Organic listings

[Irishraven]

Hi all,

Our website http://www.jurysdoyle.com has a PR 6 and has been around over 7 years now. We pay a fair amount to google et al for adwords and have constant PPC presence with all of our hotels.

My question is: when you search on google.ie for Dublin hotels or hotels Dubiln we appear 10th & 10th respectively in organic results.

I have looked at all the results that appear above us and of them, only visitdublin.com has a higher Page Rank (7)

I have looked at our title, Snippet (description), Keyword density, age of site and even had a look to see the last time the googlebot visited (June 1st)

If anyone could suggest 1 thing that they would list more important or as important as what i have mentioned above I would be greatly interested and very appreciative of!

Thanks

Irish Raven

 

[gav240z]

Hi all,

Our website http://www.jurysdoyle.com has a PR 6 and has been around over 7 years now. We pay a fair amount to google et al for adwords and have constant PPC presence with all of our hotels.

My question is: when you search on google.ie for Dublin hotels or hotels Dubiln we appear 10th & 10th respectively in organic results.

I have looked at all the results that appear above us and of them, only visitdublin.com has a higher Page Rank (7)

I have looked at our title, Snippet (description), Keyword density, age of site and even had a look to see the last time the googlebot visited (June 1st)

If anyone could suggest 1 thing that they would list more important or as important as what i have mentioned above I would be greatly interested and very appreciative of!

Thanks

Irish Raven

Have you used the Google Webmaster Tools facility to see Crawler errors / page access problems and other HTTP errors? It will also tell you the traffic you are getting for certain keywords in terms of percentages and the (Click through on your listing).

That might shed some light.

Page Rank is only 1 factor in quality, I wouldn't take it as an indicator that you should be a head of anyone else.

How long has your domain name been registered for?

I took a quick look at your site. Seems like alot of table markup and spacer images are being used. While this doesn't neccessarily indicate why you are having trouble moving up, it might be worth looking at making your site more accessible.

Just some suggestions.

 

[paul]

1) get rid of tables !
2) remove useless DIVs that look like

<div><img src="img/trans.gif" border="0" width="5" height="5" alt="" /></div>

3) ever hear of the title attribute for HREFs ?
4) alot of your pages have the same TITLE, META description , META keywords
5) get a robots.txt / sitemap

Maybe hire a SEO ?

 

[Redfly]

I *did* the SEO for one of the sites ranking above you and let me tell you, it wasn't that difficult. Took about 1 month part time. All it took was link building.

PR has nothing to do with ranking. It would be relatively easy to get a site with ZERO PR number one for BOTH search terms.

Seeing I'm not doing anything more with the site, I can tell you this... Inbound Links with specific anchor text is your friend.

 

[Irishraven]

1) get rid of tables !
2) remove useless DIVs that look like

<div><img src="img/trans.gif" border="0" width="5" height="5" alt="" /></div>

3) ever hear of the title attribute for HREFs ?
4) alot of your pages have the same TITLE, META description , META keywords
5) get a robots.txt / sitemap

Maybe hire a SEO ?

Appreciate all the feedback guys, would you believe we pay an SEO company already, don't want to mention their name but they have been around a long time!

I can see companies with PR 1 appearing above our site and that obviously our PR 6 doesn't matter as we are appearing below them - but link building? I was led to believe that link building have you a better PR? is this not the case?

 

[paul]

would you believe we pay an SEO company already

I would get rid of your current company and give Dave or Richard a shout.

PR isn't as important as it used to be. Link building with relevant anchors would benefit you. i.e. people linking to your site with the anchor, "dublin hotel", as long as it's done to make it look like you are not trying to spam the search engines.

 

[Irishraven]

thanks

again, tahnks for your feedback - we are going to have to re-evaluate our current provider for sure!

another question while I have this thread open - if you have a sitemap.html which was created by your developer and is already in place - is it possible to have an xml sitemap created and submitted? Basically, if i use the website xml-sitemap.com to generate a sitemap and then proceed to submit it through google webmaster tools, will their be a conflict with the html version that has been in place from the start?

 

[paul]

Nope they are different, sitemap.xml is different to a sitemap.html, one is a HTML file ,readable by people and one is a XML file readable by geeks and search engine spiders.

sitemap.xml is for google , here in an example of a sitemap. In fact you can call it anything. This should also be referenced in the robots.txt file and submitted via the webmasters console.

sitemap.html is an easy way for users and robots to find hard to find pages around your website. here is an example of a HTML sitemap

 

[Cormac]

xhtml sitemaps and xml sitemaps don't conflict with one another. One is for robots and one is for humans. You can have both on your site without any issue whatsoever.

The top two results in Google.ie for Dublin Hotels have the term 'Dublin' appearing between 35-38 times. Your homepage has the term Dublin appearing 5 times.

It may not be in the interest of your site to populate the homepage with the word Dublin as your site isn't specific for Dublin but instead it is targeted at a variety of cities. I would focus on getting one of your interior pages ranking for the term 'Dublin Hotels' instead of your homepage.

Setup something like http://www.jurysdoyle.com/dublin-hotels/ and get your keyword density up to the same level as the top 2 sites. Build your anchored links into that page instead of your homepage.

Do you guys own jurys-dublin-hotels.com aswll?

 

[mneylon]

As has already been said, PR won't help you with specific search queries

Dublin is just one of the areas that Jurys targets, so while you obviously want to get more business without paying through the nose for it you might not find it that easy to rank well for that search query without damaging other ones

It might also help if your site was hosted on Irish IP space. It's currently showing as being on a UK ip block

 

[Drang3d]

Like Blacknight said, your going to have to consider where the majority of your clients orginate. Are they from Ireland or are they international visitors? If it's Ireland, like Blacknight said you should move to an irish ip address. Also update your settings in webmasters console on google to reflect this also.

 

[Gavin]

Keep it in the UK for your market....

 

[RedCardinal]

Keep it in the UK for your market....

I wouldn't change it at all unless you think it through quite carefully.

I had a look through the Jurys site previously - if memory serves me right you make use of a lot of subdomains,and a few other domains for good measure?

Looking now, and one thing that strikes me - they always say you should never link from a page with the same anchor as you want that page to rank for - I'm looking at Dublin Hotels, Dublin Accommodation – Jurys Doyle Hotels and the first body link.

Do you know how many external links you have pointing at Dublin Hotels, Dublin Accommodation – Jurys Doyle Hotels which are NOT from your own domains?

 

[glengara]

- they always say you should never link from a page with the same anchor as you want that page to rank for -

Interesting observation RC as IIRC the original PR formula envisioned anchor text could be relevant to both the linking and linked-to pages, is this an internal link thing?

 

[RedCardinal]

Interesting observation RC as IIRC the original PR formula envisioned anchor text could be relevant to both the linking and linked-to pages, is this an internal link thing?

Yep - internal linking.