If you are in the business of selling online travel to leisure travelers, you understand the value of SEO for attracting more customers to your website. Though the importance of SEO is relevant, what happens after you do get the customer to your website. It is important to understand their needs and present your product that helps convert the customer. With a rising look-to-book ratio, it is important to convert the looks into bookings. Estimates suggest currently only 1-2% conversions happen for any SEO or offline marketing campaigns. With the higher cost of acquisition, it is important to get the customer the very first time they visit your website.In my opinion following are the important factors that can affect retention of your customer and convert more looks into bookings. Price and Availability ?br> Studies by Internet analyst firms Gomez and PhoCusWright, and also by TIA, have all identified price as being one of the key motivating factors that encourages consumers to purchase travel products online. For example, the PhoCusWright study found that competitive pricing is the best way to attract customers. When travelers who haven’t bought online were asked what would encourage them to do so, 64 percent said that saving money would make them more interested. No other benefit ?saving time, getting bonus loyalty club points, more control or obtaining better information, came close to this level of response. According to Yesawich, Pepperdine & Brown, almost six out of 10 leisure travelers now actively seek the "lowest possible price" for travel services. Lastly, a study by the Joint Hospitality Industry Congress found that there is a real expectation among consumers that Internet prices will be lower than those in the "bricks and mortar" world. However, with the advent of multiple online travel giants, the competition is not as much from the “Brick and mortar?companies as it is from competitor websites. On average a leisure traveler visits 3-4 websites before making a purchase. Perhaps the most important factors in deciding whether a customer lead provided by SEO or other offline marketing channels is going to be converted to a sale or not is PRICE. Not only is important to provide a Low price guarantee labels on your website but to actually conform to those Low Price Guarantees. Though labeling of your website with Low Price Guarantees helps you position yourself as the Lowest Price provider, the ultimate test is to conform to the Low Price Guarantees. This would involve either manually checking competitor websites or a more systematic approach would be to use a technology partner that can help in using their search engine technologies in tracking the price and availability of competitor firms. Equally important is the Availability factor. In order to attract customer loyalty, availability is a key issue. Having SOLD OUT on your properties does not encourage customers to come back to your site. Also important is to have an adequate number of properties available per star segment. If you are focused on the up market and luxury market segment then it is important to have a sufficient number of 4-5 star properties available on your website. However, if you are targeting the budget market segment, a good collection of 1-3 star properties is required. If you are focusing on the whole market a good representation of all-star segments is essential. Affiliates that use travel inventory from one of the big brand websites often do not have control over either the pricing or availability. However, it is important for the affiliates to research the pricing and availability trends for the markets they operate in. Though they cannot control the pricing, the affiliates can look at sourcing travel inventory from multiple other travel intermediaries. One Stop Shop V/s Specialize in Airfares or Hotels -The big brands in online travel have been emphasizing on packaging especially dynamically packaging. They can however do this because of their big size and the ability to negotiate directly with the travel suppliers. There is no doubt that the packaging is preferred by both the online brands as well as the customers and thus making it a win-win situation for both. However for the smaller online websites that focus on either certain segment of the marketplace or focus on a geography ?providing a one-stop shop could not justify the incremental costs. In order to make a business case your incremental costs should be substantiated with over and above incremental revenues. Layout and ContentIt is important to have a third party conduct a usability study on your website to judge the layout and content on your website. It is important to have relevant and updated content on the travel inventory. Equally important is to ensure a simple, straightforward booking process. Going through multiple pages is sometimes tedious and can lead to the customer being distracted and exiting your site. Inclusive or Exclusive RatesA number of websites today show exclusive rates when you first search for a hotel on their website. It is after 2nd or 3rd page that you see the total amount that is due for a hotel room night including taxes and service charges. There are sites such as OctopusTravel and Hotelopia that do provide all-inclusive rates on the first page itself. In my opinion, including all-inclusive rates is a better strategy because of the following 1) Inclusive rates are easier to navigate, compare and understand. In case of Exclusive rates, the user might have to navigate through multiple pages to get to the final rate.2) Exclusive rate can confuse the user and eventually result in loss of patronage. With the inclusive rates, they are easier to understand and there is no guesswork involved in understanding the total charges for the room.SummaryOnce you have the customer to your website, it is important you do everything in your power to convert the look to book on your site. An effective SEO campaign should be managed by an effective customer conversion strategy using above methods. About the Author,Bhanu Chopra is the CEO of RateGain. RateGain provides Internet based competitive pricing intelligence to the global travel industry. The mission is to deliver a comprehensive view of Internet based travel airfare and hotel-rates information to travel portals, airlines, hotel chains, travel inventory consolidators and travel industry related market research firms. The availability of this market intelligence enables our customers to reach their price-decisions faster and remain ahead of the market by deciding appropriate sales strategies. This in turn helps our customers increase their sales and enhance efficiency of Internet as the preferred and low-cost medium of transaction. For more information visit www.rategain.com or email bchopra@rategain.com. ...
