More text on your front page. I got to go to a job now but I'll elaborate on that later on.
Ok, was a long crappy day too
. Bad client followed by bad client getting sacked
. Anyhoo.
Keywords
The google search engine scans the first page in your entire site. This page is usually the index or a page automatically redirected from the index (using the Refresh command). To efficiently optimize the search, the highest page (your index) in your site should contain the keywords that describe your site. For instance:
Welcome to the Photography Holidays in Spain website. We are Caroline and Neil and we moved out to this beautiful mountainous region of Spain from East Anglia in the UK.
Stumbling upon this area we immediately saw that it had potential. It enables us to share our enthusiasm for what we have found to those seeking to "capture" something of the "Real Spain".
The more that we have explored this area the more we have realised what a wonderful location it is! We do not make claims of being super-professional photographers, more enthusiastic amateurs happy to share our discoveries with you.
We look forward to showing you, or directing you to, the gems that we continue to discover and hope that you will enjoy your photography holiday with us.
At first glance there are not many keywords describing your site specifics. There are however the few (highlighted) which describe the aims of your site. These keywords are far to vague for google to rank your site among the first pagers.
A small solution would be to describe which region of Spain you are in. This will narrow down the search criteria for Google.
For instance:
Stumbling upon this area we immediately saw that it had potential.
Could read:
The highly photogenic <insert name of area here> region of Spain opened our eyes as a hot spot for landscape photographers.
This now has 4 keywords in one sentence and it also provides concise information to the reader. In esscence its all about the wording. Cramming as many keywords in a reasonable manner into one page.
Keywords are ranked and read in an order. For instance:
- Header
- H1 tag
- H2 tag
- Content
- Footer
So, your header needs to legible, then your H1 tag (subtitle) needs to hold some kind of relevent keyword and so on,...
Sitemap
The Sitemaps protocol enables search engines to identify which pages are available for crawling. Sitemaps can be submitted to Google via its
Webmasters Tools. Its free.
How do you write a sitemap?
Easy. Open TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad (Win) and index your sites pages in an importance hierarchy for instance:
Again, your "home" page should be your
first page, do not have an "Enter Here" page. Simply save the file titled sitemap with the .txt extension (either in UTF-8 or Rich Text) format. Then upload in Google webtools.
Thats kind of the basics of keywording and sitemapping. There are lots of other ways for instance using Meta Keywords in the <head> section of your html pages. Meta Descriptions work really well. This is also added to the <head> tag. It allows you to describe your website in brief under the search result. Very beneficial and often overlooked.
EDIT: Looked through your site in more detail a few of the pages can be merged to create the one index page (i.e: the first page google sees). To me these would be:
By merging all this you will gain a lot of keywords on one page which will boost your ranking.
Another thing I noticed is that your header is just an image file. The text should be actual text as this acts as one big keyword. The ideal way to achieve this is to use CSS styling. It is fairly straight forward to learn. For example
my entire site is based on CSS.
I hope this kind of makes sense. My brother works in internet marketing and he taught me the ins and outs and the technical sides of it. It has worked well for me though I tend not to have to rely on my website anymore as I have decent enough client base. Though in your situation, the google and search engine ranking is extremely important. You have to keep in mind that you are going up against some very stiff competition (i.e: Thomas Cook, Going Places, First Choice). What you can do, is market yourselves alongside them, kind of beneficial keywording. So include a quick line in your About Us along the lines of:
We are not a travel agent like <insert names here>. We offer a personal, friendly photography guide service.
Right, I'm rambling.
Sorry.
Hope this helps.
Dan.
