Tag Archives: search engines
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).
How directories affect a websites success
Building backlinks is essential to a websites success. To make money online your website has to get traffic. Building backlinks is one of the most important factors. Backlinks help your website to get ranked in the search engines and the more you have the better your Search Engine Ranking Position (SERPs). The higher your position in the search engines, the more traffic your website will get. Of course there are other ways to get traffic to a website, but building backlinks is an essential ingredient for doing so.
Submitting your website to Web Directories is a useful way of building backlinks. Web Directories are like the internets phone book. Like a physical phone book, web directories list entries that offer services/information or products for sale. If you own a business, you want your business to be shown to every potential customer available.
With each directory, physical or online, you can choose a category for your business to appear under. For example if you own a plumbing business, you want your advert to be placed under the plumbing section in the local yellow pages. Web Directories offer a category for your website to be placed under, so if you own a football merchandise website, you may want to place your website under the category of sport.
Also with a Web Directory you can choose certain keywords, known mostly as tags. These tags are useful for when someone searches a directory looking for a particular service or product. For example, you own a plumbing business in the UK. You may wish to place a tag saying “Plumbing services UK”. When a search is done for “Plumbing services UK” your website will be found under the search results.
Other benefits of a directory submission are one way backlinks. A one way backlink is just as it sounds, its one way. This means you do not have to link back to that website, they link to you. There are a different types of web directories around, but most directories are free and do not require a reciprocal link (a link back to their site).
Choosing a directory to submit to is easy. There are now thousands of directories all over the internet offering you a listing free of charge. Although it is quite quick and easy to submit your website for inclusion, listing the details and pressing submit, doing this for the thousands of directories out there can be quite a daunting task. Lets face it, time is money and most of us do not have hours/days to spare doing the same thing over and over, even if the benefits are greatly rewarding.
So lets face it, time is money. We have all heard the saying but it is true, you have built a website today, you want people to be visiting by tomorrow. Well one way to save time and money is to pay someone to do the work for you. That means using a small amount of your set-up budget to have another business go to each and every directory and submit the information for you. Meaning you will benefit from the hundreds/thousands of one way backlinks without any of the effort. The best thing about using another company to do the work for you is the experience that company has in its field. Most companies that offer a directory submission services know their markets, know their clients wants/needs and most of all know the best places to submit your website information to.
The way in which all websites, not only web directories, are ranked in order of importance is something called Page Rank. A website is scored between zero and ten, with zero being the lowest and ten being the highest. A Manual Directory Submission Service can offer your website a chance at being placed into high ranked web directories, giving you highly ranked backlinks. The more of these you get the more the search engines see your website as being important to them. The more the search engines see your website as being important, the higher your website will be in the search engines and the higher you are in the search engines, the more traffic and sales you will make.
In Case You Are Looking To Obtain More Traffic You Should Have A Look At Article Advertising And Marketing
When most individuals get started with their own online business they’re going to get started by using pay per click programs which can end up costing them a log of cash. While you will find free methods that work you will in addition find other free advertising methods that are just a complete waste of time. Article marketing is still one of the greatest ways to get free targeted visitors and in this article we are going to explain to you how to do it the proper way.
With regards to article advertising, you’re going to understand that for quite some time internet marketers have been using this strategy to get all the targeted traffic they want for free. In fact when folks first started using article marketing it had been so powerful that they did not share this technique of generating traffic with other people. You are able to get a lot of different information on article advertising nowadays but many individuals are looking to sell you this information.
Before you begin writing an article you will have to make certain that you find the right keywords to target within the articles. Once you find the best keywords you’ll want to begin creating your article and make certain you’re using the keyword phrase throughout the article without over doing it. You are also going to want to be sure you are using the keyword phrase within the title of the article as this is how the various search engines will know what your article is all about. One more thing you’re going to need to do is be sure that you utilize the keyword phrase in both the first and last sentence inside the article. Don’t forget to make sure you add a resource box at the end of the article with a back link pointing back to your internet site or your money page.
At this point it’s time to begin submitting your article to every single place you can, this can help you to get the most amount of traffic that you can get. You can use article directory sites, post the article on forums that are related to your article and you can even find men and women that will enable you to post your articles to their blogs. For every article you post you are going to want to collect the URL where the article is online so you can let search engines like Google know about the article and the backlink by using pinging. If you look around online you are going to realize that there is pinging software available which can help you with this part. This will let the search engines find and count your backlinks and will in addition help you to get your articles indexed very quickly inside their results. Head out to Cincinnati SEO for more info.