Welcome to part four in this search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed the importance of the structure of your website and the best practices for creating an easily spidered and easily read site. In part four we will discuss content optimization.This is perhaps the single most important aspect of ranking your website highly on the search engines. While all of the factors covered in this series will help get your website into the top positions, it is your content that will sell your product or service and it is your content that the search engines will be reading when they take their "snapshot" of your site and determine where it should be placed in relation to the other billions of pages on the Internet.Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:[b]Keyword Selection Content Creation Site Structure Optimization Internal Linking Human Testing Submissions Link Building Monitoring The Extras [/b]There are aspects of the optimization process that gain and lose importance. Content optimization is no exception to this. Through the many algorithm changes that take place each year, the weight given to the content on your pages rises and falls. Currently incoming links appear to supply greater advantage than well-written and optimized content. So why are we taking an entire article in this series to focus on the content optimization?The goal for anyone following this series is to build and optimize a website that will rank well on the major search engines and, more difficult and far more important, hold those rankings through changes in the search engine algorithms. While currently having a bunch of incoming links from high PageRank sites will do well for you on Google you must consider what will happen to your rankings when the weight given to incoming links drops, or how your website fares on search engines other than Google that don't place the same emphasis on incoming links.While there are many characteristics of your content that are in the algorithmic calculations, there are a few that consistently hold relatively high priority and thus will be the focus of this article. These are:[b]Heading Tags Special Text (bold, colored, etc.) Inline Text Links Keyword Density Heading Tags[/b]The heading tag (for those who don't already know) is code used to specify to the visitor and to the search engines what the topic is of your page and/or subsections of it. You have 6 predefined heading tags to work with ranging from to .By default these tags appear larger than standard text in a browser and are bold. These aspects can be adjusted using the font tags or by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).Due to their abuse by unethical webmasters and SEO's, the weight given to heading tags is not what it could be however the content between these tags is given increased weight over standard text. There are rules to follow with the use of heading tags that must be adhered to. If you use heading tags irresponsibly you run the risk of having your website penalized for spam even though the abuse may be unintentional.When using your heading tags try to follow these rules:Never use the same tag twice on a single page Try to be concise with your wording Use heading tags only when appropriate. If bold text will do then go that routeDon't use CSS to mask heading tags Never use the same tag twice on a single page. While the tags holds the greatest weight of the entire heading tags, its purpose is to act as the primary heading of the page. If you use it twice you are obviously not using it to define the main topic of the page. If you need to use another heading tag use the tag. After that the tag and so on. Generally I try never to use more than 2 heading tags on a page.Try to be concise with your wording. If you have a 2 keyword phrase that you are trying to target and you make a heading that is 10 words long then your keyword phrase only makes up about 20% of the total verbiage. If you have a 4-word heading on the other hand you would then have a 50% density and increased priority given to the keyword phrase you are targeting.Use heading tags only when appropriate. If bold text will do then go that route. I have seen sites with heading tags all over the place. If overused the weight of the tags themselves are reduced with decreasing content and "priority" being given to different phrases at various points in the content. If you have so much great content that you feel you need to use many heading tags you should consider dividing the content up into multiple pages, each with its own tag and keyword target possibilities. For the most part, rather than using additional heading tags, bolding the content will suffice. The sizing will be kept the same as your usual text and it will stand out to the reader as part of the text but with added importance.Don't use CSS to mask heading tags. This one just drives me nuts and is unnecessary. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) serve many great functions. They can be used to define how a site functions, looks and feels however they can also be used to mislead search engines and visitors alike. Each tags has a default look and feel. It is fine to use CSS to adjust this somewhat to fit how you want your site to look. What is not alright is to adjust the look and feel to mislead search engines. It is a simple enough task to define in CSS that your heading should appear as regular text. Some unethical SEO's will also then place their style sheet in a folder that is hidden from the search engine spiders. This is secure enough until your competitors look at the cached copy of your page (and they undoubtedly will at some point) see that you have hidden heading tags and report you to the search engines as spamming. It's an unnecessary risk that you don't need to take. Use your headings properly and you'll do just fine.