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Introduction

What Is SEO?

How Do Search Engines Work?

What Are Search Engines Looking For?On-Page SEOKeywordsContent QualityMeta Tags: Title TagsMeta Tags: Meta DescriptionURLImagesInternal Linking

Some Final Thoughts

About Leonardo

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a beginner’s guide to

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Off-Page SEOLink BuildingSocial Connections & InteractionsLocalizationMobile OptimizationMobile Is Local

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When we launched our Vizlly Multi-Channel Digital Marketing System which gave hospitality professionals the ability to create their own website, we knew lots of hoteliers would ask us about search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a large and important topic. Search engines take into consideration three basic elements: accessibility, relevance and usability. In other words, good SEO strategy not only aligns with the search engines from an accessibility perspective but it also aligns with the user when it comes to relevance and user experience.

That being said, implementing SEO best practices is often easier said than done which is why we’ve put together this beginner’s guide. Use it to understand how to get started with SEO.

Regards,

John McAuliffePresidentLeonardo

Thanks for downloading!

Marco Braggio is a co-founder and managing partner at Braggio Cook Interactive, a data-informed SEO company based in Toronto. His friendly, head-on approach researching, analyzing and implementing SEO expert techniques are tried, tested and true.

About The Author

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With an average of three billion web queries every day, Internet search is critical to gaining an edge over your competition; it also puts pressure on you to optimize your website, its content and your online presence and activity to make your website more discoverable by search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become standard practice for marketers in every industry as a way to be found in search to attract qualified traffic and leads and the hospitality industry is no different.

Optimizing your hotel website with proper SEO can ensure travel shoppers reach your website when they’re searching for their next trip.

Consider the following statistics:

u 85% of travel shopping now begins online

u The Internet is the top research channel for leisure and business travelers1

u 90% of travelers start their search on Google, a travel site or an OTA2

u Travelers are increasingly turning to search engines first, before brand websites or apps3

The way consumers search has also changed which is important to understand when you’re implementing an SEO strategy for your website.

Some statistics from Moz.com, a leading inbound marketing software company, found that:

u Today, more than 75% of all clicks within search results are for organic versus paid links

u Content creation is becoming the predominant SEO and social media strategy because it produces the best qualitative results

u The most popular forms of marketing content are blog posts, social media, articles, guides and press releases

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Introduction

u Google’s search algorithm is changing between 500 and 600 times per year

u Continuous search engine research is becoming more and more important for SEO maintenance

u The correlation between social media sharing and inbound links is proof that brand social media signals are becoming a dominant force in maintaining SEO

This guide will help you understand what those statistics mean for your website, provide you with an overview of the SEO basics you need for an effective hotel website and help you audit your own website to ensure it’s delivering the results you want.

Keep in mind that while SEO is important to getting travelers to your hotel’s virtual front door, what will convince them to book is the information you share on your website – the hotel story you convey that demonstrates how your hotel is unique and different from the competition. And in a perfect catch-22, this type of effective content can also help you rank higher in search engines.

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What Is SEO?Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the set of best practices (both marketing and technical) that aim to improve the natural or organic search engine rankings of a given website.

Search engines are motivated by three basic elements: accessibility, relevance and usability.

The accessibility of a destination page or website defines the ease with which a search engine can index it and makes a determination of where it fits within the grand scheme of things.

Relevance and user experience of the destination determine how well the page aligns with the searcher’s expectations. After all, a poor user experience or irrelevant content will make a user doubt the veracity of the results that a search engine serves up.

Over time, this will erode user confidence in the search engine. This scenario represents a potential death sentence to the search engine business model, which is based on repeated usage.

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How Do Search Engines Work?Search engines have two major functions: crawling and building an index with crawlers, which in turn provides users with a ranked list of the websites search engines have determined are the most relevant.

1. Crawling and Indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos, and media on the World Wide Web.

2. Providing Answers to user queries, most frequently through lists of relevant pages that they’ve retrieved and ranked for relevancy.

3Google

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Search engine optimization can be broken down into several disciplines from on-page optimization, inbound marketing strategies (social, local SEO and link building) to technical requirements; each with their own list of important elements

We’ll focus on some of the most important ones here.

On-Page SEORanking a particular content piece in the search engine results page (SERP) is driven by relevancy and authority built through the content on your website. The

#1 rule for on-page SEO is to consider what keywords your target audience might be using to search for and ensure those same keywords are present on the page.

KeywordsKeyword research is still the foundation of all on-site SEO. Since Google’s Hummingbird update, the role of entities has changed, where topics take the place of keywords in the SERPs. Google has made great strides in synonym identification and concept grouping. Do not create multiple pages about the same exact thing in order to optimize for different keywords. Rather,

have a single, well-written, citation-worthy topic page and optimize them for multiple keywords. This is another good reason to use long-form content (longer than 1,000

words).

