Top Tips to Improve Online Traffic and Bookings

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Krunal Soni

In the current economic climate, it has never been more important to invest in online marketing. It may seem like an easy cut-back to make in the short-term, but doing so can have the potential to harm your business in the long-term.

Many hoteliers are implementing online marketing strategies in order to improve traffic to their website and their look-to-book ratio.

The Big Agency (http://www.big-agency.com), a recently launched digital marketing agency from Great Hotels Organisation, offers their top ten tips on how hoteliers can improve traffic to their website and increase online bookings.

1. Website design
Your website is effectively your shop window and should be an accurate reflection of your product. Make sure it is unique, eye-catching and interesting and most importantly – easy to navigate. Ensure it represents the standard of your hotel well. Research your target audience and tailor your website towards them. Pictures can speak a thousand words so make sure you include stunning up-to date images.

2. Online booking engine
With research showing that up to half the people who look for a hotel online actually convert visits to online bookings, online reservation is one of the most profitable and valuable booking options for independent luxury hotels. An easy-to-use online booking engine is a quick way of increasing profitability and developing your online strategy. Web-only bookings take away the cost of traditional, more expensive channels and allow a far greater flexibility to manage demand and yield. This makes online reservations the most profitable and valuable option for all hotels.

3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO allows independent hotels to achieve higher rankings in specific search categories. SEO is the best investment you can make in terms of online return on investment. Your website should be optimised for brand and location searches and should ideally appear in the top five results for these searches. If your site does not appear in these searches, there are a number of solutions to improve your ranking. Consult your online marketing agency or SEO company for suggestions.

4. Booking options
Make sure it is easy for consumers to make a booking. Ensure you have a “book now” button and an international phone number visible on all pages. A customer request form is also a useful tool as long as you manage it properly and are sure to respond to all enquiries.

5. Images and guest reviews
Offer clients the facility to leave reviews of your hotel and upload their own photos on your website. Potential guests browsing the website are much more likely to book after reading honest reviews and seeing real photos. Ensure that you monitor and respond to the reviews carefully.

6. Flexibility
Make sure your website has the flexibility to allow you to update and manage it easily (content management system, CMS). Content should be relevant and up-to-date and you should be able to manage the structure of your site and track all its pages.

7. Languages
With the internet reaching so many corners of the globe, it is important to offer several languages on your website in order to reach all potential guests. By limiting your website to one language, you are effectively limiting your potential market.

8. Useful links
Links to your website are a crucial element of how your website is ranked by search engines. Implement a link building strategy by offering a “useful links” page with suggestions of services consumers might need such as car rental, local restaurants and airlines. Ask these companies to link back to your site. Ensure links are of a quality standard and that there are no broken links. The more sites are linking to you, the more accessible your site will become.

9. Newsletter
Offering consumers the option to sign-up to a newsletter is an easy way of increasing your consumer database and communicating with potential clients you know are interested in your product. You can also offer special discounts to those consumers who have signed up, increasing loyalty.

10. Special Offers
Recommend special offers and packages on your website and your newsletter. They don’t necessarily have to offer low prices, many consumers are more drawn towards luxury extras such as a romantic dinner, spa treatments or room upgrade. You can also track how many clicks these special offers receive to determine which are the most popular.

Important SEO Link Building Research Tips

Posted on December 20, 2008 by Krunal Soni

Getting

inbound links

is one of the most important parts of SEO.

Here’s the criteria for getting great inbound link:

The site is related to yours but is not a competitor
The site has a high page rank
The site has a lot of authority
The site does not use link-building strategies that Google will penalize

Okay, great. Where are all these sites?

Here’s how you might begin a research campaign:

Google the keywords you want to target. See who comes up. Make a list of all the sites that are relevant but are not competitors.

Now go through all the actual competitors. Run them through some SEO software to check all of their inbound links. Who’s linking to them?

At this point you have a big list of possible sites. Now you need to narrow things down a bit.

I suggest putting the list into Excel. Include columns for the website URL, the title, the webmaster or main content writer, its

Google page rank

, and where on the site a link to your site might be good, or why THEY might benefit.

Use your head. Spend some time on each site to determine how good a fit linking between the two of you is.

Don’t just spam a zillion people. You’ll get bad links and it’ll hurt you in the long run.

Before you discuss linking with the webmaster, know exactlywhy a link would benefit you both. This will help when you email them, and it’ll help make sure you’re

setting up links between relevant sites

- which means more benefit for you, more benefit for them, and more benefit for the readers who’ll eventually come across those links.

Have a good landing page for them to link to (not just your homepage all the time) so that they’re providing their reader with value by linking to you. This is a lot easier if you’ve already written helpful search engine optimized articles for your site.

Find a page on their site you might link to, because you want to provide value to your readers. This info will also help you when you email them.

Link building takes time.

But if you ask any SEO experts, they’ll say that it’s a snowball effect. You start linking to others, slowly, slowly, slowly, until people start linking to you, and you’re getting tons of options to link to high quality, authoritative sites.

When your link building campaign is focused on only grabbing high quality links, you’ll get

better SEO results

and you’ll provide more value to your readers.

In the long run, this is probably exactly what Google wants. They’re a pretty smart bunch, those folks.

SEO Job Interview Questions

Posted on December 15, 2008 by Krunal Soni

Here are some SEO Interview Questions:

1) Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

2) Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?

3) Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

4) What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

5) Have you attended any search related conferences?

6) What SEO tools do you regularly use?

7) What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.

What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

9) Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?

10) What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?

11) What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?

