HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

[crouquet]

I've revamped my site a few times - feel reasonably happy with it visually now but have never really got to grips with good SEO. I need an urgent SEO medical and don't know quite where to go. I initially built it with zero knowledge under huge pressure concentrating on how it would look rather than how it would be found which I know was a mistake.

I've spent many precious hours trawling the forum for answers to getting the site to work- found many excellent solutions but putting them all into practice is wearing me down.

Searches for keywords which real people actually use is turning out only very few results which are in extremely high demand by other competitiors - we have holiday cottages (gites) in France ( and so do a million other website owners......!!) Can I really compete?

I added H tags but the bold typeface doesn't look good on the pages. How do others get round this ?

I was thinking of buying a book SEO for dummies (yes,it's that bad!) - has anyone used this and found it worthwhile?

I know that everyone's time is precious but I would be really grateful if someone could cast an eye over my site and tell me where I'm going wrong,could improve, etc etc.
Thank you in advance,

Elena
www.lescrouquets.net

[davidundalicia]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

Before you start spending good money, take a look at what you have, and the areas that you need to work on.
Below is a typical example of what the SE's might see for your site.

Concentrate on three main areas to begin with:
Title
Description
Keywords
You should be able to get these 3 items to 100% yourself with some tweaking.
Its not easy, but then again its not hard
You need to look at existing results(below) and then use this Analyser each time that you have changed something.
Here is the Link and you can download it and put it on your website for easy use. (its free)


Meta tags report for: http://www.lescrouquets.net/
meta tag length value
Title: 15 french holidays
Description: 160 self catering holiday cottages near Sarlat in the Dordogne region of france with swimming pool,private pitch and putt course and plenty to do for all the family
Keywords: 304 holiday,swimming,pool,gites,dordogne,france,golf, French holiday cottages,cottages wiith swimming pool,pitch and putt,dordogne gites,the dordogne,family holiday,french country cottages,self catering,salt water pool,internet,walking holidays,perigord noir,holiday accommodation,holiday cottages in France
Robots: 18 index, follow, All


Meta tags analysis.
Title: Title relevancy to page content is fair.
The Title relevancy to page content is 50%.
Description: Description meta tag contains no errors.
This tag contains 160 characters.
Description meta tag relevancy to page content is very good.
The Description meta tag relevancy to page content is 89%.
Keywords: Keywords meta tag contains too many keywords.
This tag contains 27 keywords. This is too many for what we would consider a 'robot friendly' keywords tag. The maximum number of keywords we recommend for this tag is 20.
Keywords meta tag relevancy to page content is good.
The keywords meta tag relevancy to page content is 74%.
Robots: The Robots meta tag contains no errors.
This tag contains 18 characters.

Where to Start:
Cut your Keywords down to 3 or 4:
Use 1 or 2 or 3 keywords in your page Title: (must be in the content)
use your Title in your Description. then describe your page contents. Not too long)

Change one thing at a time, then view the result as each is dependant on the others.............Happy tweaking.............lol

[Collectors-info]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

A very hard one to know what and who is correct. Titles & key words are one thing. But good outside links to your site is also another another. With quite a few searches for French rental cottages in quite a few different text variations, this one seemed to be a favoured with Google searches. LINK. Yet has a higher ranking with Yahoo. With looking at their site it seems the title is.......................
<title>French Holidays in France - Vacations Rentals, Gites de france, Villas in France Rental, B&amp;amp;B, hotels in France, cottages, farmhouses - real estate in france</title>


And the key words are............................................... ....
<meta name="keywords" content="French Holidays in France Vacations Rentals Gites de france Villa Rental B&amp;amp;B Bed and Breakfast hotels cottages farmhouses real estate in france" />
And the description is.....................

<meta name="description" content="French Holidays in France - Vacations Rentals, Gites de france, Villas in France, B&amp;amp;B hotels cottages farmhouses - real estate in france - vacation villa accommodation. Enjoy your holidays in France in one of the hundreds of listed vacation villas, gites, cottages, chateau, manoir, bed &amp;amp; breakfast, hotels and farmhouses - thousands of French homes on line to enjoy your holidays in France, plus property for sale throughout France." />
=11 + in title
=11 + in key words
=50 + in description
Now notice in the three parts above there is variations to appeal to a wider market. This is either someone very clued up or possibly someone from the US. (Remembering this is an English based company) There are things like “Vacations Rentals” / “vacation villa” & “real estate” which are not normal UK/EU terms of phrase. Words more like “Holiday” & “Estate Agents” would be a lot more common.
Also on this site they have an area on the bottom of the page with their most common searches. Even though this is linked to their search area. I still gives some good idea’s.
These are some of the most popular searches. Click to view accommodation...
This site also will have a few thousand links back to them, & this will also have a dramatic effect on there rankings.So this might also be somthing to have a good look into.

