OK so we were all told that having fresh content on your website is the best and fastest way to rank well on any search engine. This has been repeatedly said from the lead engineer, Matt Cutts, from Google. I don’t necessarily believe this to be true for a bunch of reasons. I’m managing a ton of hotel websites at the moment and none of them have had any recent or new updates in months yet continue to increase in the SERP’s (Search Engine Rank Pages). The reason is due to my light back linking over the months. That’s right I said light meaning only adding roughly 100-200 back links per month. I can usually do all of them in one day and all of my sites have jumped significantly.

So to recap, no changes to the website, not going crazy building links and ranking really jumping in the SERP’s. Crazy stuff and all the keywords my websites are against have super tough competition. Most of which have roughly 1-600 million site results competition meaning that for any given keyword there could be up to 600 other competing websites. This could only really mean one thing is still reining as the most important and fastest way to rank well on any search engine, high quality back links.

So this all leads me to believe that constant back linking is the way to go and to forget about adding fresh content all the time. When adding back links it’s important to focus your time on only getting the highest quality links. Again, it’s not about quantity necessarily but rather the quality of the links. Of course you’ll want to have more so to insure the highest rankings and for a prolonged period of time. I’ve seen many websites out there that have tens of thousands of links and another website with only 50 back links rank higher in the organic listings. How is that possible you might ask? It all has to do with the authority of the sites linking to the main website. For example if you have a link farm gathering one thousand links from spammy sites or from really low ranked sites with a page rank of zero or one then you’ll most likely have wasted your time and money as these type of links have proven to do absolutely nothing for your SERP’s. You are much better off by acquiring the highest quality of site links to dramatically improve your SERP’s.

To back up my theory I ran a few experiments with using Word Press and blogging with only fresh content a few times a day. My results were very good using this strategy but required daily activity or else the site would fall just as fast as it increased. Over time all of the websites fell off the search engine radar. I gave this experiment a few months to see what would happen and noticed that my main point stood correct. After letting these website fall off the radar I started to build the highest quality back links and guess what happened? Not only did the website start to rank well, there was no need for daily updates. The website rankings stayed in the same position even when not doing anything to them for weeks. The end result means there is no daily maintenance, much faster way of increasing in the SERP’s and a more prolonged standing for all the keywords.

Flash Looks Cool

OK so I get a lot of requests to have flash implemented on hotel websites because it looks cool. Yes having flash on your site does look neat if you only wanted to see a site containing entertainment. If you are a customer looking for a hotel room then maybe this isn’t the best use of your website. You have to keep in mind two very important things if you are considering the use of flash elements. The first being your end user and the second being the search engines.

Customer’s Perspective

When your potential clients are looking for hotel information with credit card in hand, do you really want them to be focused on some moving objects on your website? I would guess you would rather them focus on the reserve now button right? That being said it’s best to always have the focus to your call to action. Most often, your customers do not have the time to be staring at some flash content and only want information about your property. Ifeel the same way when I’m in a rush to do something or busy at work or with family. If I wanted information about something, having to click close or skip buttons to by pass all the none informational stuff on the site would be a pain. To get to the information I’m looking for, I’d rather move on to the next website on the search engine list. You really should think in the 3rd person view when considering the use of flash for your website. Pretend you only have 30 seconds to get the information you want and time yourself when looking at your website.

Flash and SEO Don’t Get Along

It’s common knowledge in the SEO world but no so common to most people. The search engine crawlers can not read anything that is produced in flash period. The use of flash looks like a huge blank spot on the website. When the crawlers are looking for information about your site to report back to the search engine database they won’t find anything. What this means is that having the flash elements can severely hurt your chances of moving up the search engine rankings. Not only is it impossible to optimize your website with flash, you’ll be distracting your audience from what you really want and that is a sale. Now this doesn’t mean you don’t have options to make your website look cool.

Flash Alternatives

Flash stuff does look cool I’ll give you that. The great thing about web design today is there are so many options to get the same effects as flash without using flash. If you take our website for example, www.prosearchplus.com, you’ll see on the main page there is a huge sliding image that moves just like a flash image would. It gives the user the option to see animation if they so desire. Having an option for your customers is a much better idea than forcing it on them. It also doesn’t distract from the customer trying to find the information they are looking for. If you check out the samples page you’ll see that it looks pretty neat and the best part is there is zero flash involved to make that page work. Everything on the site is fully crawl-able by the search engine crawlers and has a great ranking for each page of the website.

