Would anyone mind taking a look at our website?

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yourlamanga
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Location: La Manga Del Mar Menor, Costa Calida, Murcia, Spain
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Would anyone mind taking a look at our website?

Post by yourlamanga »

We have had our own website for a couple of years now but over the last few weeks my husband has been trying to bring up to 2010 standards. We intend taking our professional camera out with us next time we visit and getting some better photos and I think some of the wording needs worked on, something that has just popped out at me is the page on Aguilas where my OH has written that 5 crayfish cost him 50 euros :shock: , in general it's not an expensive area so I have asked him to fix this as it does us no justice. Otherwise I would like to know what outsiders think and would be grateful for any comments, hints, tips. :D

Thanks in advance! :D

www.yourlamanga.com
"There are two seasons in Scotland: June and winter.” - Billy Connolly

http://www.yourlamanga.com/index.php
http://bit.ly/aGbQ6n - Homelidays
http://bit.ly/c7O4O9 - HR
http://twitter.com/yourlamanga - Twitter
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mpprh
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Post by mpprh »

After a very quick look -

Just to say that the first impression is that the text is too much, and too small.


Also, why have these tags been added ? :

<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir" />
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="GB","ES","PT","FR","DE","SE">

Peter
The Languedoc Page
www.the-languedoc-page.com
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

mpprh wrote: Also, why have these tags been added ? :

<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="GB","ES","PT","FR","DE","SE">
This is what is known as geotagging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging

Very useful for retail and tourism sites. My feeling, from what I've read, is this will become increasingly important for search.
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yourlamanga
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Post by yourlamanga »

Thanks have taken onboard your comments about font size and the content, we have increased the font size now but the content will have to be a project for the weekend when we have more time, I agree with you there is too much, I wouldn't read through it all if looking for an apartment.

I have no idea about websites but this is what my husband says re the code:-

<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir" /> is there so that Yahoo and Google use the meta data from the page head tags to produce the wording on the search engine results page.

ODP - Open Directory Project or DMOZ supplies data to the SE's but this tag tells them to ignore it. It means that when you change your pages description etc the SE's will follow this.

Given the SE's are using meta data less and less and instead are using the 1st and last paragraphs to index on.

Clear as mud! :lol:

Noticed there's a dead link in the first page and that needs fixed.
"There are two seasons in Scotland: June and winter.” - Billy Connolly

http://www.yourlamanga.com/index.php
http://bit.ly/aGbQ6n - Homelidays
http://bit.ly/c7O4O9 - HR
http://twitter.com/yourlamanga - Twitter
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

yourlamanga wrote: Given the SE's are using meta data less and less and instead are using the 1st and last paragraphs to index on.
I don't feel that that is correct but would welcome any evidence to support your assertion.
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yourlamanga
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Post by yourlamanga »

Hi Garry, thanks, I don't know if this answers your question or not because I'm not very techy but I passed your comments on to my husband who said if you go to our website, press the La Manga button at the top, then open new window, go to Google.com, type in www.yourlamanga.com and then compare the indented listing that starts "there are countless golf courses..." you'll notice this is the same as the first paragraph on the above page.
"There are two seasons in Scotland: June and winter.” - Billy Connolly

http://www.yourlamanga.com/index.php
http://bit.ly/aGbQ6n - Homelidays
http://bit.ly/c7O4O9 - HR
http://twitter.com/yourlamanga - Twitter
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

OK, I just did that and see what you mean. But, Google has taken the first sentence from your paragraph on that particular page because you haven't created the vital <description> tag. It does that in these instances but I suspect it prefers not to as it's more overhead for their system!

Besides that, you're missing a valuable SEO opportunity here.

Also, a few other things:

1. The site is poorly coded with inline styles and tables. Not very efficient and therefore this sort of code is not properly optimised for search engines. It doesn't seem to have a CSS style sheet.

2. Your homepage is stuffed with keywords. People used to do this years ago when they thought it would help them, but Google et al got wise to that.

Not only that, but the profusion of bold underlined text is hard for people to read and scan regardless of how large the font is.
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mpprh
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Post by mpprh »

Garri wrote:
mpprh wrote: Also, why have these tags been added ? :

<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="GB","ES","PT","FR","DE","SE">
This is what is known as geotagging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging

Very useful for retail and tourism sites. My feeling, from what I've read, is this will become increasingly important for search.
I hadn't come across the DMOZ & Yahoo Dir tags before.

I know the theory of the region tag. However, I understood it was to allow identification of where the subject of the website is located. So "ES-MU" is all that is needed ?

If I am wrong and it can relate to the location of potential guests, then why not use "ALL" and let the Danes and Norwegians, etc have an opportunity of renting !

Peter
Last edited by mpprh on Thu Feb 25, 2010 11:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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yourlamanga
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Post by yourlamanga »

Thanks Garri, I've handed the keyboard over to my husband to answer this as it's all Greek to me.

Hi Garri

Thanks for the constructive feedback, really appreciate it.

My tags are up for being worked on. The only real SEO work has been done on the index page, to date we've worked on "look and feel". I agree about the readability of page 1 and am looking at alternatives for SEO'ing.

All the books i read on google suggest that meta tags are becoming more and more defunct, what do you think?

The css stylesheet is there, http://www.yourlamanga.com/style.css

I plan to move from table to DIV tags but just haven't perfected the technique yet.

I often say to my wife that SEO and websites is banality to the extreme, in fact I reckon I could sign my life away to just managing the one website!
:lol:
"There are two seasons in Scotland: June and winter.” - Billy Connolly

http://www.yourlamanga.com/index.php
http://bit.ly/aGbQ6n - Homelidays
http://bit.ly/c7O4O9 - HR
http://twitter.com/yourlamanga - Twitter
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

yourlamanga wrote: All the books i read on google suggest that meta tags are becoming more and more defunct, what do you think?
I'm not sure which books you've been reading as I don't agree with that. I can't see how Google, or other SEs, would index search results without the title and description meta tags as their whole UI relies on those 2 key elements for the presentation of results.

Are you sure you're not thinking about the <keyword> tag being redundant? If so, then I would agree.

The biggest question however, given the rise of social media and networking, is will search become defunct?

I read an article a few years ago, before Twitter and Facebook, which was talking about SMO (Social Media Optimisation) and with it, SMM (Social Media Marketing)

Thinking about that now in light of the rapid uptake of both Twitter and Facebook, I think it was quite prophetic.

One of our sites, attracted nearly 30k unique visitors in one month alone at its peak last summer (site at that time was only 8 months old). 65% came from search engines with Google sending the lion's share. The rest came from blogs, forums and social media/networking. That's quite a percentage and one that seems to be growing. The site isn't even fully optimised for SMO, or SMM.

I do feel there's a seismic shift taking place but for now, given the empirical facts, I'll stick with meta tags for our websites.
Last edited by Garri on Thu Feb 25, 2010 1:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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yourlamanga
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Post by yourlamanga »

My husband again, think he should just get his own LMH account! LOL!

'Hi mpprh

I'm afraid I dont know enough on geo-tags to advise, what I do know is:

1) Get your geo-location (latitude,longitude) off google. Use the relevant geotag in your tags with this data in it.

2) Via google webmaster>business center, create your google location map. Put a link on your website to this map.

The latter will get you instantly indexed. '

Garri, thanks, he says he will have a look at your post in more detail later as there's quite a lot to it. :)
"There are two seasons in Scotland: June and winter.” - Billy Connolly

http://www.yourlamanga.com/index.php
http://bit.ly/aGbQ6n - Homelidays
http://bit.ly/c7O4O9 - HR
http://twitter.com/yourlamanga - Twitter
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

yourlamanga wrote: Garri, thanks, he says he will have a look at your post in more detail later as there's quite a lot to it
No probs. I just re-read my earlier post and had to clarify my statement in bold.

I've yet to see a persuasive argument, and indeed evidence, to suggest that meta tags are becoming defunct. In fact, the case seems to be that additional meta tags are becoming more important for certain sites, which contradicts your husband's assertion that meta tags are becoming defunct.
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Windy
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Post by Windy »

http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p ... 2cfc&hl=en

suggests that Google ignores the geo tags
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HenryG
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Post by HenryG »

Hi

Your website text is unreadable.

I would suggest forgetting SEO almost entirely but to concentrate on a passage of text that reads very very well first. Get that right and then maybe tweak more SEO much much later - with further help. But get the presentation right first.

Too much effort on SEO is very counter-productive anyway - your site end up being penalised.

I also, wouldn't worry about using DIVs at this stage. Using tables could be a good compromise in getting a clean safe design up and running. The advantage of tables is that it won't break under different resolutions, different browsers or operating systems. The impact of tables on SEO is pretty minimal, so I wouldn't worry too much. Lots of sites out the still rank pretty well and were designed using tables. If you can get a nice layout using tables but may get things wrong using DIVs - then stick with tables.

What Software are you using to design your website?
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

HenryG wrote:The advantage of tables is that it won't break under different resolutions, different browsers or operating systems.
Evidence, please.

Agree about SEO, work on the content and make it readable for the user. Consider using bullet points on front page to highlight your property's key points etc. Then worry about SEO later, once you have well crafted copy to work with (and, when you know what you're doing)

As for SEO, we've signed up to this for all of our WordPress sites:

scribeseo.com
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