[whatnext]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

Elena - I do so sympathize. Going through much the same process myself at this moment. I recently bought Search Engine Optimization for Dummies and yes it is excelent and well worth the money as are most of the for Dummies series and I would certainly recommend it. There is a lot of good advise to be had here on the BV forum as well and I found Karen Macs 15 minute SEO & other tools really useful. Printed it off for further referance but now not sure where it is on the BV website. Probabably someone else will see this and give you better directions to it - kindest regards and good luck with it all - Antonia

[crouquet]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

Thanks everyone for the replies!

I'm working on the various suggestions - I just find it very difficult to work the keywords, phrases into " natural" sounding text and then finding the balance between not having enough and then having too many.

CHRIS - we actually have an advert with the link you gave ( it brings us in next to nothing and yes, we do link back to it!) and having done a bit of background research had noted it was always up there. Looking at their keywords and phrases, they do cross over a wide range of markets which we couldn't incorporate properly into our text.

When you fill in the ALT tags on images and behind shapes, nav bar etc how they get found? Should these also be filled in in the keywords & worked into the meta descriptions? Otherwise I have quite a few pages which just wouldn't have enough natural as well as relevant text.

Thanks for any more advice!
Elena
www.lescrouquets.net

[Karen Mac]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

Yes alt tags figure into keyword development.. but again.. DESCRIBE the image. dont keyword stuff it. If I was blind or site impaired and landed on your site, and the machine had to tell me what was displayed there, thats what your alt tage should be.

Karen

[Collectors-info]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

Hi Elena,
I realize you are naturally trying to get more bookings. But have you looked through your stats & seen what visitors are up to when visiting the site & how long they are staying & where they are from. If your not getting bookings through the site? Could it be worth adding your site to some of the agencies & having to pay a fee/commission?
I realize that the UK is only a tiny part Frances holiday business income. But i don’t think quite so many Brits will be traveling in the EU this year with the rotten exchange rate we are now getting.

[crouquet]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

Hi Chris!

Yes we do already pay to advertise on 8 different UK and French agencies and have to date got all of our bookings through this. We do monitor them, which work and which don't and adjust accordingly.We're on loads of free sites as well but to be honest they're of very limited value.

If we'd had to rely on our getting booking through our site alone , I'm sorry to say we'd have had to have hung up our hats a long time ago!

I can but try though and would like to get found under our own steam if at all humanly possible! Every little helps!

You are right though, this will be a hard year for a lot of people. At the moment the UK market is very quiet, not surprisingly. We're hoping that they just hanging off to see what happens and will still book later.

Fingers crossed!

Elena
www.lescrouquets.net

[Collectors-info]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

Hi, its odd how sometimes a downward turn can really hurt some & be of benefit to others. I was having lunch with some friends the other day & we was talking about some flats they purchased a couple of years ago. They where just about making a small profit from a purchased of these flats on a buy to rent mortgage, & with the way interest rates have gone down the UK, they are nearly £1000.00 a month better off in just repayments alone. Its always nice that someone can smile on the back of bad times. Its just not all of us that have the luck. lol

[crouquet]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

That's very true Chris - some friends of ours in England remortgaged their house and ended up £ 300 better off each month just by borrowing more money!!
Ah well, all swings & roundabouts I suppose!

Hope all is well!
Elena
www.lescrouquets.net

[cbrandstater]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

How do I add text to the alt tag? I'm using some text as html in order to preserve the font that I want. When I right click on the properties/html I get the generated html but can't add anything between the alt=" ". Please help me with this. I've tried everything I can figure out. Also, what is a header tag and how do I modify it? Thanks, Cherry

[cbrandstater]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

Sorry, forgot to add that my site is gentlybroken.com. I'm not sure how to improve the SEO without being able to add to the alt tag.

[dreamtogreen]

Re: HELP!! SEO help needed urgently!!

Why don't you try using some long tail key words. These are key words that are longer than one word. Then make a phrase out of that. I have done this with my web pages and videos. You may want to put together several videos and put them out. When I did this My videos started to come up number one on google with 185 million searches. By mixing video longtail keywords that are the same as your site I think you will score better.