On-site adjustment opinions

[ChristopherM]

Hi folks,

I've got a fairly interesting scenario. I'm trying to rank this page (http://www.staysa.co.za/sa/1-2-0-0-1/East-London/accommodation) better for the term, "accommodation east london". The client isn't keen on making many changes and it was built horribly with ASP, half CMS, half not.

I have made the following changes today:

1. I introduced two paragraphs of text below the H1 tag.
2. I changed "East London Bed and Breakfast", "East London Conference Venues", "East London Cottage / Chalet" to just "Bed and Breakfast", "Conference Venues", "Cottage / Chalet" as the continual key phrase duplication in my experience is a bad move.
3. I've made a change to the title tag (this is a huge mission as it's not CMS controlled, so I had to teach myself some basic ASP to do so).
4. Meta data.. nightmare to change unfortunately, at least not without rewriting part of the CMS.

I'm wondering, are there any other on-site factors that I'm missing? I'm not a fan of site-wide links, so I don't want to put an exact match anchor text link from the sidebar/footer to the page, not unless someone can motivate why I should.

Keen to hear everyone's opinions

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I feel you, working with crappy legacy setups is the worst! Some notes;

There are a LOT of links on the page diluting the power of this page - you might even have more links than text. In addition, that page isn't being linked in the quick links sidebar - this most likely signals to G that this page isn't one of the more important ones on the site.

The paginated pages should have canonicals set up --> rel=next and rel=previous. As it stands, your pages are near duplicates.

I would recommend is new site design and setup though.

[ChristopherM]

Hi Oleg,

Cheers for your feedback, I saw you were "on duty", hehe, so was hoping that you'd respond.

Point taken about the sidebar link, perhaps I should add one there dispite my dislike for site wide links. That said, there's a Popular Cities & Town box on the home page, that links to this page, or do you feel site wide is more important?

I didn't think about the pagination, I shall do that, thank you.

What are your thoughts on those internal links at the top of the page and possibly incorporating nofollows? I agree with you that they are diluting the page horribly, an internal link count revealed around 108 internal links on that page alone!

Let me know what you think.

PS. Yes, new design and setup would be ideal, but there isn't budget for that unfortunately.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

In a super helpful mood today

I would either incorporate nofollows to pages that arent as important or moving them lower down the page. Sitewide quick links would give it more juice than the "popular cities & town" box on hp.

This is also a great time to examine your analytics heatmap and see how users interact with the site. Use it to help determine what people are looking for/what they are clicking on and make it easier to them to get there. This will help you remove duds and promote high value pages (like the east long accomodation page)

Good reads on internal linking:

Link placement v power http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2185977/Anatomy-of-an-Internal-Link

Link juice distribution http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2179376/Internal-Linking-to-Promote-Keyword-Clusters

Multi-city specific
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond 

Cheers,

Oleg

[ChristopherM]

Thanks Oleg,

I get like that too sometimes, where I feel like giving back to the community - karma.

Thank you for your advise and for the links, I shall do some reading and implement things accordingly.

Really appreciate this!