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This article is a little dated, but still impactful. My partner passed it on to me the other day and it reminded me how important usability and testing are for travel websites. If we get too bogged down in ranking well, and lose site of the customer experience, we’re not doing ourselves any favors. Here is the press release as posted on e-consultancy.com.

How a Travel Site Raised Sales Conversions 30% With 26 Little Site Design Tweaks

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Tagged as: Marketing, Online Marketing

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A lot is being said about link building. It’s the most recent search engine pie-in-the-sky solution for all your search engine woes… Like meta-tags were just a few short years ago — you couldn’t walk through cyberspace for even a moment without being hit up by folks that would write optimized meta tags that would rocket you to the top of Alta Vista, Yahoo, Excite and Looksmart… Google who?

Google is nearly single-handedly responsible for this most recent phenomenon, and for the record, it probably is here to stay, unlike meta tags whose use is for the most part optional in today’s landscape. Google decided that who links to you and what that link “says” about you is nearly as important as what your page says itself. It’s usually called Link Reputation. Just like your personal reputation, it may know you better than you know yourself.

At the most basic level, incoming links should include your top keywords in the linking text and point to similarly relevant pages on your site. Hundreds, even thousands, of incoming links may make the difference in top Google rankings for the most competitive keywords. There is evidence that links that are traded (reciprocal links) aren’t valued as highly by the engines as “natural” one-way links. The best links are usually links that others included on their site just because your content is so darn good. The most valuable forms of link building include article/content production, press releases, producing an RSS feed, and content content content.

At the recent WebmasterWorld Search Conference in New Orleans, link building was the topic of many discussions. And usually it all came back to building great content. The conference was a little weak, however, on ways to build content - but we’ll save that for another day. Marketers in the travel space usually have some content at their disposal and, if not, there is enough to say about your products and destinations to fill pages and pages.

Here are some tips, though, that I did pick up at the conference on the art of link building.

• Don’t rely on reciprocal linking. As mentioned above, reciprocal links may be de-valued by the engines. You can use them, but don’t let them outweigh your efforts on building one-way links.
• Run about 70% of your incoming links to your homepage and the other 30% to your interior pages.
• When researching a potential linking partner, check their inbound links for relevancy and quantity, view their source code to make sure they’re not redirecting through a counter or ad server or including a “NoFollow” tag, and look for a robots.txt file that may be keeping the engines from indexing or following links on the page.
• Leverage your own network first. Do you have other sites, associates or friends that you can trade links with?
• Don’t be afraid to buy links. This shouldn’t be your entire strategy, but it does have its place. For instance, buying link in the Yahoo! Directory should be first on your list.
• Obtain directory links. A lot of directories out there are sub-par, but some can not only drive link reputation but TRAFFIC! You should shoot for at least 25-50 links from quality directories.
• Start a blog. If your content is fresh and good, folks will want to link to it from their own blogs with their own comments.
• Don’t focus on Google Page Rank. You know, the little green bar on your Google toolbar. Ignore it. Or better yet, make it go away in the toolbar settings. It’s not updated regularly and there seems to be no evidence that it will help you with anything, except maybe your ego.
• 90% of your incoming links should be from different IP C Blocks. In other words, if you manage 100 sites and they are all hosted with the same company and you interlink them all, it probably won’t help much.
• The text around your incoming link may be considered as well. Make sure your link is in context.
• Use different variations of your keywords in your links. If you suddenly have hundreds of incoming links that all say the exact same thing, Google may assume that it’s not “natural.” So, mix it up. In fact, throw in some banner ads to really make it look natural.
• Include a “link to us” link on your site. Then give users instructions on how to add a link to your site from their own site. You may be surprised on how many of your visitors will take you up on it.
• Internal links are important too. Meaning, the links from one page to the next within your own site. Use keyword rich anchor text and consider using breadcrumb navigation.
• Pay attention to the neighborhood your links are coming from. If you’re selling travel, make sure a good portion of your links are from other travel related sites, and make sure they’re not “spammy” sites or link farms
• You may want to consider outsourcing link building if you have the budget. It’s really not easy (or fun!). There are companies and consultants who do nothing but link building. Contact me if you would like any names.
• Build great content and others will want to link to you without even being asked. “If you build it they will come.”

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Tagged as: Search Engines, SEO, Link Building

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I’ve been watching and predicting for a while that AskJeeves was a re-up-and-comer. The recent acquisition of Jeeves by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp only strengthened that analysis. The number of searches on AskJeeves grew by 16% from Q1 to Q2. AOL also grew by 15%, but since they currently share results with Google, I don’t see that as really being separate from Google from a pure SEO perspective. Jeeves continues to add great technology to their portfolio and is just as active in the development of their engine as anybody.

If you’re not already, make sure you’re monitoring your AskJeeves traffic and search positions. Here is the article from Reuters:
AOL, AskJeeves search growth outpace leaders - Yahoo! News

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Tagged as: Search Engines, SEM, SEO, Ask

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I often wonder what search will look like in five years. Five years ago I was afraid that organic search would go away and everything would be pay-to-play. Well, that hasn’t happened. In fact, we seem to be seeing a revival of organic search with MSN’s new engine and a revitalized AskJeeves.com.

There is no doubt that search will continue to move toward personalization and local search. How far it can go is unquestionable. How far it will go is yet to be seen. Regular users won’t use personalization tools unless it is easy and seamless.