Content QualityHaving unique and quality content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site’s online

presence. It’s better to have longer, meaningful pieces, 450+ words, and creating a great list, matching features with benefits.

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Meta Tags: Title TagsThese are a key element in keyword placement because what is written inside the <title> tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag should be 65 characters or less, with the keyword near the beginning.

Meta Tags: Meta DescriptionThough the <description> tag itself isn’t a ranking factor, it does appear within the SERPs and the click-through rate (CTR) is a factor. Therefore, a higher CTR can lead to higher rankings. Include the primary keyword within the description with a strong call to action. No more than 145 characters.

URLKeywords in URLs help a lot - e.g. - http://hotelname.com/discount-hotel-rooms, where “discount hotel rooms” is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But if you don’t have the keywords in other parts of the document, don’t rely on having them in the URL.

ImagesSearch engines can’t read images but they can read the textual descriptions through the image file name and <alt> tag. Both instances should include keywords but it also has to describe what the image is, whether that’s a guest room, lobby or banner ad.

Internal Linking These are generally keywords or phrases that are linked from one page to another page within your website. Internal links help users navigate and help establish importance to search engines by the number and quality of links to a given page.

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Off-Page SEO75% of SEO is dependent on off-page optimization. It’s all about building your website’s online authority though inbound signals. Off-page SEO is the quality and relevance of links to your website, which will establish your SEO authority and ultimately influence your search ranking results.

Link Building This can be summed up in four words. Quality. Authority. Quantity. Diversity.

External links are similar to internal links in that they utilize anchored keywords but point to another domain’s page, rather than to a page from your own website. Links that are coming from external websites is the #1 way that search engines can evaluate and rank your website.

Here are some of the most common metrics search engines use to evaluate links:

u Authoritative – the trustworthiness of the referring domain

u Quality – the popularity of the linking page

u Apples to apples – the relevancy of content from the source page to the target page

u We’re similar! – the anchor text (keyword) is used in the link

u More is good – the amount of domains that link to the target page

u Variety is the spice of life – the amount of variations that are used as anchor text to link to the target page

u Too many is a bad thing – the number of links from the referring page

A great way to generate inbound links is to provide helpful, quality content that others want to link to. For hotels, think about partnering with websites of local restaurants, local attractions and community organizations, sharing their content and vice versa.

What Are Search Engines Looking For?

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Social Connections & Interactions Social media has allowed businesses to create meaningful connections with customers about their products and services by having an open dialogue online with users.

Firstly, search engines do not use social activity metrics such as Facebook or Twitter shares or how many likes or followers directly into their search rankings algorithm.

Rather, successful social activity can have a powerful secondary impact on your SEO efforts. Your social graph is the way search engines factor a user’s social network into search engine discovery and indexation and content distribution which leads to links and shares.

It’s what happens as a result of successful social activity that can lead to increased visits, higher engagement, and brand signals (users searching your site) with your content in front of

the right users, i.e., influencers. All of this, in turn, could lead to more natural links directly to your website and further sharing, and the cycle repeats itself. All of these secondary effects can significantly boost your SEO efforts.

These are the usual suspect social platforms to build engagement: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, & Pinterest but consider some of these for future marketing efforts:

u TripAdvisor.com – Though more of a travel website than a social network site, it assists customers in finding travel information, posting reviews and opinions of travel-related content and engaging in interactive travel. Primarily user generated content, TripAdvisor is a direct platform to your customers.

u WAYN.com – With over 20 million users, it’s one of the largest travel social networking sites.

u Bootsnall.com – A travel community for the independent travel community. Have something unique, get connected to Indie travel.

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Localization Local search has become one of the hottest topics in search marketing in recent years. Data from comScore tells us that local searches are growing 54% year over year. This growth has made it increasingly critical for local businesses to make sure that they are found when local customers are looking for their products or services in the markets that they serve. For hotels, being optimized for local search can help increase the number of same-day bookings that you have, if travelers can easily find your hotel website when they’re on the go, looking for a last minute place to stay.

Consider the following when building a local strategy:

u Local Content – The most important local SEO consideration is ensuring that a destination has content that speaks to all services in all areas. If a business serves ten markets and offers five services in each of those markets, that isn’t 5 or 10 pages

of content; you need 50 pages (one for each service for each market)

u Local Business Listing – Information from local search properties like Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, Yelp! and Foursquare are becoming more and more important as local search grows. Local results from these channels are prominently displayed in the search engine results on the major search engines.

u Citations – Citations (also known as “web references”) are defined as mentions of a business name and address on other web pages, even if there is no link to a website. An example of a citation might be an online yellow pages directory where a business is listed, but not linked. Exact match citations are important to local business listings in the same way that inbound links are important to a webpage. Each online citation counts as a vote for a listing. Having a critical mass of citations can help to get a listing noticed.