One Request

I see that a lot of people view all of my tips and tricks and I would like to hear your feedback. Please feel free to post comments, questions, concerns, tips of your own, etc. Making this forum active with hotel owners, GM’s and property management companies would be ideal for the community. Help us make this a wonderful place to share ideas with each other. In these economic times, any help is useful and Pro Search Plus wants to be part of it. As always, thanks for reading my posts.

We just got approved for an article posting on MSNBC news website for hotel seo

Attracting New Visitors

As many of my clients are able to agree, they receive almost weekly email blasts from our company. The value of an effective email campaign is what drives most online businesses. By offering specials, news letters or a forum you can gather a database very quickly and get the attention that your business needs. Sending out offers, promotions, seasonal discounts or any variety of emails can get people to your sight and the ROI is very high because sending out emails is free. Another key point in marketing this way is brand recognition.

Brand Recognition

After years of pounding from radio, television and print advertisements you can comfortably shop for any product and know something about the items being sold. If you have never heard of a product you generally stay away from them. This is how brand recognition works and it’s very affective. The more often you get your name out to people, the more likely that these new visitors will recognize your company name and feel comfortable doing business with you. Focusing on potential customer’s senses is very important. You want them to see, hear, smell, taste and feel what you have to offer. Imagine what you can show if you wanted to advertise for a hotel. Talk about the flat screen tv’s, show them pictures of the free breakfast, let them know about the daily cleaned linens, the jazz band playing in the lounge area, the fancy restaurant near by, the discounted attraction tickets you offer, etc. All of these things spark one or more of the senses and might convert into a sale. The more often you do this, the more you will have people remembering your business. A great way to get brand recognition is through email marketing.

Expected Returns

With any marketing campaign you must figure out quickly the ROI so you don’t go out of business. The great thing about email marketing is it doesn’t anything but your time. The expected returns really depends on your targeted audience and what you are offering. For example, if you are offering free stuff or heavy discounts, expect to have a much better conversion ratio as opposed to a simple news letter talking about current events. When justifying the time involved for email marketing think about the ROI. The cost is little to nothing so any profits will make this a smart strategy. On average, a solid email campaign will receive around 1 sale per two to three thousand emails sent out for a high valued items such as computers for sale. For smaller deals, such as lowered hotel rates at $49 dollars per night, you may expect to receive much better numbers. The final ROI with email marketing should be in the high 90% range if not 100% by doing it yourself.

Check out our new site by clicking on the links here: Hotel Marketing – Hotel SEO

Pro Search Plus has recently updated our website. We are the same company but now offering more services for our clients. Check out all the details at www.prosearchplus.com. Still specializing in the hospitality industry for hotel website design, hotel seo, hotel printing, hotel marketing, hotel gds systems and offering the only free hotel forum on the internet.

Choice Hotels, Expedia and Hotels.com

It seems that Choice Hotels has still not come to any agreement with Expedia.com and Hotels.com. What does this mean for their franchisees? Well it appears that all of the properties are no longer listed on these 3rd party sites along with all of the thousands of affiliate sites. Unfortunately many of their hotels are locked into long term contracts and this could spell disaster for their franchise as many are looking to jump ship.

The Inside Scoop

Word around the industry says that Expedia and it’s companies are asking above average booking fees for using their booking engines. They are also requesting complete control over the day rates and other features. Obviously this isn’t something that a corporate monster like Choice Hotels wants. The average fees that Expedia is asking for is in the range of 30% commissions. This is a lot when considering standard GDS travel agent fees are only around 8-12% plus GDS fees.

Options

There really aren’t too many options unfortunately for hotels that have years left on their contract with Choice Hotels. You might want to review your contracts to see if there is a clause showing that owners may cancel their contracts if the 3rd party GDS services are no longer available. Having an attorney look over the contract might be a good idea to see if there is an exclusion clause allowing for a separation and a clean severing of ties. Of course there are other large sized corporations to go to such as Wyndham, Best Western, Marriott, etc but I would think you would want to see their agreements with Expedia as well. Going independent is always an option but could be risky without corporate support.