[b]Special Text[/b]"Special text" (as it is used here) is any content on your page that is set to stand out from the rest. This includes bold, underlined, colored, highlighted, sizing and italic. This text is given weight higher than standard content and rightfully so. Bold text, for example, is generally used to define sub-headings (see above), or to pull content out on a page to insure the visitor reads it. The same can be said for the other "special text" definitions. Search engines have thus been programmed to read this as more important than the rest of the content and will give it increased weight. For example, on our homepage we begin the content with "Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning …" and have chosen to bold this text. This serves two purposes. The first is to draw the eye to these words and further reinforce the "brand". The second purpose (and it should always be the second) is to add weight to the "Search Engine Positioning" portion of the name. It effectively does both.Reread your content and, if appropriate for BOTH visitors and search engines, use special text when it will help draw the eye to important information and also add weight to your keywords. This does not mean that you should bold every instance of your targeted keywords nor does it mean that you should avoid using special text when it does not involve your keywords. Common sense and a reasonable grasp of sales and marketing techniques should be your guide in establishing what should and should not be drawn out with "special text".[b]Inline Text Links[/b]Inline text links are links added right into text in the verbiage of your content. For example, in this article series I may make reference to past articles in the series. Were I to refer to the article on keyword selection rather than simple making a simple reference to it as I just have it might be better to write it as, "Were I to refer to the article on keyword selection rather …"Like special text this serves two purposes. The first is to give the reader a quick and easy way to find the find the information you are referring to. The second purpose of this technique is to give added weight to this phrase for the page on which the link is located and also to give weight to the target page.While this point is debatable, there is a relatively commonly held belief that inline text links are given more weight that a text link which stands alone. If we were to think like a search engine this makes sense. If the link occurs within the content area then chances are it is highly relevant to the content itself and the link should be counted with more strength than a link placed in a footer simply to get a spider through the site.Link "special text" this should only be employed if it helps the visitor navigate your site. An additional benefit to inline text links is that you can help direct your visitors to the pages you want them on. Rather than simply relying on visitors to use your navigation bar as you are hoping they will, with inline text links you can link to the internal pages you are hoping they will get to such as your services page, or product details.[b]Keyword Density[/b]For those of you who have never heard the term "keyword density" before, it is the percentage of your total content that is made up of your targeted keywords. There is much debate in forums, SEO chat rooms and the like as to what the "optimal" keyword density might be. Estimates seem to range from 3% to 10%.While I would be the first to admit that logic dictate that indeed there is an optimal keyword density. Knowing that search engines operate on mathematical formulas implies that this aspect of your website must have some magic number associated with it that will give your content the greatest chance of success.With this in mind there are three points that you should consider:You do not work for Google or Yahoo! or any of the other major search engines (and if you do you're not the target audience of this article). You will never know 100% what this "magic number" is. Even if you did know what the optimal keyword density was today, would you still know it after the next update? Like other aspects of the search engine algorithm, optimal keyword densities change. You will be chasing smoke if you try to constantly have the optimal density and chances are you will hinder your efforts more than help by constantly changing the densities of your site. The optimal keyword density for one search engine is not the same as it is for another. Chasing the density of one may very well ruin your efforts on another.So what can you do? Your best bet is to simple place your targeted keyword phrase in your content as often as possible while keeping the content easily readable by a live visitor. Your goal here is not to sell to search engines, it is to sell to people. I have seen sites that have gone so overboard in increasing their keyword density that the content itself reads horribly. If you are simply aware of the phrase that you are targeting while you write your content then chances are you will attain a keyword density somewhere between 3 and 5%. Stay in this range and, provided that the other aspects of the optimization process are in place, you will rank well across many of the search engines.Also remember when you're looking over your page that when you're reading it the targeted phrase may seem to stand out as it's used more than any other phrase on the page and may even seem like it's a bit too much. Unless you've obviously overdone it (approached the 10% rather than 5% end of the spectrum) it's alright for this phrase to stand out. This is the phrase that the searcher was searching for. When they see it on the page it will be a reminder to them what they are looking for an seeing it a few times will reinforce that you can help them find the information they need to make the right decision. [b]Final Notes[/b]In an effort to increase keyword densities, unethical webmasters will often use tactics such as hidden text, extremely small font sizes, and other tactics that basically hide text from a live visitor that they are providing to a search engines. Take this advice, write quality content, word it well and pay close attention to your phrasing and you will do well. Use unethical tactics and your website may rank well in the short term but once one of your competitors realizes what you're doing you will be reported and your website may very well get penalized. Additionally, if a visitor realizes that you're simply "tricking" the search engines they may very well decide that you are not the type of company they want to deal with; one that isn't concerned with integrity but rather one that will use any trick to try to get at their money. Is this the message you want to send? ...