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Mobile Optimization When considering mobile, understand that businesses are seeing upwards of 45%+ traffic is mobile. Therefore, it’s imperative today to have a mobile version of your website.

Search engines take the format of the site into account and they will rank pages based on how that page is going to render on a mobile screen. This is all about user experience. A mobile user wants a relevant page that is going to be easy to read on his or her mobile device.

As of April 21st, 2015, mobile-optimized websites will also rank higher in Google mobile search engine rankings. Now, mobile-optimized websites are labeled as “mobile-friendly” when consumers search on their mobile devices, which makes it extremely important to get mobile optimized nowPresenting mobile content:

u Consider a Responsive web design. Essentially, this is a technique to build web pages with one code regardless of the device accessing it on a single URL. Most importantly, it also allows Google to discover content more efficiently and index a sole page without crawling all instances.

u Take a device-agnostic approach. Should content be optimized for iPhone or Android? What about BlackBerry?

And then there are iPads and other tablet devices to consider. By taking a device-agnostic approach, content can be built that is optimized for all major mobile operating systems.

u Consider an Optimized and Adaptive design. This is the approach that Vizlly, Leonardo’s Digital Marketing System, takes which allows you to use one content management system for your desktop and mobile sites as well as tailor the content to each of your consumer’s devices. This ensures there’s no extra work on your part to build multiple websites yet you can still provide travelers with tailored, relevant content.

u Make it navigable. The navigation on a hand-screen or touch-tablet is inherently different than the navigation on a traditional website. Essentially, remember to consider the difference in a site optimized for touch instead of for a click.

u Apply traditional SEO best practices. The principles outlined above for on page search engine optimization strategies also apply in the mobile space. Use tags appropriately, create a mobile version of the HTML sitemap, and follow SEO best practices just like the non-mobile version of the site.

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Mobile is LocalGoogle reports that 50%+ of mobile queries have local intent. With this in mind, it is critically important to take local factors into account when optimizing for mobile search.

Some best practices include:

u Maintain location data for your physical locations (see Localization). Since Google takes physical proximity into account when delivering mobile search results, the closer the user is to your address, the higher your results will rank.

u Feature location data prominently. After a local search, the most common actions include phoning the business from the mobile device, or visiting the business in person. It is therefore critically important for address and phone number data to appear prominently at the top of the page, preferably with a phone link allowing users to phone the business directly from their device.

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SEO is an important element of any website as a properly optimized site will drive relevant traffic reaching consumers who are searching for your business. In hospitality, this is more important than ever since over 80% of travel shoppers begin their search online.

While there are no quick tricks to SEO, understanding the basics, such as the elements explained in this guide, puts your website on the path to success.

Vizlly, our Multi-Channel Digital Marketing System, allows hospitality professionals to create their own SEO-enabled website. Vizlly websites have been designed to provide easy access for search engine bots to crawl the sites and it has built in tools to make it easier to populate pages with quality content (written and visual) that answers questions that searches have.

Vizlly’s built in search engine friendly features and technology are focused on all three basic elements search engines look for as it relates to on-page SEO (accessibility, relevancy and usability).

As the Internet plays a dominant role in the travel shopping journey, it’s more important than ever that your website is optimized for success.

Some Final Thoughts5

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About LeonardoLeonardo is a technology company serving the global hospitality industry. We provide e-marketers at hotel brands, management companies, hotel properties and travel websites with technology solutions that improve the way they present their hotels online to travel shoppers.

Our core products include Vizlly, a cloud-based Multi-Channel Digital Marketing System that makes it easy for hotel marketers to create and publish websites, mobile websites, social media apps and digital brochures for third party travel websites; VScape® Digital Asset Management System, an enterprise-level digital asset management and distribution tool that helps hotel chains better source, manage, organize, store, and publish media assets to direct and indirect online channels; and MediaConnect, advanced connectivity for travel websites to access the industry’s definitive source of hotel certified visual content. Key to all products is our extensive connectivity. Using our VNetwork, the largest travel website network in the global hospitality industry including GDSs, Meta Search sites, OTAs and more, hoteliers can publish their content and stories to millions of travel shoppers all over the world on the channels, devices and platforms they use to shop for hotels online.

For more information about Leonardo, visit www.leonardo.com.

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SOURCES 1 Google 2014 Traveler Study 2 http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Article/4861/Consumer-booking-behavior-in-the-age-of-comparison-shopping 3 Google 2014 Traveler Study

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