Breaking down the basics of how Search Engines work will help you understand how your hotel internet marketing dollars are being spent.

Knowing exactly how Search Engines work can influence your online marketing campaigns, put you in a better position to optimise your website to make it Search Engine-friendly and help you achieve the results you want. In general, there are two main sections of a Search Engine page which is organic (natural) and paid search. So, how do Search Engines work anyway?

Natural Search – non paid search

Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing will list your website for free as long as you abide by their guidelines. When you follow these guidelines and rules, these are commonly referred to in the SEO industry as white hat techniques. A web page may not show up straight away in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) but this is a long term strategy for hotel internet marketing teams.

Black hat SEO is another term that you may come across – this is the opposite of white hat SEO whereby unethical SEO companies do not adhere to Search Engine guidelines and try and manipulate the SERPS. These dubious methods may produce mixed results but as soon as the Search Engines discover what is happening, these websites may be penalised or even banned. Black hat SEO techniques include:

• keyword stuffing – heavily inserting keywords into text which has no relation with the copy or out of context and is being used to manipulate search results
• cloaking – showing Search Engines one page which is heavily optimised but showing visitors another web page
• doorway pages – primarily for Search Engines, not for human beings
• invisible text – placing copy stuffed with keywords on a web page that can be read by Search Engines but is not visible to humans
• link farms – websites set up with the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity of other sites by linking back to them.

Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have small programs known as spiders or bots that constantly crawl the web looking for new content, new websites and links. When links are found, they are followed to the new site and then that site is crawled, and again when a link is found, it is followed – because it allows to benefit from value accumulated on other pages on the web. This process happens every microsecond of every day.

These spiders return to the Search Engine’s servers to deliver their findings and this data is then used by the Search Engine’s algorithm – a large program that does millions of calculations on over 200 different search criteria including your page content, your link profile, your site speed and other factors – to determine the relevancy of your website in relation to a particular search term.

Years ago, you needed to manually submit your website to Search Engines but they have evolved so much over the years in regards to finding and indexing website pages that you don’t have to anymore. Previously, it would take months for a new web page to appear on rankings but now particular pages on particular keywords can rank immediately and others will take many months, depending on the competition for that particular keyword but also how those given pages have been optimised.

Take a look at this video from Matt Cutts – Google’s Anti Web Spam Engineer – who explains how Search Engines work in relation to natural or organic search results.

Paid Search

Paid Search works fairly differently to natural or organic search. Ads are displayed based on relevance to the search enquiry entered and the amount advertisers are willing to pay for a click; and will appear at the top and to the right of the natural search results. Paid Search is designed to be a ‘quick-fire’ and short term strategy for websites who want to be seen on the SERPS straight away albeit at a cost every time someone clicks on your advertisement.

Pay per click is where an advertiser bids on keywords associated with an advertisement in order to achieve higher position on Search Engine results pages (sponsored links section) for searches on that keyword. The positioning of these ads depends on several factors such as what the advertiser has bid for a single click, the quality of the ad and the webpage it links to.

Firstly, you need to pick your bid price. This is the price you pay every time someone clicks on your PPC ad. The more competitive a keyword is, the more an advertiser will pay for their ad to be displayed on that page. A hotel-related keyword such as ‘hotels’ will cost far more than bidding on a keyword phrase such as ‘luxury hotels in Sydney’. The more clicks an ad gets, the better its quality score will become and the better position the ad will get. Bounce rate also plays a role – bigger bounce rate = worse ad relevancy.

When a user clicks on the ad, the advertiser then pays the agreed amount – bidding can start from as little as ten cents to well over $50 and more depending on the competition or popularity of a particular keyword. Every time a customer clicks through that ad to get to your site, the bidding price is what you will pay ; whether or not you finalise the selling process on your website.

PPC advertising is a successful strategy for hotel websites who want their new website or web pages to rank straight away. However, it can be very expensive in the long run and you have to keep on paying for results. Organic search on the other hand may take longer but it is free and your website will have long term visibility. A lot of hotels will use a combination of PPC and organic search in their internet hotel marketing campaigns.

