The tricks of the trade

These tips are from Mark Jackson, Todd Freisen and Marie Dumesnil’s presentations at the recent SES Travel Conference held in Seattle:

Keywords

• Focus on the right keywords - those that result in conversions - not just those that are the most searched.
• Determine your chances of ranking for keywords and then build pages to support your goals.

Page Rank

• Page Rank is used to determine crawl frequency, crawl depth, and whether a page goes into the main Google Index or the Supplemetal Index.
• Do not horde your Page Rank - it is evident to Google when you do.

Trust Rank

• Trust Rank originates with an initial set of human-reviewed websites and is then passed outward.
• The closer you are to the intial trusted sites, the more Trust Rank you will have.
• Trust Rank is determined by domain and not by page.
• High Trust Rank coupled with high Page Rank rules the rankings.

Links

• Do not name your links pages anything with link in it - not in the title and not in the URL.
• Do not get links from pages that have link it their name or URL.
• Footer links and site-wide links are very weak.
• Use RSS feeds to syndicate your blog content and maybe get some links.

Stats

• More than 30% of the traffic to travel websites comes from search.
• 85% of the clicks are to organic listings.
• 72% of searchers click on the first link that interests them ,while 25% look at the listings on the page before deciding which to click on.

Misc

• Synergize your search - all optimization factors on a page (title, description, h tags, links, content and URLs, when possible) need to focus on the same goal and support each other. Jackson calls this the secret sauce of optimization.
• Include your SEO specialist in all site design, redesign, press releases, and marketing campaigns.
• Establish a search authority and allow them to dictate search strategy to the organization.
• Submit industry related articles whenever possible - this not only helps to establish authority, but can result in links and buzz.
• To be considered for inclusion in Google News, your blog must have multiple authors.

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Categories: SEO.
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