Stop the Madness

Have you ever felt like enough was enough and that trying to implement these SEO tactics were too much to deal with? Time is very important for any business and I’m sure with running a hotel you certainly do not have time for blogging let alone writing/submitting articles, bookmarking them and finally pinging them. Trying to figure out how to do all of this is extraordinarily hard and know which site to do this for. Currently there are around 50+ sites to submit articles to as well as 51 sites to bookmark them. Who really has time for this? It would take months for you if you only submitted one article let alone many articles. So what’s the solution?

Plan of Attack

With all things in life, slow and steady with a solid plan is the best way to approach things. Same goes for the SEO tactics mentioned above. I’m assuming that you have the time to do this manually otherwise pay a professional to do this for you. On to the outline:
1. Spend time finding the PROPER KEYWORDS for each article you write.
2. Write the article and include said keywords with a link to your site
3. Submit it to your blog first – this way you insure ownership of the article you’re about to submit
4. Ping your blog
5. Submit the same blog post as an article to major article sites.
6. Ping the article sites with your provided URL’s
7. Bookmark your blog and article on each site with new URL’s
8. Ping the various bookmark accounts that you have
These are the basic steps involved in getting your site crawled and indexed by all major search engines. Now this looks like a daunting task but taken in baby steps spread out over a few days it’s manageable. On a side note, stay far away from automation software as many are being tracked now by search engines. I’ve seen and heard of many sites getting sand boxed right away after using such software. The only true way to be safe is doing everything manually.

Expected Results

This will vary depending on your website, article, the amount of articles submitted, amount of bookmarks and if all articles have been indexed. Once all is complete, if your keyword research was properly executed then you should be on the top results unless heavily competed for. Most keywords for hotels are not competitive so you should be safe here. If all is done properly then hitting the top rankings on all the major search engines should be fairly easy. Of course your competitors might be doing the same thing or other SEO tactics so this will most likely be an ongoing battle for your property. The reason why you should expect great results is due to the fact that these article and bookmarking site rank really well with frequent updates from the various search engines. By having a bunch of articles your site will look to be authoritative and the search engines like this therefore the higher rankings. Many argue which tactic is better, having high PR back links from other sites or a bunch of articles. Simple answer here is they both work. Getting individual back links is also time consuming since they are all from different sites. On the other hand you can submit the same article to many sites and bookmark them on various sites helps get more links out there faster. There is no scale to say what holds more weight but from my experience having more links on more sites wins. I hope this post helps to explain the process better for you. If you’re still confused give me a call or reply with a question.

Traditional Marketing Basics

We all know what traditional marketing is due to the constant spamming of mailers, newspaper ads, television ads, radio ads etc. How effective are they any more? Branding your product name or corporate identity is still a very strong marketing strategy but how does this play a role for your hotel business? Of course you have the option of sending out mailers if you have a list of past customers. You could always put up an ad in the newspaper, but that really isn’t targeted traffic. Then there is local television and radio marketing, which costs a ton and you’ll most likely not get a great return on your investment. Why is traditional marketing not as effective compared to the way it use to be?

Online Marketing

When you look at the huge companies that have been around for the last 50 years, they have traditionally used old marketing techniques to bring up their corporate identity such as Apple computers, IBM, Mc Donalds, Johnson & Johnson, etc. If you look at other huge companies that have only been out in the much more recent years such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, etc. you’ll notice a huge difference in their marketing campaign. Predominately the newer companies rely heavily on online marketing. PPC (pay-per-click), Adsense, SEO, banner ads, spam, blogging, article submission, etc. are all forms of online marketing that hasn’t really been tapped in the hospitality industry. The number one thing that a hotel can do to stay on top of the online market is to make sure they are ranking in the top spots organically through SEO.

Where are you?

Obviously having a website would be the first step. Now having a corporate website vs. your own website are two different things. For one you can not optimize your corporate website as they will not allow for you to do so. You also have no control over what content is being provided on a corporate website. For this reason alone it’s imperative that you have a separate website. This will also be your safety net should you decide to leave your brand. So when I asked where are you, you should now have made the decision to get your own website and make an online presence. Websites range in pricing from moderate to expensive but for now a simple website would suite your property well. It’s really the optimization that you should be focusing on. The age of your domain name also plays a role in your SEO efforts so you should get started as soon as possible. The sooner that you start the sooner you may reap the rewards from online marketing.