Any advice on poor PR please?

[cusimar9]

I've been trying to promote our website for a while now without much luck.

The site is www.orlando4vacation.com

I added a link page (as you can see) and I've been exchanging links with websites for the last few months.

Its made absolutely no difference as far as I can see.

Does anyone have any advice about this? Am I better to scrap this link exchanging completely? Perhaps just purchase a couple of high PR links?

I realise the page uses frames but that hasn't stopped one of our other websites from getting a fairly high PR...

[agent_bozo]

You have around 17 backlinks to your site, you want to continue exchanging links and try and increase this number. I noticed that you have more than this going out of your site, it may be that you either have outgoing links from your site that you know has know return link or it may be that a site that you exchanged links with hasn't posted a return link ( should check these every few months to make sure that they have not been removed as this could cause a drop in your page rank).
If you do have outgoing links that are solely for information and have no incoming link back, then I usually add the following:
<a href="link to wherever" rel="nofollow">my link text</a>
This will cause google/yahoo/msn to not spider the link, you may want to check this when you exchange links too, as some evil web masters may do this and it would remove any PR benefits that the link exchange would have.

Also, I would advise not to exchange links with everyone. You want to try and use sites with high page rank, I try and ignore anysite that has a page rank below 4 and generally try and only use sites with a PR of 5 and above.
You may think that webmasters are unwilling to exchange links with a site with a low page rank, but you would be suprised. I would advise contacting companies that are in the same geographic area and industry as you but are not competitors for example, sites that are based in Orlando and focus on entertainment i.e. tours, restaurants, etc.

Another point, when exchanging links, you want to make sure that you get a fair exchange, a site with a page rank of 5 is great but not if your link is 7 or 8 clicks away from the homepage with no page rank. In return, they may ask for a link that people might have a chance of seeing, and not on page 15 of your links section. I get round this by splitting my links section up into separate categories.

[cusimar9]

Google says there are only 17 pages linking back to me but I know for a fact there are more than that...

This link exchanging has been a complete waste of time IMO, I definitely need to be smarter about it like you said

Also, how important would you say it is to have constantly changing content? How can I achieve this without actually changing the pages every week?

Can I pull some different text from a database in an asp file? Would that count? Or is it the actual modified date of the file?

[agent_bozo]

continue to obtain more quality backlinks, this is very important.
updated content is important and google does seem to like it as it means that your site is kept up to date. There are various methods that can be used to do this so that you don't have to update your site dailly. Loading text from a database is one way to do it, another would be to have news feeds on your site i.e. RSS

However, one thing that you should concentrate on is quality content that is unique. Google looks favouribly on unique content rich sites, i.e. it's no good if you have content
that other sites also use. Google has been bringing in changes to it's ranking algorithm that mean that a site that has duplicate content from another site will have worse search rankings.

if you do a google search for 'cache:www.orlando4vacation.com' you will see the last time google looked at your site, high ranking sites tend to be spidered every day. You'll notice that the cached version of your site (this is the version of your site that the google spider found when it visited your site ) is blank, this is because you are using frames.
This is a bad way to design a site in terms of SEO, have a look at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
There are alternative ways to achieve the same or similar site design.

How old is your domain name and site by the way, you should be aware that sites that are less than two years old tend to be flagged by google and may not get good keyword ranking even if they have high page rank, but this is not permanent.

[Wharf Rat]

cusimar9
i read ur post and the others following. i find what was said very interesting and seems that the points made are important. i have in the past spent a number of years in the broadcasting industry and i know from advertizing that in broadcasting u need to get the persons attention with-in the first 5-7 seconds of the add or they do not listen well :). Here is my point, when i looked at ur site i was expecting to see something about vacations. That expectation is derived from ur site name. i was not in the market for a house as the copy leads me to believe. i had to read the whole thing before i found that the home was for rent by the week. i guess what i am trying to say is that it is important to re-enforce the first impression. i am going to Orlando for a vacation. i want to see something about why i should visit Orlando for a vacation. then i need to know where i can stay during that vacation. That is where u come into play, u have the most wonderful places to enjoy while i am vacationing in Orlando and surrounding area. Keep in mind also ur target market. To me ur site seems awkward but i am not ur normal tourist either. :)

i am in the process of building my own site and that is the reason why i am here, to learn as much as i can. Aside for the numbers game as explained by others i want to hit my target market as squarely as possible. i want my target market to know as soon as they see my first page that they are in the right place. i do not want my target market to be confused at all. i use to think this was going to be an easy task but the learning curve i am going thru is huge. :) i would also suggest that u go thru ur other site that is doing better and see if u can figure out why. that would give u some insight that u may be able to use. As u can see my view point is mostly from the marketing side.
i wish u the best :)

[finqoo]

I will suggest you join my linexchange because of I have 5 pagerank.

And try to find any automatic link exchanges that give you the oppotunity just add few lines of codes into your page then you have a directory with thousands of links.

FX.
http://www.linkdey.com

And try to add your site i DMOZ open source directory. That will boost your pagerank upto 4. Google loves DMOZ.

And try to add some rss feed news to your site.
Google spider will think you update your site every minute and will spider more than usual. :)

[agent_bozo]

Two things - first make sure that the sites you exchange links with have a good page rank, but also make sure that they are in the same business area as you. I'm unsure of the exact influence it has, but am sure that it can make a difference.

Secondly, I know that years back, having your site listed on DMOZ had a great importance on your ranking in google. But I think that now they are only used for the google dirrectory ( which is used considerably less than the standard searching).

see http://www.threadwatch.org/node/4310

Also, I would advise everyone against spending anytime getting listed on DMOZ (definately apply, but expect to wait for between 6 months and 2 years before and if you get listed).

I have a site ( www.sportszone.co.uk). I'd be the first to admit the content on it isn't great, but it does provide a unique and very useful service.

So I aplied for listings in their Sports: Software: Web Applications section which is a small section with only 17 other sites listed I think. That was two years ago.

I used to get replies from my threads on their support forum, but they've discontinued the site status forum meaning that there is no way to enquire why your site isn't listed ( this is probally a good thing in one way, at least now they can actual review some sites in the time that they were answering status checks).

So, my advise by all means apply to DMOZ but definately don't spend any time worrying about it or attempting to contact them

[seoobzor_1]

Seo Software which displays Google, Yahoo, MSN search results with PageRank, cashe (http://www.seotools.seoobzor.com/page_rank.php) under each individual search result. It is designed for SEO experts.

[spyrit]

you can also submit your site to different directoryes, most of them are free and this is a good way to get links back to you.I recently used a program that had over 200 directoryes and it helped you to submit to them. It's :http://www.directorysubmitter.com/ oh, you can also check my new directory: www.pegasusdirectory.com Cheers

[bokeh]

That page will never get a good rank as it is coded presently. Loose the frameset, write in html 4.01 strict without tables and use a logical document structure including proper use of <h1-6> tags and <p>.

[EasyWeb]

The word from the backoffice is that since Google started running the Jagger algorithm they have been paying far more attention to the Alexa ratings than to the Dmoz listings.
my suggestion is dash over to Alexa.com and first list your site (takes about 2-3 weeks for them to show in the stats) then follow what they say about improving your Alexa ranking with my sites i have found that as my Alexa popularity rating has climbed so has my Google positioning and PR. this seems to be the current fast track as far as Google are concerned.

[johnfloyd]

thanks for info