http://www.select-a-room.com/

philips_asla · #1 (**permalink**) 06-29-2006, 06:35 AM

Hi,

We are a UK-based travel agent specialising in hotel accommodation in Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Our website (Select-A-Room) has been active for about five years now, and we're attempting to increase our rankings in search results - Google in particular, since most of our non-PPC traffic comes from there.

I'm aware that the site uses tables for layout and the HTML doesn't validate. Unfortunately a redesign is not possible in the near future, so I'm really looking for ways to boost our rankings making only minor changes. Ideally, we'd like to concentrate on keywords like "hotel in moscow", "hotels in kiev", "ukraine hotels", etc.

We have already added links to internal pages (hotel descriptions via the news text and the hotel list page), which has helped slightly (previously the only way to get past the front page was through a form). We have also added links to our other country-specific sites at the bottom of the page in an attempt to boost our cross-linking. I'm aware that having essentially duplicate sites on multiple domains is not the best way to handle this, but again this is not something that can be changed easily.

Any help would be much appreciated.

http://www.select-a-room.com/

JuniorOnline · #2 (**permalink**) 06-29-2006, 09:18 AM

Hiya,

I really think you need to look into improving your left hand side menu. simply because, there is no point of having visitors landing on the page to leave within 5 seconds. Your Visitors will need to see some livelyness to the site - after all they are going on holiday. the grey colour at the top remind me of foggy rainy days.. not too sure this would help your conversions.

- make sure your left hand side menu is left aligned. you might consider using bullet images and increase the space between each link to make it easier to read and spot. remove the underline and only make it show when you hover over the links.
The link colour is way too dark for that background, either make the background lighter or make the links lighter and keep the background colour the same.

- your main homepage is packed with text - no images. again this will not help your conversion rates. the drop off rate is likely to be high.

in terms of SEO:
- each page needs a title that has the keywords. your title needs to be in <h1> tags.
- your menu needs to show on every page. at the moment when you click on the menu from the main homepage, you get sent to that link. then you have to click back to see more of the menu. what if your visitor landed on one of the pages with no menu directly from a search engine? ;)

- instead of saying (Welcome to select-estonia.com) you should say: (Moscow Hotels - Estonia)

same with your other pages.

- add alt tags to your images using the keywords

also
your tag title must be very similar if not the same as your <h1> tag of the page. at the moment, in the estonia page you have a title tag: <TITLE>Instant Discount hotels in Tallin Estonia online</TITLE>

none of the info in this tag are showing in the page heading. it will certainly help if you include it in a <h2> tag and have 2 diferent headings on the page.

loads and loads can be done to improve your site in terms of SEO. but before looking into SEO, consider the look and feel of your site and your target market. no point spending time and energy on SEO if your visitors will run away from the site within seconds:)

Good luck and I hope this helps.

thanks
T

MarcieZoob · #3 (**permalink**) 06-30-2006, 07:03 AM

By applying SEO techniques, you might increase your rankings but will the visitor who finds your site actually USE your site? I was incredibly overwhelmed with the excessive text on your site that I left without delving too far into your site. You might be getting hits/visits but are visitor sticking around?

A human visitor who uses your site should be just as much, if not more, your focus than a bot.

andrewtcrane · #4 (**permalink**) 07-02-2006, 02:12 PM

I agree that I find the site a little bit overwhelming with small text. You could probably remove 75% of the text on the home page (perhaps moving some to pages called testimonials, Destinations, etc.), and add some more high-quality photos that enage the users. Your message will be stronger.

Cheers,
Andrew