rentahomeabroad.com

[nullensc]

Website Name: Holiday villas, cottages, apartments to rent direct from the owner
URL: http://www.rentahomeabroad.com
Site Description:A site using Esvon Classifieds, PHP and MySql and running on a root server I. It allows holiday home owners to advertise their property for free. It was doing quite well (2-3 registrations/new ads a day) until recently when Google decimated my ranking and SERPs and I'm lucky if I get one a weel now :evil:

I'm happy with the design but I'd be interested in knowing if it loads quickly enough as looks slugglish at times IMO.

[eWebtricity]

Great looking site, it's clean and easy to navigate. Great job on the Esvon look and feel skin customization. First load took 6 seconds on my count (no stopwatch involved) and I've never been to the site before. It wasn't bad, but I think it should load a little faster becuase you don't really have that many images.

Your robots.txt exists and looks good

Alexa.com uses a info.txt for site information, you might research adding this to your site for when Alexa crawls your site. Alexa is owned by Amazon so there's alot to be gained by being Alexa friendly.

Google now has an open source crawler client called Google Site Maps. You can index your own site and submit it directly to Google using an automated cron job. This client indexes your site and bundles it all up into nice and neat XML files and then contacts Google to let them know your ready to be indexed. Check out http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login?sourceid=gsm&subid=us-et-about2

I'm not sure on the results yet, but I've added a Yahoo button to the bottom of this site and you can do the same for MSN. Might be a good way to make the content more readily available for people who use Yahoo or MSN as their start page or portal home page. See the bottom of this page for an example.

This is a very philosophical debate about meta tags, the use of them, and the structure. Some search engines use the meta tags and some ignore them completely. In my opinion your best bet is to take the middle road and use meta tags but change them periodically so they are seen by those search engines that do use them as changing. You might try to incorporate your domain name into the title and description tags. But overall the tags look good.

If you haven't done so already, submit your RSS feed to the RSS feed search engines and crawlers. For example Yahoo is one option http://publisher.yahoo.com/submit.php but there are many others too. Good for cross promotion and different channels of exposure. Especially for your site, the name is catchy and will draw peoples interest just based on the name.

I don't know what other sites you run in addition to this one, but definitely cross link them. Alexa reports your only cross linked site is with http://nullens.org/

It's a little more difficult with Esvon but any images you can change the filename to match either what the image really is or what job it's doing would help increase the relevancy of your content in the site in the eyes of the search engines. The same thing goes for the HTML description and alt tags. This increases your relevancy and therefore increases your rankings.

Registration for a new account was simple and easy.

Your links page is a great idea, add more relevant and complimentary sites and then submit that URL to the search engines as well. This will help increase your relevancy and try to get reciprocal links from the sites you list if possible. Your articles links on the home page are an excellent idea, it gives you relevant content and alot of great keywords. Content is King ! So keep adding more relevant articles and information. You might think about creating RSS feeds for the articles as well.

Check your Webalizer or AWStats to see what the traffic patterns are, for example what keywords are being used to reach your site and try to cater more to those keywords and related keywords. It will also give you insight where you can focus more marketing efforts.

Your site looks great, it's clean, easy to navigate, technically correct. I think the best thing you can do is cross link your site with others that are relevant.

[nullensc]

Hi,

thanks for the comprehensive review!

I have sitemap activated for Google but it doesn't work that well as most of the pages are dynamic and the perl application I downloaded via Google's site doesn't seem to find them. In any case I'm really annoyed with Google: I used to be #1 on my important keywords until 3-4 weeks ago when they changed the indexing system and just about banned my site - possibly because I use Esvon along with 100s of other sites...

I'll look into the Alexa thing - I see that they do crawl my site from time to time; thanks for that.

I'll be doing the RSS thing soon - somebody else suggested creating a feed for www.oodle.com - looks interesting.

Cheers
Charles