Just a weird (and brave) situation you have - where this is your companies website, you list the projects you have worked on, write about SEO/development concepts - and then invite open discussion (which will inevitably be from other webmasters).

I suppose I just get into my debating mode from the normal webmaster forums - where this type of review is common.

So having said that - always keen to catch up on webmasterworld and discuss - as I think my comments above re: lack of SEO core principles are still valid.

The other questions that would stem from this would be about where the 30% increase comes from (as we all know stats are only part of the picture):

- Was it based on the previous month (not really comparable in tourism) or the same month last year (and is this adjusted for yearly tourism trends?).

- Was it an increase in sales $ or customers (and have prices changed this season, have there been new promotions, more adwords spending etc…).

- Is the increase sustainable or was it a spike (what was month 2 like?) and so on…

Just the usual ideas that get bantered around - although typically the actual website is not discussed (which takes us back to my first point about having this blog on your company site).

BTW: Yes - I’m fully aware of the makeup of the ATA Group, it’s other online ventures and subsequent search engine placement.

So once again - I wasn’t meaning to offend. Please delete any of my ramblings where you see fit.

Take care

Basically the new Global Homepage (an intro to both countries ’sites’) took the PR of our old homepage on the NZ only site.

With proper SEO on this page - results are bouncing back - with the OZ site ranking very highly.

BTW: What are these keywords for Adventure Tours?
To be honest it appears that there has been no / minimal SEO done on the site - unless you have some hidden method?

You know - the first H1 and P are the most important (not for an image and phone number), keep H1-H5 hierarchy, the keywords/phrases need to be on the page to rank, description Meta has a character count limit and on and on… and this really is just the bare basics…

Their only strength is the URL (great ranking for Australian tours) and length of time the domain has been up.

However - if you search for “backpacking australia” or “australian bus tours” (and most other search terms that people would actually use) - they are not even in the top 100.

Especially if content in the new site is better laid out etc it should only improve rankings - as was the case in the Adventure Tours site where we have raced up the rankings further for our targetted keywords and increased sales in the first month by nearly 30%.

Initially the site was for NZ only - while the new version has a ‘global homepage’ and then splits into the two countries (each with their own homepages).

It was this new site structure - and the fact that the old homepage PR now had to go to the new global homepage that caused most problems.

The problem stems from when you introduce new competitive phrases for a different country.

While in New Zealand if you search google for “OZ campervan hire” the site I am talking about is 1st and 2nd ranked - though it will not be ranked well when searching from OZ until a bit more work is done.