Are you still needing to improve your SEO? Here's a quick top ten guide to gain search engine optimization for your hospitality and travel website:
1. Research your keyword phrases extensively. The phrases that people are typing in the search engines may be different from those that you think they are searching for. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing data.
2. Integrate your keyword phrases into each page's unique Title tag. Title tags are critical because every search engine gives them a lot of importance. Remember that the information you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site on the search engines.
3. Get relevant incoming links from pages and directories as soon as possible. Relevant links are links from sites within your neighborhood of topics. Of most importance are theme relevance, age, quality, and spread of links you get.
4. Do not participate in link exchanges with sites that have non-related content. It is recommended to not participate in link exchanges at all. Search engines assign higher relevancy if the incoming links are from relevant directories, vendors, clients, business partners, business directories such as Yahoo and City Search, and local sites such as the CVB sites.
5. Update the content on your site regularly. This will encourage more search engine spider activity and faster updates of your site.
6. Use Google Sitemap and Yahoo Site Explorer to monitor your site to see how often the spiders are coming to your site, how many pages are indexed, and to analyze the links to your site. Knowing how many pages are indexed is another important stat you can retrieve from Google Sitemap and Yahoo Site Explorer. This data indicates how good your site's internal structure is and whether your site is crawled extensively.
7. Work towards building incoming links to your site and submitting your site to local, regional, national and niche directories in a gradual and continuous manner. You can find out relevant links to your competitors by imputing competitors URL at link.milestoneinternet.com.
8. Make sure your site has a site map, which is linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks.
9. Program your site to be "crawler-friendly." This is important because search engines cannot search your site, read JavaScript links and menus, fill out forms, and interpret graphics and Flash. You can use all of these things on your site; however, you need to provide alternate means of navigation on your site, such as via HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site.
10. Avoid buying multiple domains for one site. Multiple domains do not help you at all.
Milestone Internet Marketing, experts in creating complete internet marketing solutions for the lodging and hospitality industry. Please contact Benu at benu@milestoneinternet.com. www.milestoneinternet.com