Interesting travel site, I hope

Alright - well, here is my hobby site. This site represents a *LOT* of hours of work. I guess I've been building this for a couple of weeks now. On one hand, its just another site with hotels. But, I'm using lots of sorting, simple and positive UI, custom content, and personalization to try to make it a useful site that is differentiated. Try out the "my hotels", if you don't mind. I think its better than travelocity. But, I guess I'm biased.

What do you think?

Hopefully the pages are good for search engines.

http://www.honesthotelreviews.com/

Thanks in advance for your help,
Mike

While your site has a nice clean look-and-feel, and I like it, you are going to have a few problems from a search engine ranking perspective.

Firstly, you need to decide what search phrase(s) potential visitors would use. This is the MOST important step. Google reports over 4,600,000 entries using 'hotel reservations'. Forget trying to get in the first 10 to 20 of that lot!

Think about very targeted phrases, perhaps using region names or state names to qualify your taget phrases.

Use those phrases in your Titles (as you have somewhat), and Headings <Hx> tags. But most importantly, you need to have good content using those phrases too. You are very light on text content, and even that is pushed down the page by embedded CSS (it should be external) and is below your image maps (which further lowers the importance of the text)

I also don't like to see TDs and TRs without the matching /TR and /TD, but that is only a personal issue, having has my fingers burned in the past.

Good luck!

Thanks for taking the time to check it out! I really appreciate the feedback.



Agree.



Yeah - I'm trying to add more content. Depending on what city you pick, you may see lots or you may see little. For instance, NY has lots of description, as does SF, SD, and some of the major ones. I've yet to fill in the city-specific parts for most smaller cities.



Hehehe... Well, for me, its about bytes. Sure, it doesn't seem like a lot, but those nested and embedded table closures can add up to 200-300 bytes! The browsers have figured out how to tidy it up ok at this point. So, thats just me.... :-)

Thanks!

Mike

I've often wondered about such a site... does it not leave you open for legal problems when people criticise hotels...?

Aaron

hi. I'd second and emphasize the comments about selecting keywords and targetting them in your text and titles. To get the traffic that's what you'll need.

Another thing I noticed: I'd recommend that you have a name, physical address and phone number on your about us page. It left me a little cold that it was so anonymous.

good luck

Thanks for checking it out, Aaron.

If I get complaints, I'll deal with that issue. For now, I'm open to having people comment on anything they wish.

Mike

Thanks for taking the time to check it out, rdespres. I will add the address/contact info. I'm also working on the keywords.

Mike

Hi MIke

Don't think I mentioned it in my last post but we run a travel search engine... if you want a link, take a look at http://www.aardvarktravel.net

All the best

Aaron