Ensuring your hotel’s website is search engine friendly, must be one of hoteliers’ most important online marketing considerations. Unfortunately, if this is overlooked during those vital months of website design and implementation, you could be left with a website and no organic traffic. But, all is not lost! Previously I have discussed the importance of off-page SEO techniques to increase your website presence, namely, quality link building through content production and distribution. However, there are also simple on-page tweaks you can make to your website to improve your organic rankings or, in the very least, give your website the best opportunity for indexing by the search engines.

Improving user interaction and user experience, will ultimately increase your search engine rankings. A primary concern of any search engine is the accuracy of its search results. If they send a user off to your web site, will that user be happy to land there? Will your site be relevant to his query? If so, users will happily go back to that search engine, knowing that it can direct them to useful, relevant sites. On-page optimization is a vital component of any successful SEO strategy. It encompasses everything you see on the page; unique page titles, URL structures, meta tags, image labeling, and more….

Story continues below
Advertisement

Do all your pages have unique page titles?
This may be a basic consideration, but unique and accurate page titles are the foundation on which more dynamic search engine optimisation changes are built. As new content is uploaded, page titles can be overlooked. If you have a large site, running through all pages will take time. The title tag of a page tells the search engine and the user what that section of your site is about and, more importantly, will normally be used by the search engine to populate the site’s listing information in the search engine page results (SERPs.) The title can include not only keywords but details of your geographical location – showing search engines and users that this page is relevant to their query.

When checking page titles, take the time to cast your eye over the ‘meta description’ tag. While a succinct summary won’t turbo power your rankings on Google, it will tell the search engine and user what the page is about.

Are your URL structures suitable?

An organised site is one that is easily accessible and easily readable by the search engine spiders. A logical file structure with information arranged into folders should be accompanied by a URL that uses recognisable words and that could be used to ascertain what the page is about. For example, rather than www.thisismywebsite.com/web/docs/page677890/x/0078.html, a URL such as www.thisismywebsite.com/articles/seo-site-audit.html would be far more effective. Site users and search engines would be able to make an educated guess as to the content of the page. The first example is unwieldy, which may also cause problems when targeting backlinks. The second URL can easily be copied and pasted and any missing parts, such as the second half of the title of the page, would be apparent – whereas a structure using parameters and codes, as in example 1, is not easily readable. In this instance, it would not be apparent if a section of the link had been missed when copying and pasting for a backlink.