Another interesting thing to think about is how search engine marketers will optimize in an increasingly personalized search engine world. We have a hard enough time optimizing for the four major engines… How do you optimize for nearly 900 million individual users?

Yahoo is experimenting with personalized search pretty heavily and they have made some of the tools available in beta. Yahoo! Mindset is the most interesting to me. It allows a user to adjust their search results (in real time) based on a sliding scale from “shopping” to “researching.” They call this “intent-driven search.” MyWeb from Yahoo! allows you to save pages, tag and share pages within your “community.”

Yahoo! also offers the ability to save or block sites from your search results in its regular search listings as well - I believe this is a part of the MyWeb implementation. Blocking a site will keep it from showing up in your search results for future queries and saving it will save a cached copy to search later, as well as a link to the page.

Here are links to the Yahoo! tools mentioned. It’s worthwhile to start tinkering with them now and thinking about the future of search for you and your customers.

Yahoo! Mindset Beta
My Web 2.0 Beta

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Tagged as: Yahoo

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America Online has announced its summer top internet searches based on what topics received the highest volume of online queries on the AOL service, AOLSearch.com and the AOL portal. AOL Search is powered by Google.com and usually returns search results very similar to Google’s results (although not always exact).

Here are a couple items of note:

Most Searched For Destinations:
1) Las Vegas, NV
2) Florida
3) Myrtle Beach, SC
4) Hawaii
5) Mexico
6) Puerto Rico
7) Costa Rica
8) Italy
9) Niagara Falls
10) Jamaica
11) California
12) Washington, DC

Most Searched For Theme Parks:
1) Disney World
2) Six Flags
3) Disneyland
4) Sea World
5) Busch Gardens
6) Universal Studios
7) Cedar Point
8) Hershey Park
9) Dollywood
10) King’s Island
11) King’s Dominion
12) Knotts Berry Farm

Read the entire release here:
America Online Unveils Top Summer Searches

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Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Search Engines, AOL

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eMarketer is publishing a study stating that word-of-mouth advertising is losing ground to internet searches for travel seekers. In the U.S., 58% of Internet users use a web search to figure out where to go on vacation - vs. 54% that rely on personal recommendations… This stat, however, is a little misleading on its own.

The next figure says that the percent of travel booked online still has a lot of room to grow. Only 17% of U.S. respondents book all of their travel via online channels. This says to me that online suppliers and agencies still have a ways to go. This is further supported by a recent Harris Interactive survey (commissioned by Galileo International) that shows 68% of U.S. adults are more comfortable booking travel plans through a traditional travel agent.

You can only access this GMI poll data on eMarketer.com for free until July 19, so grab it now:
My Way or the Web Way - eMarketer.com

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Tagged as: Travel Marketing, Search Engines

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OK - Last Sitemaps post for a while. I happen to run across a great resource for Sitemaps info though that I thought I would share. Pretty much anything you can ask you can find here, along with analysis and user experiences.

How to Make Use of Google SiteMaps

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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO

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Roughly one week after submitting my Google Sitemaps file, it looks like most of the pages have been added to Google. Although, about half of them seem to still be in Google’s Supplemental Index.

Google’s Supplemental Index seems to be a sort of holding area for pages that haven’t been included into the regular index yet. There is a a lot of speculation about the index. It seems like it may contain “orphan” pages - pages that have no other incoming links, or dynamic pages that can’t be crawled for one reason or another. It has been confirmed that the supplemental results only show for a query with very few results from the regular index.

Here is what Google says about the index:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.

At any rate, I’m hoping that these pages move to the regular index. Travel terms are competitive enough that I can’t imagine the supplemental results would ever be called up in a real-world search.

For another take on Sitemaps and how they may help you out of the Supplemental Index, see this post at Search Engine Roudtable.

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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO

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I solved my problem with Google Sitemaps. It wasn’t the XML file itself, but the gzip compression tool that I was using to compress the file. I uploaded the file unzipped and let Google know the new file name and it downloaded just fine. Although Google suggests that you compress the XML files, if you dig deep you’ll find that it’s only required for files of 10 megabytes or more.

I should clarify exactly where the value of Google Sitemaps lies. If you manage a site with many dynamic URLs or URLs that may be hidden from the crawlers (don’t have direct text links into those pages), then it may be impossible for Google to find and crawl those pages on its own. Sitemaps gives you the opportunity to “tell” Google where those pages are. There is (still) no guarantee that Google will crawl and index the pages that you include in the Sitemap, but it allows you to make sure that Google is aware of them. Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, jokingly described the product as free paid inclusion at the WebMasterWorld Conference in New Orleans. While that’s yet to be seen, it appears that submitting pages not being seen by Google otherwise shouldn’t hurt anything.

The tool that I used to create my first Sitemap is a free Windows tool that seems to work fairly well and is great for us GUI junkies. I did run into a few bugs, like the built in gzip utility, but it seems to create the XML file with all of Google’s required parameters just fine. Here is a link:

SOFTplus GSiteCrawler

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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO

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Here is a shot from last weeks WebmasterWorld Search Conference in New Orleans. I hope to compile my notes from the conference into some useful posts in the next week or so. It was a great conference. The Super Session - Search Engines and WebmastersSession featured these four guys from the top 4 engines (from left to right): Matt Cutts of Google, Tim Mayer of Yahoo!, Eytan Seidman of MSN, and Rahul Lahiri of Ask Jeeves. Conference Coordinator Brett Tabke is at the podium with Seidman. Click on the photo for a full size view.

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Tagged as: Search Engines, SEO, WebMasterWorld

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