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[NileCruises]

My website was hacked last November and then again last week. Prior to the hacking we were at number one in Google.co.uk for our main search term "nile cruises' for years.

After last November's hacking we dropped to about position 4 and after last week we are at position 7.

Ima rebuilding the lost data and I am having to create new Title and Description meta data for each of the indexed pages.

I am taking the opportunity to try and ensure my titles and descriptions are good and the correct length, etc but wondered about the best title format.

I set our home page title over the weekend as:

Nile Cruise | Leading ABTA & ATOL Bonded UK Nile Cruise Specialist

I was going to try and cover 3 keyphrases in the title like this:

Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains

But I thought that might look a bit spammy because the 3 phrases are very similar.

I wondered what anyone else might suggest?

Thanks,

Colin

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Colin, I much prefer a good branded or descriptive title so this:

Nile Cruise | Leading ABTA & ATOL Bonded UK Nile Cruise Specialist

Is way better than this: Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains

If you wanted to cover those phrases or words you could always try to work them in to the title in a more natural way say something like.

Nile Cruises & Cruise Bargains - UK ABTA & ATOL Cruise Specialist

That is a super quick example but it works in many more of the words and phrases in a non spammy way. Sure you could do better!

Also, with all the changes in search of late (penguin, panda etc) then don't assume the hack was the loss of your rankings, it could be the natural moving target nature of search or one of many other causes. By the way, what are you using that is getting hacked so often? WordPress? There are options to easily toughen it up and just going that little step extra is usually enough to put off most 'hackers'.

Hope this helps

Marcus

[NileCruises]

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for that advice and your suggestions. Hopefully (in some way) the drop might be a result of the Google changes and perhaps with hard SEO work I can regain our lost position.

One of our competitors seemed to appear from nowhere last November with about 6,000+ links which dwarfs our back link total. So I think it will be hard to overtake them very quickly but perhaps on-page and content improvements will help us compete.

We do have a WP blog on the site but the main site is built on Cold Fusion.

Colub

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, I would question the quality of that competitors links if they suddenly got 6000 and currently opensiteexplorer and such don't really account for quality so just keep fighting the good fight and try to create a better and more informative site than your competitor.

[webestate]

HI Colin,

I agree with Marcus's response below.  Getting all the keywords in the title tags and not sounding spammy can be tough, especially when dealing with the home page since that page can sometimes be the catch all page.

From what I have been told it does not benefit you to repeat the same word more than once like you do in this example.............Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains.  By repeating Nile 3 times you are missing out on being able to include other keywords.

His example is a great example - Nile Cruises & Cruise Bargains - UK ABTA & ATOL Cruise Specialist

It includes a different variation of each (singular or plural)

[NileCruises]

Thanks Marcus. I'm hoping that that's the case.

The annoying thing si that "information-wise" we are a much better site. We have Blog posts and information going back to 2007 and much more content but that site still ranks above us at the moment.

However I intend to fight the good fight as you say. I think membership of SEOMoz is going to be a great help especially when you can call upon the kindness of people like yourself to share their knowledge.

Thanks,

Colin

[NileCruises]

I agree Nathan. Thanks.

I'm going to take Marcus's and your advice with the title.

Cheers,

Colin

[NileCruises]

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