8 SEO tips that will help drive quality traffic to your hotel’s website

May 12, 2009 - Mumbai.

There are billions of websites on the World Wide Web and millions of those websites are travel related. In the midst of this crowd, if you want to attract the attention of thousands of people actively looking for hotel accommodation, you have to rank high on search engines (appear on the first few pages). You can improve your website ranking using a technique known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website using keywords so that search engines can find your website easily. Search engines use "spiders," "crawlers," or "robots" to explore the internet in search of web pages and index pages based on those different topics. So, when keyword or phrase is entered into the search engine, all relevant pages will display.

The Search Process: Generic and Optimized Examples

Generic Search: If only ‘travel’ is entered as the search criteria, then thousands of websites from hotels, airlines, railways, review websites etc that contain the word ‘travel’ will be displayed.

Optimize Search: Your hotel is located in Goa, near the beach and you have optimized your hotel website using the keywords Resort + Goa + Baga + Beach. So, when an interested user searches for hotel accommodation using those specific keywords, the search engine will display your website.

By optimizing your hotel website, you ensure that your hotel website ranks higher (will be on the first few page) on the search engine. Thus, driving quality traffic to your website and improving your look-to-book conversion rate. So, it is extremely important for you to incorporate keyword rich text into your website content.          

Here are 8 SEO tips that will make your hotel website SEO friendly:

Update Content: There are two reasons ‘why’, updating content is essential. One, visitors get turned off by inaccurate content and two, updating the content on your website regularly not you encourage more ‘crawler or spider’ activity and faster updates of your website.

Graphics: Search engines only index text. By developing a graphic or photograph heavy website with very little text to dazzle visitors, you run the risk of a low search engine ranking or worse, you will not be indexed.

Sitemap: A sitemap has dual benefits – it adds navigational ease for visitors and helps search engines track information about every page. By linking every page of your website, you ensure that the search engines index every page of your website.

Keywords & phrases: Keywords & phrases are words used by online users to search for information. So, it is extremely important to find the right keywords & phrases to incorporate into your text. This will help search engines index your website correctly and increase your ranking. You can find optimal keywords and phrases for your website with the help of research tools such as Google AdWords, Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, etc.

Title Tags: Title tags are essential because they appear as clickable links to your website on the search engines. By adding your keywords and phrases as titles tags to each page, you make it easier for search engines to locate you and index you. Integrating title tags into your website is also a great way to increase your ranking on search engines.

Link Exchange: Link Exchange is the process of exchanging your website links with similar websites in order to increase the popularity of your website. There is one rule you need to remember when participating in link exchanges – only exchange links with relevant or related websites. For example: Non-relevant website – www.flowersindia.com, relevant website – www.tripadvisor.com.

Directory Listing: Search engines assign higher relevancy if the incoming links are from clients, relevant directories, business directories etc. So, start submitting your website to local, regional, national and niche directories to develop a network of incoming links to your website.

Track & Monitor: It is extremely important to find out how your website is performing. You can use Google Adwords, Yahoo SM etc. to track the number of visitors to your website and the conversion rate. You can also use Google Sitemap and Yahoo Site Explorer to monitor your website to see how often the spiders are coming to your website, how many pages are indexed, and to analyze the links to your website. Both these tracking and monitoring tools can help you improve and enhance your website, thus, improving ranking and conversion rate.

There are many techniques to make your hotel’s website search engine friendly. This article contains overviews of 8 tips or techniques on how to drive quality traffic to your hotel’s website. Begin incorporating these techniques and improve your search engine ranking and the look-to-book conversion rate on your website.

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