Holiday Site Builder. Your own holiday home website. Simple.

Click on the following link to start watching a great video on Link Building

Can't wait for SEO to work and want to get to the top of Google immediately?! Well now you can with Holiday Site Builder's Google Adwords functionality. It may cost, but it has guaranteed and instant results.

Click on the Google Adwords tab once you have logged in and follow the instructions.

Holiday Site Builder have created two new videos and they are both on our Search Engine Optimisation tools. We ill be uplodaing them to Holiday Site Builder, but thought we would try Vimeo and Youtube as well.

We have created two channels:

http://vimeo.com/channels/hsb

http://www.youtube.com/user/holidaysitebuilder

We recommend Vimeo for viewing on your PC as it is better quality and Youtube for viewing on your mobile or handheld as there are more devices compatible with Youtube than Vimeo.

We will be addin more videos soon - so please subscribe to the channels!

Here are a couple of screenshots of the channels:

Google have just started a new AdWords Online Classroom.

Although this is not strictly SEO as you have to pay for Google Adwords, you can learn a huge amount for SEO from paid adverts.

We always recommend Holiday Site Builder website owners should visit a magazine shop before signing up though! If you look in magazines like .NET, PC Pro and Web User you will almost always find a £20 or £30 Google Adwords voucher...

By clicking on the link above you'll find free online training on key AdWords subjects that you can walk through at your own pace. Most are bite-size courses, 15-20 minutes long, that you can watch at any time.

If you're interested in improving your AdWords and SEO performance, check out some of our popular topics:

• Improve your AdWords performance with key tips
• Reach more potential customers
• Get the most from your website with Website Optimiser
• Use Analytics reports to improve your AdWords return-on-investment

Use the following link to test the search results for your Holiday Home website in the new Google Search:

http://www.comparecaffeine.com/search-gb.php

Google is working on a new search system, that could have a major impact on the rating of all Holiday Site Builder customers.

Here is a direct quote from Google explaining the new system:

"For the last few months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback."

One of our favourite sites for SEO tips is SEOBook.com. The following is an extract from SEOBook and gives some key tips for website owners.

• an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text
• perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names
• perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms
• tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

For more information see this link: http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine

When Google finds a new website, they evaluate it to see whether the site is a real or Spam. Most of the Webmasters / Site Owners know the process as “Google Sandbox” or the "Sandbox Effect". It is actually the Spam-review process at Google, which uses both automated filters and human review.

There are wide ranging estimates for how long sites stay in the Sandbox, but it is generally between 2 weeks and 3 months.

While Google sandbox is not something you can control, there are certain steps you can take in order to make the sandbox effect less destructive for your new site.

Below are some ethical steps to be followed to minimize the sandboxing effect and to jump out of it.

• Actively gather content and good links

• Plan ahead - set up your site and register your domain as soon as possible
  

• Buy old or expired domains

• Host on a well- established host (like HolidaySiteBuilder.com)
  

• Concentrate on less popular keywords

   

  

There are many books that help with SEO and we can recommend the following:

Recommended Links

• A good beginners Guide to SEO.
• SEO worksheets from the authors of "SEO an Hour a Day".
• Explanation of the Google Sandbox effect.
• Search Engine Land - search news by Danny Sullivan and his team of SEO experts.
• Aaron Wall's SEO Book. Free guides, videos etc.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Wordtracker SEO / Keyword Videos

• Day 1: Search Engine Success Starts with Keywords
• Day 2: Assess Your Market with Keyword Research
• Day 3: How to Build an Effective Keyword Strategy
• Day 4: How to Optimize Your Web Content
• Day 5: Pay Per Click (PPC) for Testing and Profit
• Day 6: How to Use Keywords in Linking Text
• Day 7: Expand into New Markets (and Beat Your Competition)

Wikipedia defines "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results".

In simpler terms, SEO is getting more people to your site via search engines without paying for advertsing.

The book "SEO an Hour a Day" gives a useful list of the most important factors affecting search engine ranking. Holiday Site Builder uses the same list as a basis for the wizard created to help you improve your site's SEO:

1. HTML Title Page
2. Visible HTML text on the page
3. Inbound link (quality and quantity)
4. Inbound link anchor text
5. Age of domain
6. Lesser factors including ALT Tags, Meta Tags and page URL

SEO is a slow process and can take up all the hours in the day you are willing to give it. You may be tempted to pay someone else to do the boring parts like finding sites to link to yours, but our advice is don't! The quality of links is more important than the quantity and you might end up getting blocked by search engines if the so called "SEO Expert" you employ uses unfair tactics that Google, etc. do not appreciate.

Welcome to our new Search Engine news page.

Quite a few people have requested we give owners more information on Search Engine Optimisation news. We thought a separate news page was the best method to do this!

We hope you find the new section useful.