SEO casestudy : mandarinhostel.com

Here's a simple SEO analysis for a very simple website : http://www.mandarinhostel.com/

1. Design

   1. It’s important to have more text and it is important to style the text. It’s better to use headings H1/H2 and use CSS than just give <bold><strong> in the code etc. , but do use styling tags to emphasis important keywords.
   2. Since your main page has pictures that link it is vital that you use the “title” and “alt” tags for the pages. Elaborate when using that and insert keywords, because it gives more information for SE about that page and the page it’s linking to. A frontpage with only meaningless pictures means nothing

2. Structure

   1. Title for the page is important, it is better to put the name of the website after the name of the page.
   2. Remove all duplicate ways to get to your website. I.E. – choose either www.mandarinhostel.com or mandarinhostel.com but not both. Redirect one to the other using .HTACCESS. This will help remove your pages from supplemental.
   3. If you haven’t already done so, create an XML Sitemap and submit it to Yahoo and Google sitemap services.
   4. Make sure that your entire site can be navigated through a text-browser like Lynx, that will help you realize possible sections that SE can’t reach (although your site does look pretty simple).

3. Keywords

   1. Keyword density for text appearing in your site is important. The more text you have related to your target keywords, the higher the keyword density and higher rankings for that keyword.
   2. Keywords are also important for the keywords and description meta tags in your pages. It would be best to vary them between pages, and choose the keywords you want to target carefully. Download some tools that would allow you to find out what keywords have been searched for the most and how much competition you have on those searches.

4. Linking

   1. Your PR is extremely low for the time the site’s been up.
   2. Register to all possible web directories, preferably with PR4 and above.
   3. Try to get as many incoming links as you can (I know, easier said than done). When you do, don’t just get links with a title of “Mandarin Hostel”, but rather something like “Mandarin Hostel – The best cheap accommodation in Taipei Taiwan” or other similar slogans that include keywords you decided to target.

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