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Search Engine Optimization is a fairly nebulous concept that most people only partially understand. While grasping the entire process is not mandatory in order to hire an SEO firm, it is essential to know how educated the prospective SEO specialists are, and what they should and should not do.

So far, universities have not created a degree specifically for SEO, but a good Search Engine Optimization specialist spends a lot of time researching search engines and strategies available to get a website listed quickly and highly. This research can take anywhere from 20% to 75% of a full 40 hour week, depending upon the activity of search engines like Google and MSN. The rest of the time is spent putting this knowledge to use on client websites or educating others on the best practices for website optimization.

Like accounting or law, SEO is a very specialized industry with lots of possible pitfalls that only experts can help you avoid. When you hire a company like Blizzard Internet Marketing to perform your Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization, you need to trust in that company and know that they will listen to your goals and work to achieve them for you. In other words, you should tell the SEO what you want to get out of their work, and then let them work just like you would with a lawyer or an accountant.

When you hire an accounting firm to do your taxes or a law firm to write a contract, you would not hire another firm to do the same work over again. SEO works the same way; the results of duplicating efforts could be worse than just two separate copies of a contract. Hiring two SEO firms means that you not only waste money, but that the achievements of one may be cancelled by the second; you run the risk of destroying hard earned rankings.

With this in mind, below are the 13 things to keep in mind when hiring an SEO:

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Often, clients in the hospitality industry are so excited by their new travel destination website that they want it put up as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this completely understandable reaction frequently is not the best route to pursue.

Blizzard, on the whole, prefers to “go live” with sites on either a Monday or Tuesday. The reason for this is to ensure functionality. Though most sites perform exactly how they did when you previewed them, we like to err on the side of caution. Minor differences in servers when we move the site can bring up unforseen complications.

Releasing a site early in the week gives us plenty of time to fix any issues that arise before the weekend comes. If we launch on a Thursday or Friday, or just before a holiday, and something is wrong with the site, there will not be anyone in the office to make the correction potentially causing you downtime and lost revenue. The downtime could also affect the ability for the search engines to crawl your site which means they may not come back for a while. This lack of crawling means it will take your website even longer to be added to the search engines.

We understand the excitement and desire to get your travel website up and running for the public to view. A delay of no more than five or six days means a much more stable and better performing website in the long run. With this understanding, you can more easily plan the launch of your website in conjunction with your designer and promotion manager.

Josh Green - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Overview

The Search Engine Optimization contest run by the V7n networks started on January 15th, 2006, with the announcement of the contest words “v7ndotcom elursrebmem”. In all three major search engines, Google, MSN, and Yahoo, the contest words did not show any results in the Search Engine Response Pages (SERPs). The contest, however, was only concerned with ranking a webpage at the top of Google’s results. As I mentioned earlier this week, the contest ended May 15th.

With some initial controversy between two Search Engine Optimization camps, V7N and Greg Boser (aka. Webgeurilla), the potential winnings for the contest grew. When the final totals were registered the prizes totaled $10,000 and an I-Pod, which was enough to draw lots of webmasters to the contest.

The controversy and large winnings brought in more press and more contestants that any previous Search Engine Optimization (SEO) contest. At the end of the contest, Google had indexed 4,500,000 pages, Yahoo had 2,910,000 entries, and MSN indexing only 85,718. In contrast the largest contest predecessor, Nigritude Ultramarine, only topped 2 million in Google by the end of the contest.

A charity page that was assisted by Blizzard Internet Marketing as well as many others, only performed white hat, (Google approved) tactics and did not use a large collection of personally owned directory sites. The charity team did use link exchanges in the last two weeks of the contest when the benefit was fairly negligible. Finishing in the top five, and managing to help raise over $5,000 for Celiac Disease research, the charity site is a perfect case study for search engine optimization.

Lessons Learned

A number of SEO concepts were either learned or validated during the contest. These include issues like Google Bowling, on-page optimization, and varying link text, as outlined below. More importantly, however, many things were discovered about how Google indexes and crawls websites.

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As most of you know, the SEO contest for the nonsense words V7ndotcom elursrebmem lasted four months, ending on the 15th of May. The results are quite good! The charity site that Blizzard helped support earned over $5,000 for the charity. This was done indirectly through other contestants donating a portion of their winnings, and the sites placement in the Search Engine Response Page. I will be posting a “lessons learned” article on this newsletter in the next day or so; keep an eye out for it, as this contest helped reveal some interesting SEO practices to look at.

The charity site owner is now competing in a new nonsense word SEO contest called the carcasherdotcom seocontest. For this one, we’ll again offer support and provide some help, but we’ll take a much more relaxed roll this time around. Good luck to the contestants!

Josh Green - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Recently, many of our clients in the hospitality industry have asked about doing online marketing to international customers. Many are excited at the prospect of spreading their marketing out and attracting new customers from overseas. While we do not want to completely deter you, there are a number of things to consider before taking this step.

• Is your travel destination website completely represented in the United States and in the Local Searches? If not, this is much more important than international business.
• Is your tourism website in a GDS? A GDS like Inn Links or Scepter already markets your property or travel business to foreign customers.
• Did you know that the largest segment of international travel from overseas is from Europe? Most Europeans already speak English, especially those who are affluent enough to travel overseas.
• Are you aware that 80% of all websites are written in English? Anyone searching the web expects that they will come across English pages, and either knows how to read English or how to translate the pages themselves.
• Do you want to pay to have your travel website translated by a native speaker? This process, called localization, is best done by someone who spoke the language from childhood.
• Are you ready to buy another domain and pay for hosting on that domain? You probably already own a .com, .net, or .org, but to effectively market to other countries, you need to buy the local domain, such as .de for Germany or .ca for Canada.
• Do you speak the language of those you are marketing to? If a potential Russian client finds a lodging website that is written in Russian, he or she will expect that whoever answers the phone call or e-mail to will be able to converse in that language.
• Did you know that most overseas searchers use google.com, as opposed to Google.de for example, when they are searching for something in the United States? Google.com gives better results for the United States, and foreign customers know this.
• Were you aware that your hospitality website should already show up in searches on international search engines? If your travel website performs well in the top US search engines, you should already appear high in the search engines like Google.de.
• Did you know that Google already has an effective translation service? While it is not completely accurate, it is pretty good
• Last but not least, even though you may get some foreign customers, you will most likely get most of your business from customers in your own country.

Having thought about all of this, are you still interested in strategies to market your travel or tourism destination website internationally? Blizzard is willing and able to help you market your site internationally. Please contact your Promotion Account Manager or Promotion Team for details.

Google has launched a new feature called Google Suggest. It is currently only in Beta testing, but it is exciting. The new interface attempts to complete your search for you. As you type, it finds searches close to what you may be looking for. See the image below for a better idea of what it looks like.

The main implication for search marketing is that mispellings will be a thing of the past, or close too. Google wants you to find what you’re looking for, so they will help you spell the words as you go. This means that targetting mispellings might be even less necessary than it is now.

Josh Green - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Michael Martinez has an interesting article over at seomoz.org about Golden Pages, named after the Golden Ticket from “Willy Wonka“. He has an interesting take on how some pages on your site unexpectedly turn into something more that you thought they would. His example is his website’s white cheese dip page. He created this page just to share with a couple friends, nothing more. His friends thought it was a great resource and linked to it. More people found it and now when you search for things like white cheese dip or chili con queso, his page is normally on the first page.

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