Increase traffic to your hotel’s website using Search Engine Optimization

May 26, 2008

Do you ever feel that your hotel website is useless, that is doesn't attract the right type of audience? Do you often think that the money you have invested in developing an online booking engine is wasted, as your 'look-to-book' conversion rates are low?

If your answer to any of the above questions is 'Yes' then, what you need to do is optimize your hotel website to attract the right audience. Currently, there are 1000s of people looking for travel accommodation and you can drive them to your hotel's website by using a technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing your website using keywords so that search engines can find you (your website) easily. For example: If your hotel is located in Mumbai, near the airport. And you have optimized your hotel website using the keywords Hotel + Mumbai + Airport, then when an interested guest searches for hotel accommodation using those keywords, your hotel website will rank higher (will be on the first few page) on the search engine. Optimizing your website will help drive visitors interested in booking hotel accommodation near Mumbai Airport to your hotel's website, which in turn will improve your look-to-book conversion rate.

Here are few tips on how to make your website SEO friendly:

1. SEO Friendly Heading: A search engine gives more emphasis to the heading of a document, and not just that even the users tend to read the heading first. If the heading is good then people will proceed further, but if the heading looks bad people might turn away. So making sure that the heading is appropriate & descriptive is extremely important.
   
   
2. Right Keywords: Keywords play an important role in search engine optimization. The keywords need to be arranged in a strategic manner giving the impression of professionalism to the reader as the right keywords will make you more visible and help you reach your target visitors. The use of wrong keywords will simply result in the search engine not listing you at all.
   
   
3. Good Content: One of the most important factors to be kept in mind is good content. This is probably the single most important thing you need to do if you want to be found on the web. Good content includes factual & grammatically correct matter. Whatever your site maybe about, the content needs to be unique in order to appeal to the users. Another benefit of having good content is return visitors. Return visitors who like your content will eventually link to your site, and having lots of inbound links is great for search engine rankings, especially if those links are from highly ranked sites.
   
   
4. Sitemap: A thorough & complete site map of your website helps search engines as well as visitors to know about your website. Site map gives ease of use to the visitors and help search engines track information about every page. With a site map you can ensure that every page of your website has been indexed in search engines.
   
   
5. Exchanging Links: Exchanging links is a useful tool to popularize your link. It’s a process of exchanging your website links with similar websites. When more and more website links are added to your site, it increases the chance of getting more traffic.
   
   
6. Search Engine Friendly URLs: Search engines have difficulty with complex & dynamically generated URLs. It’s advisable to use URLs that are easy to read and search engine friendly. This will help you as well as your users.
   
   
7. Page Format: The format or structure of how your web page is designed can affect the accessibility of your page to a great extent. Make sure the ease of use and navigation within your website and the language is perfect. Prepare a well organized website so that the search engine can recognize where the navigation, content and headings are.
   
   
8. Avoid Graphics: Some search engines do not recognize graphics and images. If you have good & useful content in your website then don't cover it with graphics. Graphics should be used as a garnishing to your website. If you will use it in text then it might decrease your chances for a good ranking in search pages.

Search engine optimization is a marketing tool, which will help your hotel website achieve a good position in search engines, thereby improving your look to book conversion rates.