Here is a video by Nundu Janakiram, a Product Manager for AdWords at Google who explains clearly how Search Engines work in regards to paid search.

Contact us to find out how we can help you to define your hotel internet marketing campaign so you have high visibility on Search Engines for hotel-related keywords. We’ll explain the fundamentals of SEO including a Search Engine-friendly technical infrastructure, on-page optimisation, a strong link profile and the value of fresh and updated content. Now that you know how Search Engines work … you’re a step closer to reaching your hotel website SEO goals!

One of the most important assets a hotel has is its online reputation – here are 5 of the best online reputation management tools to keep it intact.

In this social media age, more travellers are turning to the web more often to research hotels and read hotel reviews, online reputation management tools are a necessity for busy hotel internet marketing teams to monitor what is being said about their property in cyberspace. From the simple to the sophisticated, here are five resources worthy paying for to assist with online reputation management (ORM).

How can online reputation tools help your hotel internet marketing team?

There are several reasons why you should make online reputation management an active part of your online marketing hotel strategies. With online reputation management tools you can do the following:

• Measure your brand popularity in the market place such as the number of followers, fans, likes and contacts and the level of engagement with your brand.
• Find out firsthand how travellers feel about your hotel’s customer service, hotel accommodation, facilities, location and so forth – in their own words.
• Monitor how consumers are responding to your offline and online marketing campaigns.
• Learn about general hotel specific-industry topics, issues and concerns that are trending.
• Analyse your competitor’s activities and how they are perceived in the marketplace.
• Identify brand advocates ie people who are loyal customers who are passionate about your business and have access to and influence other groups of people.
• Leverage word of mouth to influence brand credibility and trustworthiness and ultimate increase hotel bookings.

Here are five market-leading tools that help you with your online reputation management:

Sysomos

Sysomos is the crème de la crème of online reputation management tools. The high-profile companies using the monitoring software such MacDonalds, Microsoft, Symantec, BBC, Coca-Cola, Nike and leading public relations agencies speaks volumes about the high-quality of the product. Sysomos monitors social media conversations from blogs, social networks and micro-blogging services to forums, video sites and media sources.

Trackur

Trackur is one of the best premium online reputation management tools for individuals, companies and enterprises starting from $18/month. Trackur has no ongoing contracts and if you cancel the service within 10 days, they will refund your money with no questions asked. You can monitor more than 100+ million news sites, blogs, forums and social media sites with this one easy-to-use but sophisticated monitoring software.

radian6

radian6 is one of the leading online reputation management tools for hotels. With this software, you can scan over 150 million+ blogs, 90+ million Tweets, 25k+ online mainstream news sites, 420+ video and image sharing sites as well as discussions boards, Facebook, Friendfeed, and LinkedIn Answer. Radian6 has an impressive client list including travel clients Air Canada, AAA, AirTran Airways and Southwest Airlines.

Lithium Social Media Monitoring

Listen, measure and track your online reputation management with Lithium Social Media Monitoring. Searches of your hotel brand(s) range across millions of sources such as Social Media, video and image sharing sites, blogs, forums, and your own community with unlimited search results. Major clients include Disney, CBS, Motorola, Black & Decker, Dunkin Donuts and Citrix. Price on application – a 14-day free trial is available.

BuzzMetrics

BuzzMetrics is a product developed by leading research company Nielsen and is suitable for larger hotels and hotel chains. The online reputation management tool focuses on consumer-orientated businesses and supply key brand health metrics,real-time statistics and commentary from all consumer-generated media. Here are four services offered in the BuzzMetrics package:

• Brand Monitoring
• Brand Connections & Customer Relations
• Consumer Insights
• Brand Campaign Planning & Measurement

Whether you own a small bed and breakfast or you’re running a huge hotel chain, online reputation management is a concern for every type of hotel accommodation, big or small. Reviews can make or break a hotel so internet hotel marketing teams need to be diligent when monitoring web conversations and discussions. Contact us to find out more about online reputation management tools and why your reputation matters to your revenue.

