The first steps to improve the visibility of your hotel website
Demand share by channel in 2011 - OTA 11% - Hotels’ website 17% - CRS/Voice 14% - GDS 9% - Others 49% International hotels’ brands have invested massively in the direct channel (p.e.: Hotels’ website) to counterbalance the importance taken by OTA. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is inside the fighting area of direct online booking websites.
The Search Engines most used are: Google
represents 82% of the global market share of search engines in May 2011. In US, Google is only 65%. Yahoo and Bing represent 29%. In China, Baidu represents 61%.
SEO for Google search engine is crucial Sources : http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/articles.aspx/6967/OTA-demand-share-increases-in-2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine
If you have a bad designed website, using the Google webmaster tool will not help to improve the visibility of your hotel website ! Hoteliers have to hire an experienced team to design their hotel website. The keys facts of hotels’ website should be : o user-friendly designed o content oriented (article, videos, reviews, always produce new content) o social oriented (+1, Facebook,Twitter) o developed the website o in respect of technical guidelines
A small humour...
Get a account to login (usually a Gmail account) Add your website Verify your website to prove that you are the owner of this website => Never skip this step or Google will not allow you to use a large variety of services
Settings for your website Set your preferred domain (www or non-www)
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To tell Google how you prefer your site to be indexed.
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http://example.com and http://www.example.com are completely different sites and can display completely different content. You can avoid potential problems (and get a better view of your data) by specifying your preferred domain.
Set a geographic target for your site ď‚› If your site is targeted at users in a specific region
Improve your website 1. Submit a sitemap A sitemap is a file which lists the pages on your website. Google uses this file to enhance his search on your website.
2. Check crawl errors If Google has a lot of crawling errors on your website, it may decrease the index ranking of your website. 3. Review the site health and correct the alerts Google can detect if : - a malware on your site. - an important page is removed from your site. - an important page is blocked. 4. Run the Site Performance tool. It shows you the latency information about your site (low latency => good indexation). All those improvements show to Google that your website is well maintained. So Google will give you a good index rank.