Search Engine Optimisation woes

[SAS]

Hi,

I've been set a challenge and one I think I'm going to fail . I think I must be missing something obvious...

The 3 Star Hotel Accommodation - Invicta Hotel, Plymouth, Devon, Cornwall website which I am looking after has the right meta tags, key words and I've added it to search engines manually, yet if you type "plymouth hotels" it appears on page 10+.

I know getting high on the google rankings depends on 1000+ Factors, but other hotels in the area, which websites are smaller in size appear on page one (imperial hotel / astor hotel).

Someone pointed out I need to add ALT tags to all the invicta photos,. Would this make any difference? Is there anything else I've forgotten to do or can do with the website to help it be more search friendly?

 

[inactionman]

SEO is a black art, and a morally dubious one.

Google goes more on the number and quality of links to the site, than keywords etc. which is why you see so many link farm sites.

 

[Guest]

Hi Scott

you have only a few tags listed for that webpage


META name="keywords" content="hotel, accommodation, plymouth, devon, cornwall, england, 3 star accommodation, restaurant, functions, meetings, rooms">

where as a website on the first page has tags of

<meta name="keywords" content="hotels in plymouth; plymouth hotels; hotels plymouth; hotels,inns,plymouth,england,accommodation,b&amp;b,plymouth city airport,westcountry,dartmoor,plymouth sound,city of plymouth,plympton,plymstock,ivybridge,tavistock,devon,tarmar bridge,golf,cornwall,saltash,torpoint,brunel,devonport,dockyard,argyle,albion,raiders,raleigh,hoe,barbican,pilgrim,sir francis drake,mayflower,navy base,army">

so try adding more tags and you potentially increase the google rank...


to compound my theory, if you do a google search for 3 star hotel plymouth - Google Search the hotel is first on my list. (as you have got it in your current tags)

 

[TdC]

if you put "pokemon porn" in you'll be first in every search!

 

[GReaper]

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools to find out a bit more about how your site is doing.

Personally I'd clean the entire site using decent modern HTML to make it easier for search engines to crawl. At the moment there are far too many tables and too much awful Javascript. The entirely useless date in the top right hand corner appears as March 26, 108 in Firefox and March 26, 2008 in IE. The right mouse click disable which only works in IE and not Firefox is also quite amusing.

If you really want to be on the first page for a particular search result then there is an easy way - buy the advertising space for "plymouth hotel" searches.

 

[MYstIC G]

Plymouth Hotel isn't in the title.

<TITLE>The 3 Star Invicta Hotel in Plymouth, Devon, England</TITLE>

Maybe try?

<TITLE>Invicta Hotel - 3 Star Plymouth Hotel</TITLE>

I'd also recommend getting a sitemap hooked up and online with google.

 

[Ch3tan]

if you put "pokemon porn" in you'll be first in every search!

This calls for....


I CHOOSE YOU BONDAGE PIKACHU!

 

[TdC]

lol I'm scared to think what you googled to get that

 

[Jimmy]

i reckon he made i him self

 

[ford prefect]

Personally I think people go a little overboard with SEO. The worst thing you can do is start posting links on unrelated forums and using automated submission techniques. Links from irrelevent sources can often do more harm than good. The best way to get a good google ranking is to have plenty of good (and relevent) links to your site.

One of my domains today has 46,438 spidered pages within google, which are on a wide range of topics. Most of them come up within the first 2 pages on google with relevent search terms, and I do very little in the way of SEO. Keep content relevent. Mention possible search terms multiple times in the text if you can. I have noticed Google likes the H1 tag too, so make sure it has something useful in it.

Kewords make very little difference as far as google is concerned, in fact standard googlebot pretty much ignores them, although the adsense bot does seem to look at them. It will look at the title tag obviously, but that doesn't seem to be a major factor in website placement either.

Google is more focuses on the text content (it can now read flash text too) of the site, and compares how relevent your site is compared to other similar sites.Googlebot's algorithm changes at least once every quater, so nobody will ever find the key to guaranteeing a no1 spot.

The other thing to consider is which search engines you submit to. Personally I submit a sitemap to google, and I submit to DMOZ, which is where 90% of search engines trawl for links anyway. A dmoz link is a Page Rank 10 link as far as google is concerned. Yahoo, AOL and several others tap DMOZ for links, so does MSN (unofficially).

 

[MYstIC G]

i reckon he made i him self

10 points.

 

[Shovel]

The ‘SEO is morally dubious’ point isn't entirely correct. There are some practices that will increase search engine ranking at the expense of site quality and content quality, but for the most part you can build a higher ranking with high quality code.

The <meta> *keywords* stuff pretty much gets ignored these days: Keyword stuffing by spammers makes it useless. I don't even bother with them any more. The <meta> *description* is still useful though, so keep one of them.

Next up, search engines give more importance to content which comes earlier in the page. Therefore, the most important content —*namely the central column*—*should come immediately after the <body>, and the navigation should follow later in the page. Using CSS for layout rather than tables makes this possible.

Additionally, you should move all your JavaScript into separate external files (or ideally, just one external file), rather than include it in the document itself. Again, this bulk of code pushes the real, useful content further down the document and it won't be prioritised as highly as it should.

Next: Use proper heading elements, not formatting elements, for headings. ‘Hello and welcome to The Invicta Hotel’ should be an <h1> element, in terms of document structure. Maybe reword that to: ‘Welcome to The Invicta Hotel, Plymouth’, to get your other keyword in there. Headings are prioritised over regular content.

For further code tidiness, don't use <b> or <i> or <font>, use CSS for formatting instead. Just like scripting, CSS should be stored in a separate .css file, rather than included in the document itself.

The ALT attribute for images should always be present, but it does not necessarily have to provide content. Its purpose is to be the textual representation of the image, *not* a description _of_ the image. Where you have an image with no text alternative, or an image where the description is elsewhere in the page content, it's perfectly appropriate to use alt="" and indicate there is no alternative text. So the restaurant and bar picture should have alt="", as the descriptions site alongside them. The signature image at the base though (‘Roy & Betty Martin’) should have alt="Roy & Betty Martin". That text will be read by search engines the same way as regular text in the page.

Alt is often misused. It should never, ever say ‘An image of…’ or ‘[IMAGE]’ or any such. Imagine the image is not there at all and doesn't exist. The text in an alt="" should make just as much sense as if it were in a <p>.

There's more, but as first steps, these will help and would put the mark-up of the site into good shape for a second pass of enhancement suggestions.

In addition, try to get links to the site listed in local directories, the entry on Yell.com and so on.

 

[Ch3tan]

lol I'm scared to think what you googled to get that

I did make it myself.

It's a GAME bag, a chain and I believe he even had some lippy on.

Sorry for the hijack scott

 

[SAS]

Thanks for the advice (and the pokeman porn ).

I'll give the site a make over and see how it goes .

 

[Malecheon]

This calls for....


I CHOOSE YOU BONDAGE PIKACHU!

You must spread some reputaion round...

Quality, although a bit sad to have access to a stuffed Pikachu