newbie website help me help me plee- feedback..? meta tag optimization..

[holidayhavens]

help

i could really do with some help here.. im trying to generate clean traffic to my new website for www.holidayhavens.co.uk (http://www.holidayhavens.co.uk) and have been wresting with my meta tags and website search optimisation.

the tags i am using are as follows..

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<title>Holiday Cottage &amp; Rental Property in UK Scotland France Spain Portugal Canaries</title>

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="holidayhavens,holiday cottage,gites,self catering,bed, breakfast,villa,rental,accommodation,youth hostels,gite,rent,villa,advertise holiday property,apartments,Isle Skye,Palma,Gomera,Gran Canaria,Lanzarote,Fuerteventura,">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Advertise and Search for Holiday Cottages Gites Apartments Villas self catering accommodation, Book direct with rental owners. Upload & edit your rental details online with holidayhavens">
<META NAME="abstract" CONTENT="holidayhavens rental holiday accommodation listings in UK,France,Spain,Portugal and Canary Islands.New property listings appearing every day.Advertise your property with us. ">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="EN">
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="holidayhavens">
<META NAME="distribution" CONTENT="Global">
<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="www.holidayhavens.co.uk 2004">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="FOLLOW,INDEX">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="4 days">

Ive been looking at google adwords waswell but just think its really expensive and badly explained....

are there any good meta tag checkers out there taht are reliable..

I do a search in google on 'holidayhavens' and it brings up text from my footer...yet in the optimisation tools it brings up my keywords..

help me someone.....

[holidayhavens]

sorry, i didnt include the tags i was using, i have now..

[holidayhavens]

okay

I got some great feedback from jocelyn and ive removed the php session ids from my website.

things ive done since i started

- i have now included a site map with a url on my front page which displays a url for each property im listing.. - will these get spidered also?

- ive also got each property listing to create its own meta tag title which should, as i understand it get a listing under its unique title?

so i should now have one met tag title for my main page, and unique entries for my listings pages...

Could someone confirm that this is the case and if there is anything else glaringly obvious missing, or that i may benefit from....

thanks !

[dilligaf]

HH
If you can rewrite the urls to the property listings they'll get spidered earlier and more frequently. It's not a major issue as they will get cached and ranked. You may choose to take the dynamic title and include it in an H1 at the top of the page to get them ranked. Als you can use dynamic descriptions/keywords that should help on Yahoo for the specific property listings.

Big Glare: The titles on all your main pages are identical (but I guess you said that). The title is the most important (outside of back links) factor in getting listed for different terms. You should individualize them, similar perhaps to your property listings (if it's coming from a db)

Because you're doing real estate rentals, you may want to check out Real Estate Webmasters Forum (http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/). It's a great place to find related link partners. (Plus your sig there might have additional weight coming from a related source)

[holidayhavens]

ill take a look at the individual page header this is a good idea....

i think my new site map has got the listing url's covered now without the phpsession appearing, so im awaiting spider activity with great anticipation !!

and i will check out the real estate webmaster pages..

thanks v m!

[holidayhavens]

Hi everyone

Okay ive really been trying to optimise my site and have increased spider activity quite a bit over the last week. Here are the results from awstats. But can someone tell me why googlebot is only picking up 31 pages?

why is the second figure much lower than the first one?

Ive added a site map following advice from here that lists all my properties and wonder if this is being picked up? how can i tell what pages they are spidering..

any extra advice, ive been on the real estate pages but its a bit quiet there.

thanks (please dont laugh at my rubbish stats!) 8-|

Unknown robot (identified by hit on 'robots.txt') 0+30 3.72 KB 27 Aug 2004 - 20:44
Unknown robot (identified by 'robot') 57+37 1013.17 KB 27 Aug 2004 - 18:24
Unknown robot (identified by 'spider') 56+4 782.53 KB 27 Aug 2004 - 15:38
Googlebot (Google) 143+31 2.37 MB 27 Aug 2004 - 08:53
Alexa (IA Archiver) 30+5 376.76 KB 27 Aug 2004 - 00:11
Inktomi Slurp 2+2 35.66 KB 25 Aug 2004 - 09:45
Unknown robot (identified by 'crawl') 11+4 200.26 KB 24 Aug 2004 - 17:51
Jeeves 1+1 17.88 KB 24 Aug 2004 - 14:26
Fast-Webcrawler (AllTheWeb) 1+1 17.58 KB 23 Aug 2004 - 14:24
Lycos 254+1 3.88 MB 20 Aug 2004 - 11:02

