimizing for a while now. It's going pretty well but 90% of my hits are from MSN, i can't seem to crack Yahoo and Google. Does anyone have any tips for optimizing websites to give good results from Yahoo and Google?

Feel free to share your sites for all to see!

Answer 1

Get a different domain name I mean not .co.uk but .com or .net

OH yeah try Google adwords that'll get your site known

http://milliondollarzhomepage.co.uk/googleadwords.html

Answer 2

Keep adding new relevant content as regularly as possible so that everytime the spiders come round they can see it's fresh. Also links to you. It's a hard time consuming job getting reciprocal links but it's a must. Also I think with Google there is a time thing, I'm involved in one website which saw it's traffic double when it had been going a year and now most of the traffic comes from Google. I've now 7 others so are waiting to see if the same thing happens. I would say MSN are far more generous to new sites than Google and Yahoo.

Answer 3

There are so many things you need to do if you want to move up in the ranks. Most of the key, but know factors in optimizing is pretty much listed in here now although I did not see the link for the standards which is:
http://www.w3.org/
A good place to type in your URL and get a report.

I do lot of SEO consulting - which,if you are willing to do the work, can probably be done but you will encounter a lot of trial and error. Then again a lot of firms have a "one size fits all" approach. It is expensive to do right because it can be very time consuming and also can require a lot of content writing, testing and reseach (not to mention the ongoing competitive nature and waiting periods to prove and better the startegy).

I strongly believe organic is best. A lot of relevant content using common terminology works best without too much info on each page (300 words is a good amount for a page - lots of focussed pages are good). Also, think about what will make people click to other pages on your site and what might bring them back or send a friend.

NO Fames & no fancy flash or other distracting featues. Don't oversubmit sites. know that "keywords" have got to be in the content of the page or they are absolutely useless. Learn about page rank and find relevant sites with high page ranks where you might be able to post a link to your site. Build a good site map and submit it to Google. Put a search too on your site.

This ought to keep you busy for a while.

Answer 4

Looks like you've done quite a bit of optimizing. It's a good start. I'd recommend that you start adding content and update it frequently. You might think about writing reviews of places to visit. Include photos and make sure the photo names include the name of the location (ie. Hyatt-Maui.jpg rather than photo159.jpg).

If updating your site often is too difficult or expensive for you, you might consider starting a blog and incorporating blog headlines and links into your home page. A blog can act as a dynamic content manager. They're relatively easy to setup, easy to maintain, and cheap to run.

Another way to improve your ranking is to create a sitemap specifically for Google. You can find out more about how to do this at the link below. Basically, you tell Google where to look on your site for information. This allows Google to index your site more completely. Each search engine has its own protocol for sitemaps, but the biggest search engines all agreed the other day to follow a single protocol. You can read more about that below.

Answer 5

This may be good news for you
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/15/google-yahoo-and-microsoft-agree-to-standard-sitemaps-protocol/

The following is basic but may help;

Keywords and phrases
Prior to any redevelopment work, it is essential to define the key words and phrases that the site should be optimised towards. This is a collaborative process which combines the unique insight of stakeholders, existing site analytics, our expertise and also specialist software. The results of this phase are crucial and provide not only the foundations of any subsequent work but also a series of metrics against which the effectiveness of the campaign can be measured.

Keyword density
Optimising the content to provide maximum exposure to search engine spiders is the next step in the process. Keyword density is both a confusing and prevalent term often used here, but essentially refers to the percentage of content comprised of your targeted keywords. Our goal is to create or edit content that uses as many keywords in the content as possible while keeping it comfortably readable to a human visitor.

Site structure
The structure of a site is also important. A logical and well organised information architecture results in meaningful URLs that allow engines to make accurate assumptions about that content.

Internal links
The text of internal links should indicate destination. The “Click here” convention may work for a human, but indicates very little to a search engine about where or what this link leads do. By contrast, “Find a travel agent” embodies the function of the link and therefore enables search engines to make critical assumptions about the nature of the destination.

Standards compliance
On a technical level, it may also be necessary to review the code making up the web pages (usually a combination of HTML and CSS). Search engines are far more effective when cataloguing pages that use concise, web standards compliant and most importantly, semantically correct markup.

Cross-linking
After the site has been optimised many SEO specialists advocate following a submission process to the major search engines. Our experience indicates that this makes little if any difference to long-term page rank. The major search engines are spidering search engines, which means they follow links whether they have been submitted or not. Any links to sites that are already being spidered will ensure your site is also being exposed.

Monitoring
Now the initial groundwork has been completed, the long term objectives of the SEO process should be reconsidered. Periodic Monitoring looks for evidence that the targeted phrases are harvesting your site in search results. This is achieved using a combination of specialist software (Urchin) in tandem with the analysis of site statistics to elicit exactly where traffic originates. If results are not forthcoming, it may be necessary to refine some of the strategies applied

We would be able to do all this for you and more. Your website could do with a bit of a redesign to improve the user experience and restructure of content, plus compliance with Accessbility guidelines. Any further help contact www.cimex.com

Answer 6

MSN is the easiest site to optimise for. I can't crack yahoo properly. You need to get incoming links from relevant high ranking pages (not sites) with only a few links on that ideally they should link to the most relevant page for the anchor text. Aim for quality more than quantity. My successful idea was to use my "resources page" as an information page about our trade. In your case you could list the
specialities of your rivals. Put all the information you know about them in a manner which informs your clients. When I discovered that this page was ranking in google nearly as high as my home page I had #1 and #2 for some keywords the main banner was a link to the home page. I soon found I had accidentally added new keywords the names of key competitors who hadn't optimized their sites well. Another idea is to create another site and
have some key links triangular. You link to outside site who links to site 2. This gives you a
valuable one-way link. Don't do this too often google don't like it. If you had lots of them they
would delist you completely.
I have only bought one link. That was for $20 from a pr6 site and has been up 18 months now and provides visitors as well improved page rank.

Answer 7

Read this Ebook, and soon you willsee your site at the top of Google for your keywords.

You will know more than 99% of the webmasters.


Free traffic guide (Search Engine Optimization)

http://www.makemoneyonlinehow.com/SEO_madeeasy.pdf

If you want to learn even more, I advise you to subscribe to the Internet Marketing Center:

http://www.marketingtips.com/searchmarketinglab/t/889531

Answer 8

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Answer 9

Your site looks great, but you'll need more content for your specific kewwords to be found.

What about having customers write travel reports and post them on your site? People like to read reviews and experiences from other people.

Answer 10

I downloaded Scrabble for free here: http://bitly.com/1oh86wP

I was fond of playing scrabble when I was young. I use to visit my neighbor since they own the board game. We would compete and try to outwit each other to win the game. Scrabble helps us to enrich our vocabulary and keeps us entertained at the same time.
For me, it's the best game ever.

Answer 11

For starters, always put http:// in front of your web address when posting your web address on forum, blogs, Answers etc. Every in-bound link helps and it's more than likely going to work better with http:// infront.