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.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Antonio,

The best way to check if the site is using cloaking is to go into your Google Webmaster Tools acccount and "Fetch as Googlebot", then compare the code to see if googlebot is being shown the same code as the user.

However in this case, I would suggest that your concerns are being prompted by the use of CSS to hide text within the page so that it is not visible to the user.

I located this in your main.css file

#homepage-content {
	position: absolute;
	height: 1px;
	width: 1px;
	overflow: hidden;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
}

Basically, this is a massive amount of text which has been shoved into a div that measures 1 pixel x 1 pixel in the top left corner of the page. This is a practice which is not viewed kindly by search engines.

As to improving optimization there are a couple of things that are fairly obvious:

• Using Flash for the rotating images is not our preferred option for a couple of reasons.
  First, any user with an Apple iOS device will see only blank spaces as these devices do not support Flash.
  Second, bots are not able to retrieve information from Flash documents in the most cases.

  jQuery is a much better option as the presentation is visible to everyone and also allows you to obtain some SEO value from image file names, alt tags and inserted text.

• The majority of the images in the flash presentation do not really represent what people expect from a  "Resort". If you want people to convert then you need to engage them and I think that the images that are being used now are not helpful in selling the product.

Hope this helps,

Sha