[jocelyn]

Why it's picking up only 31. My guess would be that it's because these are the 31 links you have on your home page. Your sitemap has 40. If those 31 are crawled everyday, then your homepage must be a PR5 now. Your sitemap being new, it does not have a high enough popularity to get the links on it crawled.

[holidayhavens]

thanks jocelyn, i thought this might have been the case but i dont really know what to do about it.

how i can increase the popularity of my site map to be included by the spider this has all my links for properties in which have all got unique meta tag titles so i must get this fixed as soon as.

should i submit my site map url to google and the others?

[jocelyn]

[QUOTE=holidayhavens]...should i submit my site map url to google and the others?[/QUOTE]
Submitting the site map is useless for google, links do the trick much faster.
Your homepage has a high popularity because it has many pages linked to it. Usually other sites and also internal page must point to it. This raises it's PR and once it's high enough (PR5) it will get the links on it crawled daily. You have to do the same with the map. I link to my sitemap from all my site's pages. This way it has a high PR and gets all the pages on it crawled daily, and it's also good for the visitors that can navigate with it also.

[holidayhavens]

should i put it in the footer as this is loaded with everypage?

my page is made up of 4 parts a header, menu,footer and these are loaded with everypage on the website. ie site_map.php is surrounded by these 3 different pages so trying to link to my site_map on every page could be achieved by putting it in the footer as this is loaded every time.

if i put it in the footer, linking to the sitemap do you think this might help.?

really appreciate your advice..

[jocelyn]

Footer is good. Did you run a spider simulator on your page ?
Just to see how bots will see them and maybe validate the html to be sure there is no bug.

[holidayhavens]

okay, thanks ive now added it..

yeah i have run a few spider things but i like this one

http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi

it seems to give me a good view of all the pages.

i wonder if it is because i have put the full link in my menupage ie
http://www.holidayhavens.co.uk/site_map.php

rather than
/site_map.php

would it see this as an external link.? i think i might change it just in case..

[jocelyn]

Won't change a thing. Both will be seen as internal links. As long as it bings the page up properly when used, it's fine. You have to use http://www.blabla.com for your homepage rather than /index.thml so you don't split your PR to the 2 URL versions of the same page.

[holidayhavens]

thanks for your help jocelyn.. i think patience may be the key from now on

until i think of another question..

ill post a spider update again soon..

[holidayhavens]

well after a bit of patience im now getting a few more hits from the google bot, much better than the original 31 pages i was getting.. It seems to be visiting me twice a day now..

Googlebot (Google) 1178+57 22.01 MB 21 Sep 2004 - 13:05

I dont have a PR yet why is that then? i only started a month or so ago so is time the main factor with this.?

i have also set up a links page if anyone is interested...?
holidayhavens free link exchange (http://www.holidayhavens.co.uk/link_to_us/)

thanks for the great advice !

[leeds1]

I posted a note on your google hits on your "hello" thread

One more thing

What KWs are your targeting ?

I was playing and thought AH! you started the "hello" thread to see if you could get to #1 for "holidayhavens" and you have- out of 3 results :(

Should you not split the 2 words up at all ie: holiday havens ?

Just a thought because I don't know what you are targeting - maybe it's self catering holiday cottage as that's in (part of) your title - but that phrase is no-where else together in your page - not even as a heading.

G may thing you are targeting some of the following:

property search options
travel services

or anything else that you have as a header as these is the first things a bot will see

Also - dump all your JS into external files like :

<script type='text/javascript' src='/exmplmenu_var.js'></script>

or whatever..