My parents have asked me to look into something for them, and I really have no idea where to start with it, so I'm turning to you guys. Basically, we own a hotel, and just got the website redesigned. While it is a lot nicer than the old one, we are way way down on Google. We're not after anything big, but a search for "(local town) hotel" or "(local town) restaurant" should at least have us on the first page, as we are one of the larger places. Yet there are places with completely crap websites higher up than us, and places nowhere near there higher up. I don't know enough about this to advise on it. The guy who designed the website for us (who when farmed it out to someone else, we just discovered) wants to charge us extra to get us higher up, but I'm sceptical about his abilities. Another local company took a look at the site, and told us that he can see some major problems that will affect search engine rankings, specifically some javascript on the front page. I was under the impression that javascript didn't affect search engine bots, so I'm unsure how much of that is just ******** to reel us in. He also said there were some other problems that he could easily fix, but we would have to transfer the maintenance to his company, rather than the people who designed the site originally. Lastly, we've also been contacted by a company that is there purely to get you higher up search engine rankings. They did fax us and call us unsolicited though, so I'm kinda sceptical about that too. They're all charging the same sort of money, but I want to know who I should be going with, if anyone. It's quite a lot of money, but if it gets us on the front page, it'll be worth it. My gut feeling is to go with the second company, but I'd like a bit of advice from a pro. I won't link to the site right now, but if someone wants to take a look at it, I'll stick a link up. Cheers guys.
The crawlers do ignore most JS, but If you have something like a blank holder page that pulls content in via AJAX or something, then the crawlers won't see the content. I believe they also look at meta tags, and stuff in H1 THML tags, but it's all a bit of a blind science to me. Please do post/pm a link, and I (and a few others I expect) will take a look and see if we can see anything wrong?
Cheers bloke. After a cursory glance, the biggest thing that jumps out at me are the Javascript menus. You can do pretty much the same thing with Unordered lists and CSS. One of my friends wrote a great tutorial for Webthang on exactly this, but it's since been taken down. For a (simple) example, something like this, though with rollovers, and not grey.
Google don't release details on how to achieve a rank - if they did all the spam sites etc would just tick the boxes to get their site recognised. But things that are suspected to improve your rank such as... 1. increased off site incoming links (other sites that link to yours) - in your case you might like to encourage review sites to review your place or advertise on someone's site etc. 2. regular updates to the page 3. having an xml site map (allows the crawlers to crawl your page more effectively) 4. Your page titles are crucial - look at ebuyer's home page title for instance (cheap laptops, hard drives, lcd monitors, TVs and more at ebuyer) - they are trying to match keywords for products they want to be associated with! 5. Make sure your pictures have alternative text (crawler ignore pictures but lap up text) 6. In bound links should be keywork links (ie 'Hotel in Wales' rather than 'click here') As I say this isn't an exact science, just suggestions. It can take some time to build up a rank too. You can check your rank (1-10) using google bar in IE.
Alright, thanks for the suggestions. The main thing I did notice was the page titles, which I figured might be hurting the rank a fair bit. The javascript menus are another thing - I recommended not going with them, not because of any technical reasons, but because I hate when they don't work properly.
CSS drop down menus are incredibly effective, I'd suggest using them. (I have some example code if you want it.)
I can't really be messing around with the site myself. While I do have the ftp passwords and stuff, I don't want to be messing around with the site and break something.
Here is a usefull article that may help you. The Site Wizard Also, a quick google search (don't you love the irony ) gives you a lot of links too.
Tell Google Maps where you are! On the How to Find Us page. You're using just a plain link to a location. Get the business listed on Google Business IIRC this will also improve PR slightly. http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7039
getting a listing on dmoz.org (while quite often taking a long time) will usually help a good deal. As said before, page titles and links in to your site are the big things you need.
I've already added the listing to Google Business directory (which was one of the services they wanted to charge 600 extra for.) I'll try to get the link on the site edited in though. Edit: it's on dmoz too already.
Google webmaster tools is an awesome free service that will tell you where you rank for your top keywords, what your page ranks are, what your keyword densities are like, etc. Time is one of the most important factors people tend to forget, the only SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques that can get you up the results quickly are the kind that are equally likely to get you removed from the search engines all together, so steer clear of those guys. Google will actively stop new domains from achieving high ranks for up to a year, so as you registered your domain a little over a year ago, chances are you'll only just be able to start getting good results. With the menus, what the designers have failed to do is allow the javascript to die with dignity, meaning if the user (or search bot) doesn't user javacsript, not all the pages can be reached. The most simple solution to this would be to submit a site map to google, but that wont solve the problem for all search engines (another thing people forget is that yahoo and msn do still have a small but significant market share of searches) I feel I should point out that the site fails W3 validation: w3 validator result - 14 errors on homepage so if you are considering making a complaint against the company that designed the site (and from what you've said I think you should) that's some extra ammo for you. How much are these people charging anyway? My company would probably charge between £250 - £350 to fix the problems and optimise for search engines, so hopefully that helps you. PM me if you got any more questions, I'm always happy to help. Edit: just tried the site without javascript, and only the homepage can be reached, so that's all a search crawler is likely to see, if I were you I'd definitely be having words with the company that made that site.
The Javascript menus are definitely the biggest issue. Once they are fixed, things should become easier. Anchor text (the text that a link has) is critical. Other than that, the best i can say is +1 for what firehed said: Seomoz.org. read it... lots.
+1 on the javascript menus. I've just looked at it in lynx (a text browser) and you cannot actually get to any other pages apart from the home page! google won't be able to either