Members of the jury, what is your verdict?

Hi everyone,

I have been hanging out on this forum for a few months now and there are so many great tips here! I have to be honest that some of the more technical talk is lost on me but there is a lot of very interesting reading....

Anyway, I was wondering what your thoughts are on the following website; http://www.travellerspoint.com
I am pretty happy with how things have been going so far but getting more tips can never hurt, right!

Any tips are welcome, both from seo point of view, design wise, random thoughts etc. etc.

Thanks in advance!

Sam I Am

Your main keyphrase seems to be Travel Community Online, which to my mind seems a bit "unfocused".
Just wondering what other keywords you had considered using.

Hi Glengara,

On the front page, yes this is our main keyphrase. We rank number one for it, just as for "travel community", amongst some sites which have been at it a good deal longer than a year as well mind you We also rank number one for 'travel tools' 'travellerspoint' and travellers point'. 'travel help' and 'travel diary' are two other terms where we are top ten with our index page. These are all not big traffic bringers mind you....the main first time traffic comes from inner pages, links from other sites and write ups in newspapers, magazines, sites and even bbc world's click online tv program a few months ago.

With a pretty diverse product/services range, we decided to go broad with our index page and target each product/service with its own keywords on deeper pages, ie travel forums on the travel forums page, travel friends on its page, hostels on its page etc. etc. I think the title on the index page best describes what the site is about but if anyone can think of a better one that is searched more; definitely would love to hear it

Sam
ps. eventually a top 50 spot for 'travel' and 'travel online' with the index page is our goal..... not easy, but hey, you have to challenge yourself every now and then right!

I was going to suggest "travel guide" before I checked the competition ;-)

Travel guide, interesting, never thought about that one.... maybe we will target that next after this position is solidified Shouldn't be too hard to get top ten there, although 1-5 would require some work I guess

I like your site a lot! Good work

Thanks Glengara for the feedback! Thanks Liloptimizer for the kind words. I will pass them on to my brother who is to thank mostly for the technical/design side of things. Hand coded, from the ground up, including the forum....the more I see on the internet, the more it impresses me what he did!

I was hoping to get some constructive criticism as well and maybe some ideas on how to improve areas of the site, seo etc. Also, ways to get the forum busier. The different threads are indexed and I know the keywords can use some small improvements but does anyone have an idea how we can get more active users there without flooding the members with newsletters/ezines etc.

Cheers,

Sam

Only thing I could think of is a daily updated "travel news" page, with stories linked to a thread in the forum.
Means some daily work though ;-)