Curacao SEO Project - curacao-actief.com
June 4th, 2007 by Joost SchrierCuracao Actief is an environmentally conscious tourism company here on Curacao. In effect, this means that they organize tours and activities that go easy on the environment and help people understand the importance of conservation and the beauty of nature.
For a long time people have only taken advantage of nature on Curacao without giving back. It is good to see that eco-tourism is also on the rise on Curacao so our children can enjoy nature here as well.
When looking at their website we get the impression that Curacao Actief is a professional company with a vision and the business-savvy to turn their vision into reality. The homepage has a lot of information and a clear, straightforward structure. The internal pages are filled with information and are easily digestible. So far, this is looking like a well-made, functional website.
The numbers
| URL | www.curacao-actief.com |
| Google PageRank Homepage | 4/10 |
| Frames | No |
| Incoming links | |
| Google Yahoo MSN |
6 579 n/a * |
| Indexed pages | |
| Google Supplemental Yahoo MSN |
1,020 838 1354 247 |
| Open directory listings | |
| ODP Yahoo |
No No No |
| Age domain | 3 Years, 3 months |
| Meta tag “Description” homepage | Curacao Actief diving, land tours, mountain biking, hiking, sailing, windsurfing, dancing |
| Meta tag “Description” internal pages | Yes, identical |
| Meta tag “Keywords” homepage | Curacao Actief, tourist company curacao, active tours, land tours, curacao tours, countryside, soft adventure, curacao things to do, what to do on curacao, active caribbean, caribbean adventure, diving in curacao, curacao snorkel, snorkeling in curacao, curacao caves, curacao plantation, curacao landhouse, Curacao AND weather, curacao safari, curacao jeep tour, curacao day trips, curacao nature, curacao biking, curacao accommodation, map of curacao, curacao activities, curacao active, island, things to see in curacao, dive guide, curacao dive, e-commerce park, hiking in curacao, curacao trails, dive instructor, boat, Netherlands Antilles, curacao tourism, dive curacao, PADI courses curacao, curacao holiday, dive trips Caribbean, bonaire, aruba, curacao windsurfing, curacao mountain biking, eco tour,curacao adventure, catamaran sailing, salsa curacao, merengue curacao, antillean salsa, curacao dancing, curacao birds, land tour, curacao habitat, curacao fauna and flora, traveling to curacao, curacao private home rentals, curacao coral reef, curacao geology, Sunset curacao, Curacao beaches, curacao hotels, curacao travel, Caribbean island curacao, Curacao language, curacao tourist attractions, Carribean curacao, Distance between aruba and curacao, sailing, activity, dive shop, snorkeling, sailing, curacao regatta, kayak, curacao personalized tours |
| Meta tag “Keywords” in internal pages | Yes, identical |
| Title tag homepage | Curaçao Actief |
| Title tag internal pages | Yes, unique |
| Use of header tags | Yes, multiple <H1> |
*: MSN’s interface to see the incoming links has been off-line for a while so we can’t see this number.
Explanation
It is clear that the people who made this website are professionals. Not only does the website look good (a bit ‘boxy’, but good nonetheless), but when you look at the source of the website you can see that the website is made with layers instead of tables. The menus are CSS-menus instead of JavaScript menus and many of the important elements in search engine optimization are used properly.
Although a lot of designers still use tables to position their pages’ elements (we also use them sometimes still, but are moving away from them), they should really use CSS-positioned layers instead. There are multiple advantages to using layers instead of tables. Some of the more important for SEO are reducing the size of the pages (a lot less code) and if you use absolute positioning you can put the layers anywhere in the code (thus indicating importance of content).
The main reasons for using layers instead of tables do not have to do with SEO directly though. The main reasons are:
- Accessibility: a table shows up only when the last piece of code is read by the browser. With CSS-positioned layers the browser shows content gradually, thus giving the visitor pieces of content fast.
- Maintenance: by using CSS you are separating content from presentation. As a result it is a lot easier to change presentation factors because you only need to change them in one place and everything is updated at once.
