Tag Archives: their
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).
Differences between web hostings and cloud computing
The term “cloud” has become highly present in the web hostings market during recent times. Making something available or putting something “in the cloud” is a major trend. So what is the fuzz all about?
There are several distinct differences between web hostings and cloud computing. In a clouded environment the web hosting provider maintains greater control, but given the elasticity of a virtualized environment the server is much more capable of meeting rapid influxes in traffic than it would be in a regular hosting scenario. That elasticity amounts for one of the most advantageous benefits of a clustered hosting environment. Previously a rapid influx in traffic had the potential to crowd a server to the point of failure, making it a distinct possibility that the website would crash.
Cloud computing, or cluster hosting as it is more commonly being referred to enables a single server to be virtually divided into a multitude of individual virtual servers. Data or information stored on each clouded server can be backed up with greater CPU power than would have been available by conventional means.
Cluster hosting works by taking advantage of the virtually connected servers to meet the fluctuating demands of the websites housed on the server. Overcrowding is unlikely to become a problem in a clouded environment, since there is little chance that each website on the server will experience high traffic simultaneously.
The advantages are pretty straight forward. You (your application or website) is hosted on a big server farm, where each server is performing a special task and being a backup or fallback for other machines in the farm. Your web application can use resources across the various machines, hence making it extremely simple to host many services on one big server farm (cloud). The biggest advantage for you as a user is the (almost) unlimited scalability your application can achieve within the cloud. By adding further resources to the cloud, the provider can deal with an increase in resource usage by the users, thus giving the users the ability to grow their projects within the same environment, without having to switch product or provider every time they reach a certain size, disc space or bandwidth.
Some of the most common problems associated with web hosting(especially the top web hosts) can be mitigated by electing to deploy a cluster hosting solution. Not only does it provide the confidence that comes with knowing that a website will receive optimal uptime and resiliency it also enables webmasters to take advantage of the power, space and security of the websites of their peers since everyone shares the process and features virtually while still having their own personal server allocation.
the top ten web hosts list some web hostings providers which supports cluster hosting.
Differences between web hostings and cloud computing
The term “cloud” has become highly present in the web hostings market during recent times. Making something available or putting something “in the cloud” is a major trend. So what is the fuzz all about?
There are several distinct differences between web hostings and cloud computing. In a clouded environment the web hosting provider maintains greater control, but given the elasticity of a virtualized environment the server is much more capable of meeting rapid influxes in traffic than it would be in a regular hosting scenario. That elasticity amounts for one of the most advantageous benefits of a clustered hosting environment. Previously a rapid influx in traffic had the potential to crowd a server to the point of failure, making it a distinct possibility that the website would crash.
Cloud computing, or cluster hosting as it is more commonly being referred to enables a single server to be virtually divided into a multitude of individual virtual servers. Data or information stored on each clouded server can be backed up with greater CPU power than would have been available by conventional means.
Cluster hosting works by taking advantage of the virtually connected servers to meet the fluctuating demands of the websites housed on the server. Overcrowding is unlikely to become a problem in a clouded environment, since there is little chance that each website on the server will experience high traffic simultaneously.
The advantages are pretty straight forward. You (your application or website) is hosted on a big server farm, where each server is performing a special task and being a backup or fallback for other machines in the farm. Your web application can use resources across the various machines, hence making it extremely simple to host many services on one big server farm (cloud). The biggest advantage for you as a user is the (almost) unlimited scalability your application can achieve within the cloud. By adding further resources to the cloud, the provider can deal with an increase in resource usage by the users, thus giving the users the ability to grow their projects within the same environment, without having to switch product or provider every time they reach a certain size, disc space or bandwidth.
Some of the most common problems associated with web hosting(especially the top web hosts) can be mitigated by electing to deploy a cluster hosting solution. Not only does it provide the confidence that comes with knowing that a website will receive optimal uptime and resiliency it also enables webmasters to take advantage of the power, space and security of the websites of their peers since everyone shares the process and features virtually while still having their own personal server allocation.
the top ten web hosts list some web hostings providers which supports cluster hosting.