General Comments
The home page of Brewster by the Sea has a great layout and plenty of pictures. The images of the inn looks fantastic, and visitors will find the site appealing when looking for a B & B. Visitors can view every aspect of the inn from reservations to spa services. All in all, this is a very convenient site for those searching for a scenic and relaxing European styled inn.

Specific Positives
Internal Links:  The internal linking structure is great. The site has a clear navigation panel on the left and additional text links at the bottom of the page for search engine spiders.

Use of award icons: The display of award icons is a great way to help conversion rates go up. Visitors can see what honors the inn has won and see why they should stay there.

Deals:  Everyone likes a great deal, and Brewster’s page prominently displays a large specials button.  The specials button takes visitors to a page listing great deals.

Reservations: Visitors can directly book a room from the Web site. This is a critical function for any hotel Web site. Without the ability to book a stay, online visitors are more likely to leave the site.

Gift Certificates: Many B & Bs offer gift certificates to visitors, and Brewster by the Sea is no exception. Brewster by the Sea offers gift certificates and adds indulgences like champagne and chocolates, making the gift certificates more attractive to buyers.

Specific Problems & Solutions
Most of the issues with Brewster by the Sea cannot be seen by the average visitor. The creator of this site spent too much time on the META data and could have spent more time on other important aspects of SEO like title tags, header tags, and a functioning sitemap page.

Problem: Over-optimization of META information
We see this mainly from older sites, but in this example, we see that the creator of Brewster by the Sea has used almost every META tag in the book.  Now that’s not to say that this will hurt the site’s ability to rank in the search engines, but it can add to page loading times or could be seen as a form of spam.

Here are the current tags being used:

• Title
• Keywords
• Robots
• Bed
• Classification
• Page-topic
• Page-type
• Audience
• Author
• Revisit-after
• Publisher
• Content-language
• Copyright
• Distribution
• City
• State
• Email
• Contact

Solution
Most search engines only look at a few specific META tags because people used to keyword spam this section. The general rule of thumb is to have the following META tags on your page:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

Most search engines disregard the keywords tab, but it can be left in for good measure.

Problem: No Heading Tags
None of the Brewsterbythesea.com pages use heading tags. Keywords found in heading tags are generally more valuable to search engines than large fonts.

Solution: Use Heading Tags
Heading tags vary in size from <H1> (largest) to <H6> (smallest).  Using heading tags rather than font tags will better emphasize the importance of the heading and subheadings on the site’s pages. Be sure to include your keywords in these segments.

Example:
<H1> Cape Cod Bed & Breakfast</H1>
<H2>A2Z – Unique European Bed & Breakfast</H2>

Problem: Low Google PageRank
The current Google PageRank for the Brewster by the Sea home page is 4 (out of a possible 10), while the other pages on the site all have a PageRank of 3-4. PageRank is an assessment of the total link popularity for a Web site. By increasing the total number of links pointing to a Web site, you may be able to change the overall PageRank score. Keep in mind that not every Web site can achieve a PageRank of 10. Every market will be different according to competition levels.

Note: Although PageRank is a Google-specific concept, other top engines use similar methodology when reviewing Web content.

Solution: Build Links
Building links can be a simple task or a time intensive process depending on how you go about it. Joining business groups like the local chamber of commerce is a great idea. Typically business groups will list your Web site for free once you've paid for your membership. Another idea would be writing a press release and having it distributed online. This can be a valuable source of links. You might not have a story for a press release, so another tip would be to create an article and post it on one of the many article Web sites out on the Internet. Whatever your choice is, remember to keep your link building out of spam territory. Some webmasters will resort to forum spamming or comment spamming; this could get your Web site banned for good with search engines, so make sure you are always creating valuable, relevant links.

Problem: Broken Images and pages
During our site review, we found a broken site map page, a broken links page, and several broken images. The users’ experience can be ruined if they run into too many of these problems.
Solution: Run Traffic Blazer Site Analysis
 
Traffic Blazer’s Site Analysis Tool will spider your site and provides a list of pages with broken links.  Once you run the analysis, just click the “+” .
 


Then, you will see a list of the broken links for each page. You can then locate these links and fix them in your HTML Editor, or you can send the details to your webmaster.

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