SEO advice

[Splat]

Hi Peeps,

I have a website that I advertise a couple of holiday lets on in Spain, and was wondering if there is an innexpensive way of getting SEO advice. Most co's I've spoken to want something in the region of £150 a month, and I just cannot justify that. Happy to do DIY SEO, just not my expertise in terms of what to do. Any ideas?

Cheers

Splat

[Bushfiva]

Site-wise, and oversimplifying, it's a matter of linking to useful sites and asking them to link to you. Beware of any third party solutions that "guarantee" a high pagerank on Google, for example.

In practice, you might get more insight into how people search for such holiday lets simply by giving yourself an advertising budget and creating a Google Adsense account. The latter approach lets you micromanage your advertising in real time without having to fart around with the website itself. You'll be identifying the relevant audience, and presenting your web site to it.

While doing that, check out what people like Matt Cutts say about optimizing sites: you may want to reword pages, etc. to improve search results in Google et al., but I do think that focussing on a Google Adsense campaign (and/or Yahoo Overture) will increase your awareness of how your target audience searches for you.

A mixture of both methods will get you the results you want: I'm not saying ignore SEO, I'm saying apply what you learn from Adsense to your own SEO efforts.

[green granite]

If it's any help, I go away 2 or 3 times a year. I tend to feed into google the following [ "holiday cottages" +(which ever area I'm interested in)] usually get lots of sites with cottages to let. However the first few pages tend to be dominated by agencies.

This site has some good tips etc: http://www.coffeecup.com/book/html/chapter15/optimizing-your-site-for-the-search-engines.htm

[plinkton]

One thing you can do is include suitable 'meta tags' (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931), apparently this used to be the way all searches were done a while ago.

Now searches are done with keywords, so you may well need to include plenty of these.

You can also link from other sites to yours and then check these links with a backlink checker (http://www.online-utility.org/webmaster/backlink_domain_analyzer.jsp)

Another thing that you can do is set up a blog and link from each site to the other, you can also have every entry in your blog use a different address. The fact that you may not actually be writing blog is academic in my view, it gives you extra web presence, you can even use the same background on each site, so that the two appear to be the same site, etc. Try blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com/home)

Once your site is SE optimised I would recommend a visit to the W3C validator (http://validator.w3.org/) to check your HTML and the W3C css-validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/) to check the CSS.

Another site for you is websiteoptimization.com (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/)

One last thing is to try to make your site mobile friendly with mobile emulators and validators:

ready.mobi (http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN)

mobi/emulator (http://mtld.mobi/emulator.php)

operamini.com (http://www.operamini.com/demo/)

I spent weeks creating my own website and getting it just right, so that it would display perfectly, load really fast and not crash browsers, it's worth doing.

Good luck with this.

[kenhughes]

Try this: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

One tip I can give - think hard and long about the keywords/phrases you want to optimise for. Do you really want to rank well on Holdidays in Spain, or would you rather come out well for Holidays in Barcelona?

The narrower you make your search criteria, the easier it is to rank well. (Go to Yahoo and search for 'miserable failure'. It only took around 15 websites linking to G Dubya's official White House biography page to put that at the top of the list).

Also re Keywords. Google, Yahoo and MSN virtually ignore the keywords meta tag, so put the keywords in the body of your page - not too much, but enough to make it obvious to a robot that those are the important words.

[Splat]

Many thanks for all your replies. I think I have a reasonable handle on most of them, have optimised the text for my market, have a rolling text line to keep Google interested.

I also hear that if you exchange links and link to another site that then links back to you, Google does not count that link.

Having looked at this, and need I say checked out the opposition, what I need to do is generate some links. I hear that link farms are not a good idea, so have avoided them. Any suggestions on this would be gratefuly received.

Cheers

Splat....

[kenhughes]

Rather than go for link farms, try to get yourself added to popular directories, such as Dmoz (and good luck with that one), they can help your inbound link count tremendously. This is because webmasters around the world are allowed to replicate the directory on their sites - and each one counts as a seperate inbound link.

JoeAnt (www.joeant.com (http://www.joeant.com)) is another popular directory where you may sign yourself up as an editor and put your own site(s) in the directory. I think you may have to edit a minimum number of entries before you can do that, but check it out - I may be confusing it (the minimum number of edits), with another directory site.

Also, try adding your sites to social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us. Sending press releases to (free) online news release sites is another good way of generating inbound links. Make sure you put your website address on the press release though. :hmm: