Best SEO Practices the Travel Brands Tell Us About

Travel industry has ensured its huge online presence. If you look at the websites such as Hotwire, Priceline, Travelocity, and TripAdvisor, you will find out that these websites have been doing really well in terms of SEO. And since there are many people interested in traveling to different locations, they search online for the best locations and best services. In this scenario, the brands can bring minor changes in the keywords to convert traffic into conversions.

What’s more interesting to note is that travel and tourism consultants hire best SEO teams to stay in the limelight. It means that there is a lot that you can learn from travel websites in terms of SEO. Some of the things that travel brands tell us about SEO are worth mentioning here.

Home Page Text

Most of the people do not pay attention to the text on home page. It makes sense. The page is here forever. So it should not be treated as just a fancy portal page. If your website is not focusing on the paid ads to earn revenue, you need to write high quality text content for the front page. You can surely learn it from travel websites.

Home page and internal links

Home page is the most linkable page for most of the websites. In this scenario, you will have to see if the link equity on your home page is directed to the most important pages of your site. That can happen only if you highlight those pages on the front page with the help of effective internal link building.

Internal links in the footer

Do you really need to put the links of your internal pages in the footer section? Some people say that it is a good way to get the most important pages of your website crawled and indexed. On the other hand, some people say that this practice can contribute to devaluation of the links which are being placed in the footer section.

In this scenario, you may wonder if you can do it. Well, it depends upon the size of your site. If your website has too many pages and, so, your home page has a lot of link equity, you can certainly put links in the footer section and expect better results.

Landing pages made to target organic keywords

This is one of the strategies which can bring a lot of traffic to your site. You will find larger brands following this technique to dominate in the tougher competitions. However, it doesn’t mean that this technique doesn’t work for the small brands. You can also build pages for the purpose of matching user intent. One thing work mentioning here is that the pages should be able to provide satisfying answers to the users.

Increasing Keyword Rank without Link Building

Increasing keyword rank seems to be a game of link building because this is the way through which you can get traffic onto your website. But you may be surprised to know that this is not the only way to improve the rank of your website against the keywords that you are targeting. As a matter of fact, if you are not paying attention to the ‘other’ factors that we are going to talk about, you might not be able to get better results just on the basis of an effective link building approach.

It is worth mentioning that rank basically refers to the position of a website everyone sees while looking at the SERPs.Well, Google doesn’t work this way anymore.

The results change with the insertion of subtle modifiers such geo-location, local items like a map pack, and user personalization. Google pays attention to the words entered by the users. That makes it challenging for the websites to retain their visibility even if they manage to come on the top of the search results.

If you believe that only link building can help your keywords to get ranked, you are going to have to develop a complicated, exhausting and, at the same time, robust link building strategy. But the good news is that there are some other factors that you can work on in order to increase the ranks of keywords.

Site crawl and indexing improvements

A few questions that you need to ask yourself here may include:

  • Does Google crawl all of your website’s pages well?
  • Are there any redirect loops or spider traps?
  • Are you, unknowingly or knowingly, creating any roadblocks that are causing difficulty for Google to rank your site?

You can use a tool named Streaming Frog to see how well the pages of your site are being crawled.

Schema

Schema is not a direct ranking factor. However, it contributes in the process which leads to the pages ending up in the featured snippets. So, it is quite important to review the schema and find the ones that best for your site.

You can also go for what Google has been recommending, i.e. the JSON-LD version. It is worth mentioning here that the content of schema is the same which is present in the page.

Improving page speed

According to Google, page speed is the ranking factor. The reason is that it serves as a tiebreaker when your site equals your competitors in every other aspect. Remember, the page speed can be a tiebreaker only when your site’s speed is slightly slower.

Content relevancy and on-page optimization

First you will have to make sure that your page remains relevant right from the title till the end of the content in the page. Title tag is what that appears prominently in the SERPs. The content of your page needs to answer the search queries. This is the reason that it is highly important to make a research about the keywords in such a way that it becomes easy for you to identify and target user intent.

Other on-page optimizations include alt image attribute, H1 tags, a summarizing first paragraph, and captions around the image.

AMP

AMP is not directly helpful in ranking but they can help in the placement of pages at certain positions. For instance, it can bring your page into the Google News program if you want to be in the news counsel.

Common WordPress Mistakes

Starting a website using CMS is a great idea. We will particularly talk about WordPress here because this platform is not only easy to work with but it can help you develop websites with complicated structures without deeper knowledge about website development. Moreover, it is very easy to work on the SEO of a WordPress based website.

Nevertheless, many people still make mistakes while working with the WordPress.And if you look at those mistakes, those are pretty much of beginner level. Some of those mistakes are worth mentioning here.

Not changing permalinks properly

Once you have set a permalink for any post or page on WordPress, you have to make sure that you do not change that permalink. The reason is that once your webpage is indexed, its permalink is the only way the searchers will be able to land at your post. If the permalink is changed and the previous one is indexed, the Google will keep showing that previous version of the link. Clicking that link will lead your viewers to the infamous 404-error.

Forgetting to update

While working with the WordPress, you may know about the concept of updating the plugins in a periodic manner. Sometimes, it becomes difficult to keep track of the frequent updates released by the publishers, especially when your site works smoothly. But ignoring these updates can lead you to miss the features which could be quite beneficial for your site. Therefore, it is quite important to work on a strategy to check for the updates on regular basis.

Too many plugins

In total, there are far more than 50,000 plugins available for the WordPresswebsites; and you do not need to install all of them. The availability of plugins in this number basically means that you have got too many options to choose from; and it can be quite difficult in most of the situations. You need to pick the best plugins for your sites. And it is quite possible for you ending up in installing too many plugins which might not be quite necessary for your site. Therefore, you have to make sure that you analyze a plugin thoroughly before installing it. You will need to see if this plugin is truly beneficial for your site.

Not creating a child theme while making changes

When you install WordPress, you get a basic theme. It is highly likely that you are not going to like that theme. So replace that theme with the one which looks good. But after working on the new theme for a few minutes, you realize that the old theme is better than the new one. In that scenario, you revert back to the old theme and start over with the website. This entire practice can be quite time consuming. However, the best way to deal with this situation is to install a child theme and work on it before making changes to the main theme. This way, you will be able to test whether or not the new theme is going to work for you.

Why You Need To Focus On Long Tail Keywords?

If you are into the SEO business, you may already know the importance of keywords. In this scenario, it gets important to work on the long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are basically the phrases which are usually longer and more specific. And these keywords are not used for as many times as the normal keywords are used. These keywords do not get much traffic. However, they can lead to higher conversion rates. And the good thing is that they can help you gradually build more traffic to your website.

Now, you need to have a clear vision about your company, products and your website if you want to work with the long tail keywords. In this article, we are going to discuss what long tail keywords are and how they can be used in an SEO strategy.

What are long tail keywords?

These keywords are more specific and less common. The main focus of these keywords is the niches. The name ‘long tail keyword’ comes from the book named “The Long Tail”. This book tells that there is a market for virtually every product. However, this market may be quite tiny. And since we use long tail keywords for the promotion of products on internet, the prospects of forming a market are higher.

Even if you are promoting the same product across different blog posts or pages, the long tail keywords may differ in every post. That’s because of the slight change in the focus in every post or page. And that’s where you are going to have to do the analysis in order to choose the best keyword that is a fit for the specific topic.

Reason you need to focus on long tail keywords

Ranking for the long tail keywords is quite easier as compared to the e-commerce keywords. Reason is that you will not have to compete much for the ranking against that specific keyword. The longer and more specific the keyword is, the easier it is going to be to rank against that keyword. And the good thing is that the vastness of internet will allow you to get traffic to that keyword. Gradually, you will be able to build an audience based on that specific keyword.

Another benefit of long tail keywords is that they are mostly used by highly motivated audiences. Hence, if your website comes up in the search results of a long tail keyword, you are more likely to get an order for the purchase.

Tips to Craft Great Page Titles

When you into the business of SEO, you are going to have to make sure that you have the necessary skill to write good page title. The reason is that a page title is the first thing the users see when they find your website in search results. Moreover, it is the page title which helps search engines to understand the topic of your website or web page.

HTML title tag and main heading

Many people think ofHTML title tag and main heading as two names of the same thing. However, these are different. HTML title tag appears as the name of a page on the tab of the browser. On the other hand, the main heading is inside the body of the page.

