Hi All

This is kind of a strange one. I have been trying to work this out for a while.

Surely If you have more sites in a serch for keywords it would be harder to reach the first page??? This is where my dilema begins. If you do a search on google.co.uk for late minute villas it throws up about 4.6 million websites but if you do a search for last minute villas then google comes up with 2.1 million now surely it would be easuer to get first page on the lower of these searches. However on the late minute villas search my website is no.5 page 1 but on the latter search my website is about page 7.

Would anyone care to try an explanation on this. It is not just this website I have noticed it on a few other websites that I deal with it seems to be easier to get found on searches that are more than 3 million in competition.

Is it just me or am I missing something?

Any help appreciated

Pete

Hi petehols,

4.6 million websites have "late", "minute" or "villas" in their content, whereas 2.1 million websites have "last", "minute" or "villas" in their content.

What's more important is how many of those websites have actually been optimised for those phrases. In the case os "late minute villas", that would appear to be....0!

gringo is exactly right. It's how the pages are optimized that's important. If you notice on the late minute holiday search many if not most of the sites that are in the results never mention the word 'late' at all in their title.

One of the main reasons for the lack of optimization for the 'late' phrase is that it's not a particularly popular search. Overture reported 0 searches for that phrase while they reported over 5000 searches for the 'last' phrase.

The sites returned first on the last minute villas search appear to have a significant number of backlinks (in the ten's of thousands). It looks like that will be the key to gettng your site ranked higher in Google.

One thing on your title. It could be considered spammy by the search engines with all the repetitive keywords. You might be better off with a title along the lines of 'Find last minute villas to many holiday destinations'

The competition gets lower in the search engines if you include the specific location in the search so internal page titles could be 'Book last minute villas in Italy quickly and easily' or something similiar. Some of your internal page titles were optimized this way while others just mentioned the destination.

The number of searches for last minute villas that include the destination will surely be less than without the destination, but you still get the more general search term in your title and it will most likely be easier to get your pages ranked higher for the longer keyword phrase. As you acquire more links for your site it will be easier to get ranked higher for the more general phrase.

Hi

Thanks for the replies. Vangough I have had this tilte for about 6 months now and yahoo and msn are ranking me page 1 for about 50 different keywords. I was advised to use this sort of title. It is only google that I cannot make any progress for. The search last minute villa holiday I am on page 17 but for the search last minute villa I am page 4 again the search for last minute villa throws up more results than the last minute villa holiday one.

Is it just a matter of getting more links to the site and would you suggest recipricol linking or triangular linking?

Thanks

Pete

Absolutely no on the triangular linking. I think some people will disagree, but it seems to me that Google in particular is trying to weed out sites who are doing that. Reciprical linking can be ok, though it's best to have one way links back to your site. If you do use reciprical linking try to make it a small percentage of your overall links.

The key to links is getting one way links from relevant sites and to use your keywords in the anchor text for the link. For your site I would think anything having to do with travel would be a relevant site to get a link from.

It will take time to get all those backlinks though. Directories are a good place to start. You can usually find them with searches for 'your keyword phrase' + directoy. You can also replace directory with 'add url' 'submit url' submit your site' and other varieties of the same.

Also try to get links to pages on your site other than just your home page. Get as many as you can for pages deeper in your site structure. Use different phrase in your anchor text and point the links to the most relevant page on your site. For example using 'Last minute holiday villas in Greece' should link directly to the page on villas in Greece. It's ok and even good to vary the words you use in your anchor text as long as you make it seem natural.

Adding links this way can be a really slow and tedious process. I try to do a little of it each week, though that might only get me 10 links or so a week.

Better ways to get links would be to write some articles with links to your site in the text and in a signature like on this forum and submit those articles to free articles sites. The idea being that other site owners will use those articles on their sites with the links back to you included.

If you build a site with qualty content other sites will naturally want to link to yours. This natural linking is what Google considers the ideal and what they seem to be attempting to move towards every time they change their algorithm.

For your site you can probably add general travel type content and specific content on some of the areas where you can book villas. The content should also help convince people to book the villas too. I know I'd be more likely to want a last minute villa holiday in Italy after having read some articles about the beauty and history of Italy, especially if booking that villa is a single click away.

An additional benefit of acquiring more links for your site is that you'll get visitors through these links whether or not you make your way to page 1 in Google. Try to write the links in a way that entices someone to click on it rather than just putting in keywords for search engines. Add your keywords to the anchor text of the link, but only if it sounds natural.

Great advice from VanGogh.

Here is a pretty cool tool that
you can use to see what your competition is looking like..

Thanks for the compliment hezaa. I try to help when I can. Thanks for the link too. Looks pretty cool and gives you some good info that usually takes a couple of other tools to get all of it. I've already bookmarked the site.

You're welcome

I try to help out when I can, too.
Finding usable tools on the internet is always a good thing

I know what you mean about finding usable tools. I have so many sites bookmarked and so much software loaded onto my computer I sometimes forget where they are or what they do.