"Jay Honeck" writes:

When I type in "Iowa City Airport" at the Yahoo search screen, our "History
of the Iowa City Airport" webpage pops up second on the list -- which is all
well and fine.

When I type in "Iowa City Hotels" at the Yahoo search screen, however, our
hotel website doesn't appear at all. Well, maybe it's five pages in, but
who's going to bother to look there?

I've studied meta tags, and key words, and I believe I've got things set up
properly for the "robots" to see -- yet the stupid "Weather Underground" and
"Sheraton" sites pops up ahead of our hotel. (And they don't even appear to
be using meta tags...)

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Google is the only search engine that particularly matters, but much
of what I say applies to most search engines anyway. (And Yahoo may
be using google search actually?)

Well. First of all, you're competing with a lot of other hotels in
Iowa city. This is going to make it difficult to get really top
placement for the generic search -- probably essentially impossible.

One thing you can improve is that you don't have any headings marked
on the page -- no h1, h2, etc. tags. Your big title is just
decorated text, not an actual heading. That should help. Words in
headings generally get extra weight.

I see you've already included it in the title, which is good (and I
don't remember seeing it there before).

Google page-rank really likes sites with links to them. You've got
lots of content on your site, which ought to get a lot of people to
link to you; but specifically asking for links from some places can
help. Local historical society? Other fans of the Iowa City airport,
of course. You seem to have 31 links already, which is good.

I dug into the Yahoo results from (and the first page seems to have
identical content to Google, suggesting that it really is google under
the hood still). You're mentioned in a link from a uiowa page on page
3 of the results, and don't seem to turn up in the first *15* pages of
results. That's seriously nasty.

Unlike many of the sites I've worked on, you may be a good candidate
for google ad-words -- buying some of those little ads on the right in
the results. You can play with it pretty cheaply, and set maximums,
and such.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
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