Lights, camera, action – take your hotel marketing activities to a whole new level with hotel video content.

Creating hotel video content is a great way to promote your hotel  property, engage with potential customers, drive traffic to your website and ultimately increase hotel bookings. With the popularity of video hosting communities such as YouTube and influence of social media, hotel internet marketing teams ideally should use a mix of traditional marketing tools and online channels to stay relevant in today’s virtual market.

1. Deciding on hotel video content

The type of hotel video content you produce will depend on the size and scope of your hotel and your target audience.  A smaller establishment such as a bed & breakfast may focus on local community events and their staff while an international hotel chain such as the InterContinental Hotels and Resorts Group which produces exceptional hotel videos may have a global video strategy. Here are some ideas for hotel video content:

• videos displaying hotel accommodation and facilities
• videos highlighting conference meeting rooms
• videos showcasing wedding reception venues
• videos promoting events held at the hotel
• videos about the location or local tourist attractions
• videos interviewing a selection of hotel staff members
• video testimonials or reviews

2. Producing your hotel videos

If you manage a small hotel, you may be able to get away with taping your own hotel videos but an international hotel chain may need to hire a professional to do so. Tamara Lohan, chief technology officer and founder of leading hotel review website Mr and Mrs Smith had this to say about producing hotel videos in an article on travel technology website Tnooz:

“Done well, video can be the best online experience you can have – as long as the content you provide is rich, engaging and smoothly delivered. For us, it was a great way to build on our brand credibility and enhance consumer trust, with the ultimate aim, of course, of driving conversion.”

3. Uploading your hotel video

Firstly you need to decide whether you want to host your video on your website or upload it to video hosting sites. If you host the video on your website, you are driving traffic directly to your website but if you host it on a third party website like YouTube, you are receiving a backlink from these sites which can also boost your Search Engine ranking . Some of the main video hosting sites include:

• Dailymotion
• Metacafe
• Bing Video
• Google Video
• Tube Mogul
• Vimeo
• Yahoo Video
• YouTube
• and many other hotel video websites

Keep in mind that if you syndicate your hotel video to a site like Tube Mogul, this may compete with the Search Engine rankings for the videos hosted on your website and it may cannibalise your VSEO efforts (see below).

4. Hotel VSEO – optimising your hotel video

Once you have created a quality video and uploaded it, it is equally important to leverage videos and maximise your video ROI through hotel VSEO. The purpose of video optimisation is to make sure your message is seen, drive quality traffic to your hotel website and capture new hotel enquiries and bookings. Ways to optimise your hotel videos and fast track them on Search Engines include the following:

• optimising title tags/URLs /video file names
• writing keyword rich anchor text in descriptions
• submitting a video sitemap to Search Engines
• adding a transcript file to videos if appropriate

5. Promoting your hotel video

Once you have created your video and you are happy with the production quality, it is essential to promote it through as many means as possible. The viral nature of hotel videos means that your promotional message can be distributed much farther than conventional methods of advertising for less outlay. Promote your videos by taking advantage of your own hotel assets such as:

• the homepage of your website
• social media properties
• enewsletters and corporate materials
• sales DVDS
• video podcasts and
• other promotional material.

6. Analysing your video statistics

Once you have uploaded your videos to a video hosting channel like YouTube, you can start analysing your hotel video content. Every video community will have a video analytics program such as YouTube Insight. Measuring campaigns is one of the most important steps of hotel marketing. With YouTube Insight you can find out the following about your campaigns:

• measure user engagement and observe how many times viewers rate, favourite, or comment on your videos
• track the views and popularity of videos including a heat map of where video views are coming from
• find out the demographics of the people watching your videos such as age and gender
• discover how people found your video for example the search terms on YouTube or Google
• see what specific parts of your video holds the most interest for your audience.

Hotel video marketing gives you the opportunity to add another dimension to your online marketing activities and enables you to engage with your target audience in a more personal and intimate way – video content allows people to emotionally connect with your hotel brand. Contact us to find out more about hotel video content and how you can make it a key component of your internet hotel marketing strategy.

