How do I influence what page on my site google shows for specific search phrases?

[activenz]

Hi People,

My client has a site www.activeadventures.com. They provide adventure tours of New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas.

These destinations are split into 3 folders in the site (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand, activeadventures.com/south-america etc....).

The actual root folder of the site is generic information for all of the destinations whilst the destination specific folders are specific in their information for the destination in question.

The Problem: If you search for say "Active New Zealand" or "Adventure Tours South America" our result that comes up is the activeadventures.com homepage rather than the destination folder homepage (eg: We would want activeadventures.com/new-zealand to be the landing page for people searching for "active new zealand"). Are there any ways in influence google as to what page on our site it chooses to serve up?

Many thanks in advance.

Conrad

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Looking at your internal linking, I don't see many links beyond menu, logo and breadcrumbs.  Your site rarely links from the body of pages.  This is most noticeable on your home page, which has no internal links in the body.  Everyone has their opinion on this, but in my experience I see the most benefit from links from the body.

The other thing I notice is that the keyword text for your breadcrumbs at the individual destinations has "Home" instead of the destination like "New Zealand."  If you wanted to make this a less confusing link, on the user end, you could just change it to "New Zealand."  It's also a potential spot for a more optimized link if you were so inclined.

What I'd suggest doing is linking to your destinations from the home page, decreasing its relevance for that exact term while improving the relevance of the next page, and working on body level internal links on the internal pages of each destination.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Conrad,

Aside from internal linking, it is also important to look at the page titles, and these could do with some work.

When crafting page titles, you want to remember that Google has changed how they calculate how much is now shown, and this equates to 56 characters (512 pixels). MOZ has a tool to show you what would be seen here.

You say that when someone searches for "active new zealand", then you want this page to be returned http://activeadventures.com/new-zealand

However, the page title of that page is "New Zealand Hiking & Adventure Tours & Vacations | Active Adventure".

This title is also a little spammy, and you need to get your desired phrase in there as well, if you can. Rather than what is there, I would have "Active New Zealand adventure tours | Active Adventure". This gets both key phrases in and fits into the 512 pixel limit that Google now has.

Internal linking can also help by explaining more to Google about the pages as well. A strong anchor text around each phrase would be desirable here.

If you want a hand with any of this, just drop me a PM and will be happy to give you some pointers.

-Andy