I need help with my sites

[frogmanandy]

Aloha,
I manage three sites right now,
www.hawaiidiscountactivities.com
www.maui-vacation.net
and www.mauihawaiiluau.com

They are each doing well for their age under a number of highly competetive keywords, but there is always room for improvement.

My biggest issue, seems to be how to generate links in this industry. I have spent hundreds of hours accumulating recips with companies around our area. The problem is that in this industry, we are basically wholesalers and the companies that we are selling their products sell the same products at a much greater price and do not wish to link to us.

In a situation like this, how could I go about finding important one way links to our site.

I have been submitting travel articles like mad and have registered with hundreds of directories a majority of whom, I never heard from. But is there something I am missing?

Basically we are doing well in yahoo and msn but flailing in google

[australianseo]

you can also link with other travel sites of various categories,

not necessarily with yr competitors.
There are many travel or travel related sites out there.

i.e. my site www.travelwalk.net

[frogmanandy]

I am always interested in link exchanges or partnerships. And your site looks like a great candidate. I will send you a pm.

I guess part of what I was hoping was that someone would come up with some magic answer...lol :)

I have been trying to think of some large authority type sites that are heavily relevent to my content and just haven't hit on the right ones.

The majority of the best overall Hawaii sites are pay for inclusion, and very expensive at that. We pay quite a bit for advertising for Hawaii Discount Activities, and the returns are good but all of these sites lack strong IBLs.

I have literally emailed out a thousand beg for link requests with a mixed but mostly disappointing return.

[26global]

A big problem is that a lot of your pages use asp and create long urls which google won't follow like http://www.hawaiidiscountactivities.com/reservationrequest/activitylistings.asp?actkey=909&island=2

This url should be hawaiidiscountactivities.com/activities.html or something similar.

And all of your title tags are the same so search engines can't differentiate between any of your pages.

You need some SEO work done if you want to improve your rankings.

That's my 2 cents.

Peace,

Jeff

[australianseo]

haha

I have literally emailed out a thousand beg for link requests with a mixed but mostly disappointing return.

I probably emailed out tens of thousands begs. lol.
Like you said, not much response.

Its a v. competitive industry!

I have competitors signing in my travel forums and sending out PM to every member!

[peaceman]

Hello,

You can add your link to my website at http://www.greetingmilitary.com/dir/resources.php

Thanks,
Peaceman
http://www.FreeMilitaryGreetingCards.com

and

http://wulux.com

[frogmanandy]

Aloha Jeff,

I have thought about using a renaming script for the urls, but using sitemaps, I do get every page spidered.
Do you think it would still be worth it?

The titles are something we are working on to change at least at the land, air, ocean and luau levels.

the biggest problem with those issues, is that the site was designed before I started here and the people who designed it refuse to give me access to their ftp server.

So getting things done is a hassle.

The good thing is, with that hawaii discount site we are doing KILLER business from paid advertising and on yahoo and msn we rank top 5 for most of our targeted keywords and not too bad in the bigger more competitive keywords. I really think our biggest trouble with google is links.

That said. today I checked google and we had moved from 37th to 14th on one google center and to eighth on another for "hawaii discount activities" so maybe I'm just impatient.

Thank you for your input, and these are things I have thought were causing problems as well