With research showing that 80% of people use Search Engines to find and book hotels, it is critical for a hotel internet marketing team to understand how SEO works.

Hotel marketers may be aware of the importance and relevance of Hotel Search Engine Optimisation but may not be conversant with exactly how SEO works. It is imperative for all hoteliers who have hired an SEO company to have a basic understanding of SEO principles so they can evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign.

Hotel Search Engine Optimisation or hotel SEO is a specialisation of hotel internet marketing. The role may be performed in-house but it is usually a task undertaken by an SEO company for larger hotel chains, exclusive resorts and boutique hotels. To understand how SEO works, it can be broken down into four core components:

1. Keywords – both ‘money’ and ‘broad’ keywords
2. Technical infrastructure – how a Search Engine accesses your Web pages
3. Content – both ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’
4. Link profile – external and internal range, depth and scale

Keywords

‘Keywords’ or ‘keyword phrases’ are the terms given to the words that people use to search for your website on a Search Engine. Choosing the most relevant hotel-related keywords is fundamental to the success of a hotel SEO campaign. How SEO works is that each keyword or keyword phrase is evaluated by its relevancy, search volume and level of competition.

A quality keyword portfolio will focus on both ‘broad’ keywords (attracting hotel lookers) and ‘money’ keywords (attracting hotel bookers). For example if you are searching for a Sydney hotel such as Sebel Pier One, you may search for the ‘broad’ keyword phrase ‘Sydney waterfront hotel’ or the ‘money’ keyword phrase ‘Weekend packages Sydney’.

Technical infrastructure

The technical infrastructure focuses on the architecture and the ‘bones’ of your website. There are many factors that can affect the performance of a website from a SEO perspective. As part of its initial audit, an expert SEO company ideally should evaluate any potential site structural problems including but not limited to:

• domain strategy;
• web host;
• content management system;
• site navigation;
• page speed;
• duplicate content issues;
• redirects and broken links;
• site maps.

Content

The keyword research lays the foundation for on-page optimisation. Keep in mind that website content needs to be written for humans, not Search Engines – you do not want to disappoint your website visitors and see them turning away because of your low-quality copy.

Chosen keywords need to be seamlessly integrated into the on-page content in a way that is organic to the site. The on-page optimisation lets the Search Engines know what the page is about and helps Search Engines rank your web page accordingly, for appropriate keyword searches.

On-page optimisation includes:

• title tags;
• meta keyword and description tags;
• H1, H2, and H3 tags;
• URL structure;
• alt tags for images and filenames;
• page (body) content;
• internal linking strategy.

Link profile

A quality link building campaign is an important component of hotel SEO and a heavily weighted factor in Search Engine algorithms. Search Engines see a link to your web site like a vote of confidence in your website, so in theory the more links, the higher your site’s authority. However, not all votes have the same weight and links ideally should come from quality, trustworthy and on topic websites.

Search Engines believe that if other websites are linking to your web pages, you must say something worth linking to and will rate the page very positively. How SEO works in link building is that when all things are equal and two hotel websites have a similar structure and content, the site with the best links will be served up first.

Some hotel link building strategies include:

• hotel blogging;
• participating in industry-related forums;
• commenting on related websites;
• writing guest posts on industry-related blogs;
• listing links on community websites such as your local Chamber of Commerce, industry associations and so forth;
• distributing media releases and article marketing;
• listing links on quality directories;
• listing links on clients, suppliers and partners websites
• creating a Google Places Page;
• video SEO and commenting on videos related to your industry;
• linking on social media sites;

Don’t just drop a link to your hotel website on those online properties; get involved in those communities, participate, share and position yourself as an authority in your field of competence.

Your hotel SEO strategy should be a harmonious balance of on-page and off-page optimisation, a well conceived link strategy and a Search Engine-friendly technical infrastructure.  Contact us to find out more about how SEO works and how you can improve your Search Engine visibility, increase hotel bookings and boost online revenue.