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.