- Bandwidth: there is less code with CSS thus making your pages faster and less bandwidth intensive. Furthermore; external CSS-files are cached by your browser, eliminating the need to download everything all the time.
- Adherence to standards: tables are meant to display tabular data (like the table with the numbers above), not for layouting. That’s what layers are meant for.
Although these reasons do not have to do with SEO directly, they do have to do with some of the most important factors in ‘visitor satisfaction’. It is mighty difficult to convert a clickthrough if the visitor needs to wait too long for your website to show and if it is a lot of work to maintain your website you invariably stop doing it.
Using CSS (with some JavaScript) to show your submenus is far superior in terms of SEO to using a full JavaScript solution. The website we reviewed last week used a JavaScript menu and this really hampers SEO-efforts because the search engines don’t read JavaScript. As a result they can’t see the links to your website’s pages and will therefore have trouble indexing those.
When you use CSS menus the search engines an easily read the links to your internal pages. If you use a JavaScript menu you can bypass the search engines’ inability by adding footers and a sitemap, but if you have a larger site (like curacao-actief.com) this becomes unmanageable. So, it is good that the people of Curacao Actief use these CSS menus.
There are some issues with this website in terms of SEO. The description meta-tag and keywords meta-tag are identical on every page of the website. This prompts the search engines to see the pages of a website as similar pages so this is something to avoid. Luckily the titles of all pages are unique (as well as the content of course) so the search engines will most probably see the differences, but it is not something you want to risk.
Having unique description and keyword meta-tags not only helps with pages not being seen as similar to other pages, but it can also help to enforce the important keywords on your individual pages. If an important keyword is present in the title, in both of the meta-tags and in the content it helps with ranking pages for search phrases containing that keyword. So, by using unique titles, keywords and description you can optimize pages for targeted search phrases. This website does not take advantage of this.
Attention has been given to the meta-tags of this website, but the designer has, probably inadvertently, used a very old black hat trick that does not work anymore. This trick is called keyword stuffing. This can be seen in the fact that the keywords meta-tag is stuffed with all kinds of keywords.
The keywords in this meta-tag should be on-topic for the page and not contain all these keywords that have nothing to do with the page. Nobody knows for sure if a website gets penalized nowadays for using this method, but it is better to not run the risk of this happening.
Another old black hat trick that is used in this website is text cloaking. Underneath the header image there is some hidden text that is not seen by visitors, but is seen by the search engines. The idea is that this helps in such a way that Google sees extra important keywords and the visitor is not bothered with this extra text.
The problem with this approach is that you’re actually serving different content to search engines than what you’re serving to your visitors. The search engines are not happy with websites that do this and if they find out they usually penalize the website. In this case it is not very heavily done so chances are that the search engines will not see it as gross misconduct, but if they do the website might be removed from the index entirely.
The final, small, issue is the use of header tags in this website. When you use header tags in your website you’re basically telling the search engines that the text in between these tags is important and says something about the page. This makes it useful to use these tags and to have your keywords in between these tags.
When using header tags you do need to keep in mind that they also say something about the structure of the page. The #1 header says what the page is about and can therefore be used only once in a page. Below the #1 header there can be several <H2> to <H6> tags. In curacao-actief.com multiple <H1> tags are used per page. This does not help the pages to rank for these phrases because they cancel each other out. A less liberal use of #1 headers and a more liberal use of #2 headers would be prudent here.
One final tip: it might be wise for Curacao Actief to look into using mod_rewrite rules. Right now the URL of all pages has this format: www.curacao-actief.com/index.php?id=[number]. The filenames of your pages can be pretty valuable for SEO. By using mod_rewrite you can give your pages names that include your keywords thus helping them in being found for those keywords. It can be pretty daunting to implement mod_rewrite, but the advantages are multifold.
All in all, we really like this website. It is fresh, up-to-date, has a good structure and loads of useful content. Best of all; it really sells the product very well! We think that when Curacao Actief irons out some of the imperfections, removes the SEO-shortcuts and implements mod_rewrite this will make the site even better.
