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Your Own Website Assessment

Tourism Wales UK’s 'Full Membership' and 'Associate Membership +Option 1' packages include an assessment of your own website to see how it's performing The assessment covers the eight elements listed below, the first of which scores for your WelcomeWeb Silver Award.

Ratings Good Average Poor

W3C and WIC Compliance (Silver Award) This element provides the criteria for the Silver Award under the Tourism Wales UK Website Award Scheme. It covers coding errors and warnings described below and guidelines under the Web Accessibility Initiative (WIA) to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities.

Coding Errors and Warnings These are errors in code detected by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) validation service, which could result in warnings. Code validation and how a website is pieced together can be a key factor in achieving higher positions within the search engines. Having validated code enables search engines to crawl sites more easily, reducing the risk of errors, making sites more accessible to search engines and users alike and conforming to any relevant disability guidelines.

Ratings 0-9 errors (Silver) 10-19 errors (Silver Provisional) 20+ errors
 
Ratings 0 warnings (Silver) 1 warning (Silver Provisional) 2+ warnings

Keywords and Keyphrases Why are keywords and keyphrases important? Search engines constantly analyse the frequency and relevance of keywords on your website in relation to the other content within websites, to gain an idea of the theme of the site. It is essential that this theme is consistent from the content that appears on the site itself through to the meta data hidded from view.

Simply having words such as 'Wales', 'hotel' and 'Llandudno' scattered around the site is no longer a guarantee of success; search engines have become much more sophisticated in recent years. It has become increasingly important to emphasise longer-tailed keyphrases such as, for example, 'hotels in Llandudno Wales'. This helps establish a theme within the content of the site to attract more relevant visitors and increased sales.

Ratings Business name + property type + town name + region or country Business name or property type + town name + region or country Business name or property type only

Keyword Density Once members have established the keyphrases that most reflect their business from the perspective of search engine users, it is important to make sure the density of these keywords and phrases are distributed evenly within their websites and stand out from the rest of the text, especially on the home page. As well as text within the main body of the site, this also includes text hidden from the view of users in the meta data, alt tags and anchor links. This is an area that needs treating with care; too much density can lead to the site being classed as 'spammy' and attempting to fool the search engines - leading to penalties. 4-8% is an ideal keyword density.

Ratings 4-8% 2-3% / 9-14% 0-1% / 15%+

Google® Listings Position With statistics showing that nearly 80% of search engine users do not even look beyond the first 10 results, the importance of being found as high as possible within the search engine results pages needs little explanation. Websites positioned near the top of a search engine consistently achieve a higher volume of traffic and, if the keyphrases have been carefully chosen, will bring a much higher return in revenue.

Ratings 1-10 11-30 31+

Backlinks; Inbound Links Backlinks, inbound links from other websites, are one of the most important aspects of online marketing because they not only give an indication of how popular a site is within the internet community but how good the sites prospects are at gaining additional business through other means rather than just users on a search engine. A site that has many links coming in from other websites is not only looked upon favourably by Google when ranking sites but there is more chance of a members’ sites succeeding if they don’t have to rely solely on internet search.

Ratings 4-8% 2-3% / 9-14% 0-1% / 15%+

Page Title and Meta Description These are highly important and are the first things search engines reads when they spider your website; and the first things a user sees when they are viewing search results and deciding which site to click on. If these elements do not have a main keyphrase within them or describe members’ businesses in the best way possible then the their sites could be losing valuable visitors.

Ratings Title and Meta Description Title No Title / Meta Descriptiion

Page Rank This is Google's way of assessing the overall authority of a website by taking many different factors into account including backlinks, keyword density, code validation, age of site etc and giving a rating based on that information. There is much more to it than can be described here but page rank is a good indication of how well a site is regarded in terms of Google's search engine. A page rank of 0 is bad and 7-10 very good.

Ratings 5+ 2-4 0-1

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