Tag Archives: search engine
How Your Company Can Benefit from Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
When your potential customer searches the Internet for services offered by your company, it is obviously important for your web page to appear as close to the top of the search engine rankings as possible. People generally dont spend a lot of time trawling through results potentially numbering in the millions, so if your website is the first result they see it generally bodes well for business.
One of the most efficient practises of getting your site to the top of the search engine rankings is called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO. Through link building and general on-site tweaking, your website can leap up the rankings, certainly far ahead of other websites which have benefitted from an SEO agency, but with careful research of search keywords and liberal link construction, your website can reach the dizzying heights of the first page of search results.
Although anyone possesses the tools to attempt to optimise their websites, it is not usually the case that the average website owner holds the knowledge of how to get it to the top. Search Engine Optimisation campaigns require careful and meticulous planning in order to be effective, and can also take up a great deal of time, particularly in the article writing aspect, so it is definitely worth hiring an expert if you are serious about seeing results.
Article writing constitutes a significant aspect of Search Engine Optimisation. Through writing interesting, informative articles, you can not only raise awareness of your brand, ideology and methodology through the text, you can also create links which will increase your visibility in search engine results. Most article sites have strict guidelines as to what is acceptable and what is not, so its important to carefully research what is required on each site in order to ensure your article is approved and you start to reap the rewards.
In regards to the on-site maintenance, your website can be optimised to include industry keywords in strategic places, so that your site will rank when a potential customer searches for the products or services you offer. Words that you may think are key to your business are not necessarily what people looking for you would search for, so it pays to hire an expert who will be able to research what you will need to market in order to attract business.
It is not just a case of altering words in certain places, however. It is important that your website has relevant content throughout, and all your pages are properly set off so as to avoid upsetting strict search engine regulations and penalising your site.
Hotel-Owned Website Receive Limited Exposure on Major Search Engines
Before hotel proprietary Websites can begin to significantly make an impact on reducing the slide in market share of online room sales from third party travel sites they must identify and understand e-consumer search behavior. Windham and Orton (2000) found that 80 percent of respondents or Internet users in their study expected to turn to the Internet more often than current practice for making online purchases. More importantly, sixty-five percent regularly visited a search engine to begin their Internet search activities with travel purchases among the tenth most popular product purchased online. However, there has been mixed messages as to how e-consumers and e-businesses can maximize their efforts and expand their capture rate in the online market respectively. Greenspan (2003a) found that 56% of Internet users give up their search before going past the second page of search engine results. Moreover, over a quarter will move onto another search engine site before refining their keywords. Even with the potential of creating a competitive advantage through the development of proprietary brand Website, hotel companies have missed opportunities to generate traffic on their branded Websites by not considering a strategy to improve their Website visibility in search engines (CyberAtlas, 2001b).
To further examine this concept this author conducted an exploration of finding proprietary lodging brand Websites through search engines using intuitive keywords. After identifying the top seven search engines being used by e-eonsumers in 2003, this researcher ran a search using keywords to identify how e-consumers can easily locate hotels for booking rooms online. The seven most popular search engines used today in order of their popularity are Google, AlltheWeb, Teoma, Yahoo, Alta-Vista, MSN, and Lycos (CybcrAtlas, 2001a).
For each search engine, a common keyword was used to identify the results of hotel proprietary Websites returned from the search. Four keywords were used and included “hotel,” “hotels,” “lodging” and “travel.” When using “hotel” as the keyword Yahoo returned the most proprietary lodging Websites in the first two pages with 15 out of 40 links. All the Web and MSN returned only four and six proprietary lodging Website links respectively within the first two pages. Similar results occurred when using the keyword “hotels.” Surprisingly, when the keyword used was “lodging” only Teoma (12) and MSN (6) returned any links to proprietary Websites. The results were even more discouraging for proprietary lodging Websites when using the keyword “travel” which resulted in no hotel-owned Websites found in the search results within the first two pages. It seems clear that one pan of the Internet strategy that lodging brands need to address to overcome the lack of market share in online room bookings is to get more exposure with the popular search engines when using intuitive keywords.
When searching under the keyword “travel,” Expedia and Travelocity came up within the first two non-sponsored listings in each of the seven most popular search engines. Given the current state of affairs, e-consumers in search of hotel rooms on the Internet may very well find that using third party travel agents represents the most efficient search strategy in terms of time and cost. Hotel-owned Websites must begin developing a better strategy to position their Websites on Internet search engines to drive customers to their Websites. Conventional wisdom seems to contend that a large section of the e-commercial marketplace gravitates toward the sites that listed in their searches and ultimately purchase rooms online based on price alone (Starkov, 2002).