Peru Birding Tours
Kolibri Expeditions is widening its horizon to provide you with More Birds. If “Birding Peru” was a noun, we are it, as we provide a number of top quality Peru birdwatching tours to all corners of the country, for all pockets and for all people regardless of background, experience or favorite way to watch birds. Perhaps you are a hard core bird lister? Or are you interested in combining nature and birds with culture and cuisine or perhaps you enjoy bird photography worldwide. We do it all.
Birding North Peru, birdwatching Manu and Machu Picchu. Pelagics from Lima and several other Lima birding day tours. We also provide birding services outside of Peru all through South America and beyond, for instance Japan, Panama and Guyana/Roraima/Surinam to mention a few new destinations. Check out our bird tour calendar for more info.
Help!
Did you understand what I just did? The reason for this post is not another sales pitch to get you to buy a tour from of us right now. You could of course, and we would not mind, but my chief intent is to show you how Google works. I am creating Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Title description, some header and a text that contain our most important key words. All this helps for getting more people to find our website. The first page should contain all this, and our first page does. Yet, we rank extremely poorly for the same keywords. Hence, this post to ask for your help. But hey, maybe we all learn something how Google works. Let’s use this post as an experiment. If you have a website, you may use some of these techniques and they may help you too.
Why were we punished?
(Skip this part if you like….it is long and technical. Jump to the next section for the summary)
We used to be #1 on Google a few years ago. I blogged regularly and since the blog got so much traffic, it also helped the main page. Lately, the last couple of years I blogged less, but we also since a few years started getting a lot of problems with our web hosting service. My website is not built on Word Press (Linux based) as the blog is, but with a asp.net windows database. When the website, was started the developers were mostly windows guys and Windows were then considered much more powerful than Linux based system. Since, however Word Press, Drupal and Joomla, all Linux based content managing systems have evolved and become both more user friendly and very powerful. It is too much work to change once a system has grown as much as ours, and we are stuck.
The problem was that many of the hosting providers started giving fantastically good and cheap service to Linux based systems, while many neglected the need to also update their windows servers. So eventually, our combination with a WP blog run on a Windows server, with a plugin to make WP work in the Windows environment, soon stopped working properly, and we had to change hosting service. We changed to Arvixe. Big mistake. From there it went from worse to worst. Soon hardly anything worked. In order to make the blog work, we were persuaded split the domain into www.kolibriexpeditions on windows, and kolibriexpeditions.com on linux and placed the blog here. Structurally, it seemed to work better, but I think we lost SEO here due to the internal linking not working properly.
Soon the blog stopped working well on the Linux server as well. This time because the Theme was getting out of date and did not respond well on WorldPress updates. With a new WordPress theme, that worked much better, I created a new blog and put it back on www.kolibriexpeditions.com, and also merged both versions to the WIndows server, not caring if the old blog looked strange. The content should still give some SEO strength I thought.
We rebuilt the webside to be more user friendly and easier to navigate and the form you see today when you go to our website. At the same time we also launched a mobile friendly version of the website, and tried to reduce very long url:s we had with subfolders containing keywords. This seemingly created a lot of double content (punished by Google), and we got structural mess with all the changes, redirects, and a seemingly also a not very well optimized new page for speed. Both the mobile and the desktop sites were extremely slow.
We changed Hosting provider again. This time Godaddy, This one works great. And we ran Google Search Console and Google Speed test. Our site is still quite slow, but it is getting better.
We learnt that we did not have a site map. My developer (not knowing much about SEO) but is good at building websites and programming, put an automatic Site Map crawler to do the job and then submitted a site map with 2600 pages! Another error. From worse to worst.
Summary why we did not do well on google.
Here is the short version what was wrong.
- less blogging
- duplicate content
- structural errors
- Very SLOW
- No site map – erroneous site map.
What to do? Can you help?
I am so glad you asked. We are on the last lap here I think. Speed is still not great but is getting better. So the main strategy must be to show Google that our material is relevant. Hence using keywords such birding Peru, Peru birdwatching tours and Bird Photography Tours in Peru in the initial text. This will be a brand new post showing these keywords. Hopefully, a lot of people will click on the link when we share this blogpost on Social Media and through our blog newsletter (have you signed up yet?). This will show that there is relevance.
But you can do more. Here is a short list.
- Please consider put a link to our website on your website with anchor text containing any of the three keyword phrases I am listing above and a description containing all three phrases.
- Share this post on Google+. This is especially important because it is Google’s own Social Media. For Google that is more important than Facebook.
- Share on Facebook. It is no doubt one reach more people on FB.
- Share on Twitter. Twitter gives news value. Google recognize this.
- Make a search on Google for each of the three phrases above. When you find kolibriexpeditions.com click the link and hang around for over a minute or two and then follow a link on the same page. This shows Google the relevance of the keywords.
Please report back to me in the comment section below, or by email what you have done. I’ll reciprocate by sharing any link of yours on my social media and do a search for any search term you want. Maybe we all learn something about search engine optimization by this?
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