Domain Development Tips for Lahaina.com

Lahaina.com is a geo domain site with content about Lahaina Hawaii. The domain was registered in 1998 (Woohoo!).

Although the site ranks high for its primary keyword, I think there is a lot more than can be done to develop this domain name.

Let’s look at the site a little closer.

Overview of the Site

The site is built on Wordpress and is visually appealing to visitors. The primary revenue method appears to be google adwords. The domain has a PR of 4. Lahania.com ranks in the top three in google, yahoo and msn for its primary keyword “lahaina”.

Keywords to Target

After a bit of research, the following keywords look promising to bring visitors and revenue to Lahaina.com:

lahaina
lahaina maui
lahaina travel
lahaina hawaii
lahaina hotels
lahaina resort
lahaina resorts
lahaina hi
lahaina luau
lahaina home
lahaina homes
lahaina weather
lahaina condo

The site ranks in the top ten in google only for the terms “lahaina” and “lahaina maui”. I’d recommend building content and back links for more of these terms in order to capture more visitors and revenue for the site.

Content is King

Google reports 65 pages for the site, and yahoo reports 100. I’d recommend creating categories using the keyword list above - such as Lahaina Resorts - and then writing 25-50 articles per category to increase page count and relevant content of the site. I’d include keywords from the list above in the titles, headings and body of the articles and I would interlink related articles with keyword rich back links. This will enhance the visitor experience and improve the internal linking of the site.

To help the SE’s focus on the content of the articles themselves, I’d avoid duplicate content problems by making some changes to the site’s robots.txt file.

By creating the categories, articles and removing duplicate content, there is nothing stopping the new category of www.lahaina.com/category/lahaina-resorts/ from ranking #1 for “lahaina resorts” in google, for example.

Page Structure

It is always a good idea to use keyword rich titles, meta data and headings on your pages. This tells the SE’s exactly what your pages are about and points them in the right direction of what to rank you for.

Generic titles and H1 headings of “Restaurants” or “Golf” gives the SE’s the message that your content is about generic terms, which is not exactly the case. Using titles and H1 headings of “Restaurants in Lahaina” or “Lahaina Golf Courses” is a better choice.

Remember to use short, but relevant, meta descriptions for each of your pages. A lot of times, the SE’s use the meta description tag in their search engine listings.

Descriptive titles and headings combined with good meta descriptions will give you a better chance of visitors clicking your link in the search engine results, instead of the competition.

Internal Linking and Back Links

The main navigation across the top of the site does not link directly to the main pages/sections of the site. Instead, it links to a script that counts clicks, which then directs the visitor to the page or section clicked. The effect of doing this is that the internal linking structure from the home page to the main pages/sections is broken, meaning relevant anchor text ‘juice’ to pages/sections is lost, and so is PR.

Yahoo reports quite a few back links for Lahaina.com and google reports very few. Upon closer inspection, some of the back links are to pages that do not exist on the site. Instead of using 301 redirects to direct the broken links to alternate, relevant content, the home page of the site is displayed. By doing this, the back link is devalued or perhaps ignored completely by the SE’s.

It appears that the default Wordpress 404 error page has been modified to include an exact copy of the home page of Lahaina.com which will confuse the SE’s every time they come across a 404, since the link they followed to get the 404 will look like the home page of the site. I’d use a regular 404 page with a friendly heading and include a list of links to recent articles and the category list and write body text on the 404 page to encourage visitors to view a recent article or browse the categories.

Suggestions for Improvement

By adding 500 pages of new content, removing any duplicate content issues and improving the internal link structure of the site, I think that Lahaina.com could rank in the top ten of all of the keyword phrases listed above in a few short months.

These small changes and added content would bring more visitors to the site, improve the visitor experience, and earn more revenue.

[Want your site reviewed? Contact me.]