Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Hotels - The Specifics (Part Two)

Here are five more basics of Search Engine Optimisation for hotels to help improve your Search Engine visibility and drive sales.

We recently wrote about five fundamentals of search in the first part of our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Hotels – The Specifics two-part series. Done correctly, hotel SEO is one of the most cost effective marketing disciplines for generating high value hotel visitors. Here are five more hotel SEO basics to enhance the optimisation of your website, attract pre-qualified traffic and increase your online sales revenue.

Citations

Citations along with link building strategies (see part one) are important factor for Search Engine Optimisation for hotels. Citations are web references or mentions of your property on the web which includes your business name, address (street) and phone number (NAP). Like a link, Search Engines see web mentions as a validation your site is a trusted and authoritative member of the virtual community. This can help increase your local search rankings (see below).

Local Search

Local Search is a speciality of SEO and very relevant to hotels who want to boost their local search rankings – hotel accommodation is typically searched for using locational searches. Optimising pages with location-based keywords, link building and citation strategies with websites native to your region (see below), Google Place Pages optimisation (see below) is all part of local SEO.

Google Places Optimisation

Google Place Pages is a free marketing tool produced by Google to allow every business to have a web presence and a page to list their business details, describe their products and services, their hours of operation and so forth. With the launch of Place Search in 2010, Google Places Pages began to merge seamlessly with organic listings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) making this integral to Search Engine Optimisation for hotels.

Mobile SEO

As more travellers book accommodation on the go, mobile SEO is also very relevant to the hotel industry. There are a few key differences between mobile SEO and desktop SEO for hotels. This includes developing a mobile-compliant website design, mobile-friendly layouts, creating mobile XML Sitemaps, specific link building, increasing the site speed and so on.

Image SEO

As a lot of hotel websites by nature tend to be image heavy, image SEO is also very important to the hotel industry. It is sometimes overlooked but Google Image Search has the potential to become an important traffic referrer to your website. Image optimisation starts with large, quality pictures on your website and the image needs to reflect the content on the page. Other fundamentals of image SEO include:

• Keyword-rich filenames that reflect the keyword theme of the page. Avoid duplicate content. Give each image a different name.
• ALT (alternative) text used to describe the image should also use the keywords that you are targeting the page with.
• If you’re linking to your images using text, use anchor text that describes the contents of the file.
• The post or text below should deal with the same topic as the image or describe it. Google will weigh the surrounding text heavily when determining what the picture is about.
• Avoid duplicate content – if you have two images that are the same such as the thumbnail and full-size image, only have one image indexed by Search Engines.
• Create an image folder on your web server space that’s accessible to the Search Engines.

This is part two of our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Hotels – The Specifics series. Find out how we have collaborated with marketing teams of high-profile hotels to help them optimise their website specifically for hotel SEO and grow their online sales revenue. Take a look at the Hotel Web Design Packages we have available and contact us to speak to one of Hotel Website Designers’ consultants, specialising in Search Engine Optimisation for hotels.

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