Why am I not receiving hits? Optimized, but nothing happening here...

[tvldeals]

I am so frustrated with 2 out of three of my websites and the miniscule hits they are getting.....Ironically my 3rd website www.getawayspas.com
is doing extremely good on all the top search engines and its only been live since January.

About 10 months ago I had switched hosts and so there was a down time of about 3-4 days where both had disappeared from the web. So that did not help.

On top of this I had revamped both of these websites, keywords, content,etc... optimizing them for listings as best I could. This was about 9 months ago. However, I may get 1 to 12 hits to my websites period in a day or so and that is across the board for each site!

On the first one listed below I have has a big whopping ZERO all day and for the second one listed I have had only 7!!! ;0(Whats even more annoying is that alot of my searches that do come up on Google, 50% are or IMAGES.....)

I use StatCounter for tracking and the pages on each of my sites are showing up, so its not any error in that. But really don't want to get into paying for submissions because I hear for one, there is NO guarantee and afraid if I start that and then drop it, due to the cost involved, my ranking will be even worse.

Also I had previously read that search engines find you no matter and if you provide a site with good content, you should just let nature takes course, because eventually you'll be found.

However, something I have been doing lately though is tweaking my TITLE TAGS, that shows up in the search engines for each of the MAIN index pages and I've been doing that maybe 2 times in a month, hoping to get better results. But maybe changing it so much is hurting me more than helping at this point???

OR perhaps its an error in my "html source code" that is messing me up. All I know is that I could really use some help.

I don't think I am in any directories but I have done free submits to Google, Yahoo, etc. I've had the first website live for about 5 years. Never has it ranked so terribly. The second url for only a year.

Maybe someone with more exp could take a look and offer some friendly advice.

http://www.pricebusterhotels.com
http://www.traveldealsunlimited.com

Thanks~
Brenda in Ohio

[seomike]

Problems I see are

1. Duplicate content between domains.
2. Keyword stuffed home pages
3. small page mass
4. Low link popularity
5. worst of all you're an affiliate portal to a bigger company

What I would do...

1. Pick one domain and stick with it.

2. I'd build pages out for your keywords at the bottom. grouping related keywords together by category. (example: category -> Italy -> Rome vacations, Florence vacations would be pages in that area.)

3. As you build more pages your page mass goes up which helps in a lot of ways when it comes to content and internal link structures.

4. Get relevant links from directories or other sites willing to link to you.

5. Don't link directly to your affiliate flag ship. Since you need to get users there eventually there are a number of ways to keep the spiders from finding that you are linking or sending users to an offsite destination.
Link swapping via IP delivery (If it's a spider you make the link text point back into your site if it's not a spider then the link text goes to the affiliate site (there are risks with this if done incorrectly)
Using an iframe to pull in the links so they are not part of the on page code
duplicating the form from the affiliate site onto your site

To tell ya the truth you've probably already been tagged as an affiliate, you're in a very competative industry, you'll be going up against companies with deep pockets for seo or some might even have an in house site. Unless you can make a site with 1000's of descriptive pages and 100+ unique and good backlinks I'd write the sites off and look for another affiliate niche that is less competative.

[tvldeals]

Hi and thanks for your quick reply. Well I have never been one to jump ship without a good try. Both of those sites were alot of sweat on my part. I know I need to definitely work on building more content pages. Right now both only have a mere 15 content pages total, PER url.

I do like your suggestions as to building linked pages out from my keywords at the bottom, grouping related keywords together by category. (example: category -> Italy -> Rome vacations, Florence vacations would be pages in that area. (pages that reside on my site)

And I have already started that process somewhat....If you look at http://www.pricebusterhotels.com/NewYorkCityHotels.html, I am setting up a template now to easily add/create pages for hotels in every key city, that will provide some tourist information on there as well, for each destination.

I have also talked to a few affiliate site owners in the travel industry, who are making a tremendous amount of money at it. But I agree, it is a incredibly rough road ahead, with alot of competition. Being a travel agent owner by trade, I'm just trying to encourage bookings online to get a piece of the pie. But ROME wasn't built in the day and neither will this...

My plan is to NOT end up with the same exact content pages for each site. Right now you do see quite a bit of duplication, however.. But that will change soon, as I plan to get our content pages to somewhere between 100 to 200 per each of these sites, to help pull our relevancy up in SE ranking. It certainly can't hurt.

And at least that's a start..... ;0)