12) Are you familiar with any blackhat SEO techniques, search arbitrage, and affiliate marketing?

13) Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

14) Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?

15) Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?

16) Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

17) Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

18) Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?

19) What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)

20) Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

21) Do you know who Matt Cutts is?

22) What is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

I got several excellent questions from a couple forum postings. These get into the more complicated end of SEO.

23) What’s the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?

24) What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI – Indexing)?

25) What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

26) In Google Lore – what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

post a your comments and give answer to help freshers

Incoming search terms:

some seo experience questions

5 Mistake Can Kill Your SEO Process

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Krunal Soni

The whole SEO process can be divided among three major parts i.e. Crawlabilty, Content and Links. These three things are pillars of Search Engine Optimization and so to your site’s success path.
First keep this thing in your mind that Search Engine Spiders are not all that smart. If a spider can’t find content (suppose there is a broken link, for example), it’s programmed to end what it’s doing and wouldn’t go look around for that great article you wrote. It’s going to move on to the subsequent link and keep crawling, crawling, and crawling. That’s what it does.
So, it’s obvious that if a spider can’t access your content then your content will not get indexed and so will never be found on search engines. That’s why crawlability is the basic and most important component of SEO and we will highlight these crawlabilty issues.

1) Screwing up Robots.txt file.
Make sure your text is like the one written as User-agent:* Disallow: It should not be like the one written as: User-agent:* Disallow: /
This mistake can drop your organic rankings drastically.

2) Too many variables or parameters in your URLs
Although Search Engines are getting better and better in means of crawling long and ugly looking links but still they don’t like them. Short URL’s also do get clicked more often in the result pages and they are good for crawlabilty and clickabilty.

3) Session ID’s in your URL’s
Search Engines straight away do not like session ID’s in URL’s. If you are using Session ID’s then just store them in cookies rather than including them in your URL’s. Session ID’s can cause a single page content to be visible at multiple URL’s and thus obstructing the SERP’s.

4) Your site suffers from code bloat
Even though Spiders are normally good at sorting out code from content, but that doesn’t mean you should make it more complex by having so much code that the content is tough to find.

5) Your navigation and internal linking
Designers and developers can be pretty creative while designing a web site but this creativity may come in the way Search Engine Crawlers. Your site’s navigation build in complicated DHTML, java script code, flash or Ajax based can stop a crawler in its track.

Though crawlers have become advanced that they can crawl these entire things but why take a chance.Crawlability is often ignored in the name of creativity and coding, but it’s as vital to your SEO efforts as content development, link building, and any other element of the SEO Strategy.

Latest SEO Do’s and Dont’s Tips

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Krunal Soni

There are some simple tips for SEO process that will definitely boost your traffic and search engine ranking .

(1) Submit your ready website to Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engine. Submit also your site to reputable high PR related web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as digg, furl, etc.

(2) Make XML sitemap either by using free tools available or by your self and submit this sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com.

(3) Create unique and rich content sites. No duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content.

(4) Use relevant keyword that suits to your website theme, avoid keyword stuffing.

(5) Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords. TITLE should be max 60-80 character length.

(6) Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces (about 25-30 words).Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.

(7) Use H1, H2, H3 tag for the heading of your content or text pages. Heading should contain your site’s primary keywords.

(8) For dynamic website, use search engine friendly URL or URL that contain keyword or phrase, before the query string mark.

(9) Avoid link farming in the page; use less that 100 link per page. Otherwise search engine will mark that page as link farm.

(10) Use robot.txt, which direct search engine to index your website. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed.

(11) Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

(12) Avoid hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.

(13) Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

(14) Do not buy OR sell links.

(15) Increase linking with other higher PR website by exchanging links. If you have a good and unique content websites will automatically links you.

Source by topseo.org

Role of Keywords in Search Engine Optimization

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Krunal Soni

Keyword Importance

Since the keywords are the root element of any search engine optimization process, so it becomes necessary to take it as the first and most important thing for optimization. Since all search queries are based on the keywords inserted in the search engines, so one must be careful and should select the most relevant keywords for his/her website.

If the SEO is to make your site visible in the search rankings then the keywords are what around which the entire SEO process revolve. A wrong selection of keywords may ruin your entire seo work as whatever you will do after it will be based on these keywords. So you must be careful at this first and far most important point.

The following points can be helpful for finding the appropriate keywords for a given website:

1. Analyze the website: By analyzing the website make sure not to leave even a single corner of the website’s content and images. Extract all the important words from it. Prepare an excel sheet, make as much different phrases as possible from the extracted keywords. Eliminate all those phrases which do not have the words used on the web page. Repeat this process to get the most appropriate and relevant keywords list.

2. Industry Knowledge: To select industry specific and relevant keywords you should have the knowledge of that particular industry which the website belongs to. If you don’t have knowledge of that industry you can get it by visiting some of the same industry website.

3. Keyword Generator Tools: There are a number of tools available on web, which can help you getting the target keywords as per your requirement. Adwords keyword tools, Wordtracker are some of them where you can get the relevant keywords by just supplying one single keyword or your website URL.

4. Analyze Your Competitor: You should analyze the website of your competitor prior to finalize your own keywords. Check what keywords it has used to target its different pages. It will give you an idea to finally select the list of keywords for your website.

5. Keywords Popularity: The more a keyword will be popular the more it will be difficult to get a good ranking for that keyword. It is not true for all sites but only for new sites. So it is good to target the keywords which are not the most popular and competitive in beginning. You can go for it after 3-6 months of optimization when the site has the enough links and a position in search engines.

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