Discovery is the secret to online success

Ensuring your site appears on the web’s biggest search engines is vital. Great Hotels Organisation’s Operations Director Joanna Fay unveils the secrets of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

You can have the best website in the world, but it isn’t going to do you much good if no-one can find it. It’s estimated that some 80 per cent of web users find what they want using search engines such as Google and Yahoo, so getting listed on them is vitally important to the success of your site. You can choose to pay for every click-through to your site, but that is tough to manage and could prove costly. The alternative is using search engine optimisation (SEO) which involves customising your site to be search-engine-friendly, and thus bring you visitors from your target market through natural search results.

Here are some top tips to help you out:

Key phrases

Search engine users search with words and phrases so it is important to research the phrases used by your target market by comparing their popularity and the competition for them from other websites. Your choices, such as spa hotel Rome, will be your key phrases. There is a lot of help and advice at www.wordtracker.com.

Logical building

Attention to your site structure is essential. A professional SEO company can help you structure your site correctly and this is the building block of any future success. Get it wrong and you run the risk of never appearing on search engines, or at the very least not featuring very highly. Do it right and you give all your pages a big boost.

Every page within your site should be as close to the home page as possible – preferably within three mouse clicks. Use text links if possible and use key phrases in that text. Search engines analyse a page’s code from the top to the bottom, with the top considered more important.

Your website name, folder names and page names can all improve your site’s SEO and increase visitor numbers if they include your key phrases. Avoid capitals and spaces. Use hyphens and not underscores, and then no more than two unless you must.

Quality original content

Content really is the most important thing. You should aim to have as much content that is relevant to your target market on as many pages as possible. Hundreds of pages should be a minimum target. For individual hotels this is hard, but the more content you have the more likely it is you will appear high in natural search listings on sites such as Google.

Where possible each page should target a ‘collection’ of key phrases. So if you are a spa hotel in Rome, detailed pages on your spa and its treatments is a good idea.

Linking

The best and least expensive route to getting listed on the major search engines is to have your site linked to and from other sites. A link to your website is seen as a vote of confidence from another site, but the quality of the linking site is also taken into consideration. That site should be relevant to yours, be high ranking on search engines itself, and the nature of the link is also important. Search engines tend to have what they term ‘authority sites’ which are deemed to be of high value, and getting linked from these should be your aim.

So swap links with other highly ranked sites, such as your local tourist board or GHO sites.

What next?

Even if you’ve done everything right, you might need to wait three months for your site to be visited and indexed by the search engines, and a similar time for the sites that link to you to be indexed.

Get good ‘visitor statistics analysis’ software to find out where your paying visitors come from, what search terms they use, and how they travel through your site.

Sell rooms

Once the traffic starts rolling in, selling rooms on your own site is by far the best channel for you. Many hotels are still reluctant to do this, but consumers are demanding this real-time availability now and you must serve that consumer demand or your competitors will. GHO has launched a new and innovative website booking engine called G-wiz that is worth looking at.