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How far can I take my little site?

much more potential?

         

fatpeter

1:40 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I'm new here so I hope i don't post in the wrong area. I thought here was best as 80% of my visitors come from google.

I followed all the advice in these forums for a month or so (thanks a lot everyone)and in one update my site has gone from 20 visitors a day to 50. To say I was amazed would be an understatement. All i did was add 3 pages, get a few links plus changed some titles and made sure the words in the title were actually on the page! Amazing how many were not!

my site is small...21 pages in 2 languages and advertises a guest house. I am just wondering how far I can go with it. I see people here talking huge numbers for visitors and I know I'm not in the same ballpark but what would be a reasonable number of visitors....I guess I'm trying to find out if I have a long way to go to get the best out of the site or whether I can sit back knowing I can't do much more.
Site in profile. Grateful for any advice?

victor

1:48 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



If you want more people to find it you need incoming links -- lots of them.

If you want everyone who finds your site to be able to read it consider:

  • HTML that validates to W3C standards
  • Dropping some of the deprecated elements like fonts and replace them with:
  • CSS throughout for smaller pages, better rendering, and better degradation in old browsers.

vitaplease

1:50 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Many ways to look at how far you can go:

- Check overture/Google adwords for the amount of times your favourite keyphrases are being used. (just indications)

- Spend 5 dollars at Google adwords for a campaign for your keyphrases and get exact impression data per language, per country, per keyword(s) formation

- Check Alexa.com and see your ranking compared to your immediate competition. (only works for bigger, popular sites)

- Check your competition's websites, many have those little graph buttons on their page, click on it, it can show amount of visitors, where they came from etc.

sem4u

1:56 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



You should be able to get your site into many paid and unpaid directories, especially those that are travel related.

This will help your link popularity and therefore Google PR. Also, I would expect you could generate quite a few click throughs to your site if you get listed on travel sites.

ukgimp

1:56 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



fp

Just take one thing on board when you go after numbers. You want quality clicks as well.

Imagine this, your site could choose from 10,000 clicks with no conversions or 500 with 10 conversions who linger around the site, which would you choose. I know my preference.

The content will hopefully bring them in and clever linking and a good sevice will draw them into the part of the site where they may part with some hard earned. :)

That said go for it mate

Cheers

fatpeter

2:02 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks for those quick answers :)

"If you want more people to find it you need incoming links -- lots of them."

I have 38 links...plus more to come next month. 3 in Dmoz 1 in yahoo...2 pr6 links and the site has a pr5

This seems more than a lot of small sites in my sector.

- Spend 5 dollars at Google adwords for a campaign for your keyphrases and get exact impression data per language, per country, per keyword(s) formation

I tried adwords but it is hard as it includes any other word with the search. Also there is not a huge amount of searches in my narrowed down sector.

- Check your competition's websites, many have those little graph buttons on their page, click on it, it can show amount of visitors, where they came from etc.

Thats a good idea. I tried a couple and I have more visitors than most but in this sector most people just make a simple site more for people to see pictures of there house. The only one I saw with more has lots of links from a farm and they also have 2 sites exactly the same.

rcjordan

2:09 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>advertises a guest house.

Those in the hospitality industry should, IMO, optimize for the town name, state or province, region, and nearby attractions and things to do. That's the first search in destination research. You want to get in front of them before they start searching for accommodations.

jk3210

2:17 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



"How far" could you take it?

Well...

...you could expand it to include other guest houses in the area; maybe even some of your competitors would want to pool their resources with yours;

...you could expand your site to include affiliate links to book tourists into all the guest houses, hotels, spas, car rentals, in the town, state, and country you reside in;

...you could wind-up going public and cashing in your stock for [fill-in the blank] million dollars and buy a villa in Nice;

...AND THEN you could send a postcard to WebMasterWorld saying "Having Fun, Wish You Were Here!"

fatpeter

2:18 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"Those in the hospitality industry should, IMO, optimize for the town name, state or province, region, "

Thats good advice too and i would agree. I realised that my site had no mention of the region. plenty on the departement but in france they have a region too and I was missing out. Part of the reason that my visitors have improved. Getting lots of visitors now with 4-5 word searches that i never got before.

rcjordan

2:31 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The trick is to see your destination as others do when they first become vaguely aware that it exists and they might have an interest. The problem I see so often is that the independent accommodations sites tend to think that searchers immediately focus on "inns in Winfall, NC" or whatever. They don't.

Try this; go to your local tourist shop and buy all the postcards (just one one each subject) they have on your region. If it's worthy of a postcard, it probably what those outside your area hear about first.

Ove

2:33 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I totally agree wit RC

<optimize for the town name, state or province, region>

I have done that with a few sites and the combination searches for state or provice or country can bring alot of traffic!

And you can go how far you want with the site i have a site like that in our small vilage we live 4000 people here in the middle of nowhere
and that site have about 10 000 visitors a mounth now :-)
so dont give up keep the good work up!and good luck

/Ove

onlineleben

3:01 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>...you could expand your site to include affiliate links <

maybe extend the content of your site in form of a little travelguide to your region and also offering some books about the localities etc

fatpeter

3:47 pm on Jan 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



O.K.

Thanks for all the good advice.

Seems to me that adding pages related to all the attractions in the area would be a good idea. I like the idea of a mini travel guide.