Tag Archives: engines
Overlook These SEO Factors at Your Own Risk
While it takes some effort to raise the search engine ranking of your website, it’s not as hard as you might think. However, there are a few SEO factors that you need to keep in mind at all times to ensure that you’re constantly getting ranked for your targeted keywords-
Top Notch Content: If there’s one thing that plays a major role in helping you succeed with SEO and gives you edge over the competition then it has to be the content. Possessing high quality content on your website or blog is very important.
This is because Google and other search engines are taking strict measures to ‘demote’ any website that is using bad content. Not only do you have to have unique content, but it also has to be highly relevant to the blog’s main topic. Do not listen to those who claim that your content does not have to adhere to the principles of SEO because this is not the case. You will find that top of the line content will be ranked higher by the search engines because it obtains plenty of backlinks. It makes your SEO efforts simple when you have quality content because other bloggers will have more of a reason to link to it. So you have to pay attention to creating the best content that you can. If you are considering getting a SEO professional who can create good content for you, then do it even if it is a little bit costly. This is because producing quality is of the utmost importance.
If you want to build effective backlinks you’re going to have to use a variety of sources for these important external links if you want search engines to pay attention. Backlinks are all about building credibility and the search engines find it more credible when you have numerous IP addresses represented among those backlinks rather than a handful. Leaving aside the technical details, you should understand that the basic rule of building high quality backlinks to your website should be about getting backlinks from as many different websites as possible. When you take the time to do this every backlink you build to your site will be one that matters. You’ll discover that this is a method of building backlinks that does happen gradually over time, but it is also one that will reward you well when all is said and done.
Were you aware that Google makes note of the keywords that show up in the permalinks for your blog or website? If you’re wanting your sites to get a little love from the search engines then you need to make sure that long-tail keywords are included in the permalink for each page of content on your site. This will give the search engines a clear idea on what the page is about, besides looking into the title and the H1 tag. The targeted keyword is often included in the site’s domain name but it’s a little known secret that the permalinks help even more.
These are small changes you can make but when they are made consistently they’ll bring big results for your website’s SEO rank results. It’s not enough to just do these things once and reap the rewards indefinitely you must keep working to maintain your efforts.
Hotel-Owned Website Receive Limited Exposure on Major Search Engines
Before hotel proprietary Websites can begin to significantly make an impact on reducing the slide in market share of online room sales from third party travel sites they must identify and understand e-consumer search behavior. Windham and Orton (2000) found that 80 percent of respondents or Internet users in their study expected to turn to the Internet more often than current practice for making online purchases. More importantly, sixty-five percent regularly visited a search engine to begin their Internet search activities with travel purchases among the tenth most popular product purchased online. However, there has been mixed messages as to how e-consumers and e-businesses can maximize their efforts and expand their capture rate in the online market respectively. Greenspan (2003a) found that 56% of Internet users give up their search before going past the second page of search engine results. Moreover, over a quarter will move onto another search engine site before refining their keywords. Even with the potential of creating a competitive advantage through the development of proprietary brand Website, hotel companies have missed opportunities to generate traffic on their branded Websites by not considering a strategy to improve their Website visibility in search engines (CyberAtlas, 2001b).
To further examine this concept this author conducted an exploration of finding proprietary lodging brand Websites through search engines using intuitive keywords. After identifying the top seven search engines being used by e-eonsumers in 2003, this researcher ran a search using keywords to identify how e-consumers can easily locate hotels for booking rooms online. The seven most popular search engines used today in order of their popularity are Google, AlltheWeb, Teoma, Yahoo, Alta-Vista, MSN, and Lycos (CybcrAtlas, 2001a).
For each search engine, a common keyword was used to identify the results of hotel proprietary Websites returned from the search. Four keywords were used and included “hotel,” “hotels,” “lodging” and “travel.” When using “hotel” as the keyword Yahoo returned the most proprietary lodging Websites in the first two pages with 15 out of 40 links. All the Web and MSN returned only four and six proprietary lodging Website links respectively within the first two pages. Similar results occurred when using the keyword “hotels.” Surprisingly, when the keyword used was “lodging” only Teoma (12) and MSN (6) returned any links to proprietary Websites. The results were even more discouraging for proprietary lodging Websites when using the keyword “travel” which resulted in no hotel-owned Websites found in the search results within the first two pages. It seems clear that one pan of the Internet strategy that lodging brands need to address to overcome the lack of market share in online room bookings is to get more exposure with the popular search engines when using intuitive keywords.
When searching under the keyword “travel,” Expedia and Travelocity came up within the first two non-sponsored listings in each of the seven most popular search engines. Given the current state of affairs, e-consumers in search of hotel rooms on the Internet may very well find that using third party travel agents represents the most efficient search strategy in terms of time and cost. Hotel-owned Websites must begin developing a better strategy to position their Websites on Internet search engines to drive customers to their Websites. Conventional wisdom seems to contend that a large section of the e-commercial marketplace gravitates toward the sites that listed in their searches and ultimately purchase rooms online based on price alone (Starkov, 2002).