Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-09-21 18:22:40 - Graham Ellis
I received an email, telling me what a good web site design we have (I'm flattered) but also informing me that the author thinks we're not performing very well on search engine ranking. He writes:
I was surfing through your website and realized that despite having a good design; it was not ranking well on most of the search engines for most of the keywords pertaining to your domain.
Always anxious to learn (and slightly naughty, because I suspected this to be a spam email written by someone who hadn't even visited our site), I wrote back to ask which search engine terms he had used.
We researched on keywords like "country hotels in Wiltshire", "cheap hotels in Wiltshire", "hotels in Wiltshire" and did not find your website on 1st page.
He's right that we're not on the front page in any of those categories - but I think that's right. We're not (and we don't claim) to be a country hotel. We provide business accommodation - larger rooms, more facilities than just a cheap bed. And if you look at the front page of "Hotels in Wiltshire" on a Google search, you'll find the most of page devoted to booking agencies and tourist guides that cover the whole county, with just a couple of individual hotels which are many times our size. Actually, I think Google has it more or less right. Try "hotels in Melksham" and you'll find Well House Manor featuring quite well.
I received an email, telling me what a good web site design we have (I'm flattered) but also informing me that the author thinks we're not performing very well on search engine ranking. He writes: