What on-page/site optimization techniques can I utilize to improve this site (http://www.paradisus.com/)?

[Melia]

I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.

[RyanKent]

Some quick notes regarding your site:

• you have a flash-based page but you have the HTML code fully supporting a non-flash version of the page too. Very well designed.

• You are using 11 H1 tags. Try changing to 1. The other tags should be H2 or H3.

• your Resorts menu shows the other brands have their own primary domains, not subdomains as you suggested. You could merge all your sites into one. This would offer the advantage of combining your DA into one site, allowing all pages to rank better.

I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking.

You are right. The website is using black hat tactics. In the future if you can share EXACTLY what leads you to this belief, it would probably make finding the problem easier.

As you can see, the home page shows almost no text. Even with the flash disabled, the home page appears the same but the image viewer shows a single image instead of a slide show.

The html shows a large amount of text which is hidden in a div called "homepage-content". The div is set to be invisible: height 1px, width 1px, overflow hidden, etc. This behavior will be detected by search engines and directly lead to a severe penalty. Most likely the site will be pulled from the index.