Page title’s role in SEO

The main purposes of a page title are as under.

  • The page title has to help your page to rank against the relevant keywords.
  • It needs to be attractive enough for the user. It needs to make the user click on link in search results.

It is worth mentioning that both of these factors are quite important. If your website ranks well but it is not clicked by the users, this good ranking is of no use. As a matter of fact, the ranking of your page is going to deteriorate over time.

Click through rate

Click-through rate is the factor used by Google. This factor helps Google understand how relevant a website is against a specific keyword. If the CTR of your website is not number that Google expects in order to rank the website for a certain position, the rank of your website will drop. Page title has huge role to play in this regard.

Focus keyword in the title

If a specific focus keyword is something your page talks about, make sure that you add that focus keyword into the page title. As mentioned above, Google looks at the page title to figure out what the page is all about. Thus, not adding focus keyword can be quite detrimental for the overall SEO of your website.

One thing worth mentioning here is that the purpose of adding focus keyword into the page title shouldn’t only be helping search engine in figuring out the topic of your post. The title with focus keyword needs to be attractive for the users as well. This is how they will be compelled to click on the link of your page.

Ideal title length for SEO

There is no fixed character limit of the page title. However, you have to make sure that it is neither too short nor too long. The title needs to give a little description about the page. And if it is long enough to hide in the SERPs, it will also not serve the purpose. It is worth mentioning here that Google SERPs have a specific width, in terms of screen’s real estate, allocated for the page titles. You can keep in mind that width limit while crafting a title.

Important Local SEO Practices to Consider

Local SEO is just as important as big business SEO.  You need to learn how to connect to your customers, who want to purchase.  Local SEO does bring up a lot of checklists and valuable information, but many enterprise companies won’t target that since they don’t optimize for local searches. But, you should, especially if you want to reach a local market.

The patent for a business only requires you to have four things, a physical address with a legitimate phone number, the H1 matches the name of the business, the URL, and the page has links posting to it from other pages or location and a business name.  The Maps feature also should be utilized, since it forces websites to optimize for the countries, provinces, states, and cities as well.

Since then, the goal of this is to push for local results in websites, and that means that you need to make sure that you have the location specific to the business as well. Otherwise, it’s going to be dropped.  This is something that has recently been used with the Panda and Penguin updates, so remember that.

With enterprises, you want to try to make sure that you claim your business on Google Places, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Groupon, and other location services. But, you want to make sure that you add local links to this as well.  you’ll want to make sure that this manages the local pages, gives you an interface to monitor and respond to various reviews and also pushes the information out to different location sites too.

You should make sure that you establish authoritative pages for the location, the H1 has the location name, the content has the addresses and phone numbers, and you have local schema for the local information in place too.

If you have URLs, you need to make sure that you have the business name as needed. Yext and SweetIQ services will also give you local signals to other locations. You should have everything also optimized for Maps, preferably Google Maps, on pages with the pin to address.  Unique content, whether it be customer reviews, specific location services, links to nearby locations, hours of operation, an event happening, and a location description.

Images are also great because people want to see your business. That way, you’ll be able to show it off, and you should include both text and alt text.  Sub-pages with additional information and internal links to pages as well are also incredibly important.  Ranking for this is super important to have, and if you’re a business who is trying to win in the local market, you need to have a good idea on what it is that you need to do in order to rank in this, so you can do it as needed.

Location is important, and a local business needs this to survive, so always make sure that you’re putting that info in no matter what, since it makes a big difference in the way the business is inevitably ran.

Link Building 101

While this is an introduction to effective link building, here, we’ll tell you about Suggest a Link, and why it works.

Some people may call it link begging, but it’s so much more than that, and if you know how to increase conversions, this is integral for it.

This consists of link building to websites and pages like your own and asking publishers to link to the page, and this type of link works amazingly with websites that have resources or link pages. This is great for linking to useful sites, and you can suggest relevant and useful web pages for this.

However, in order to obtain a link, you need a relevant web page, which means you need to take the time to review the links that are listed that you want a link from. The work is exclusive, and it is something that’s excluded, so if you link exclusively to educational or government pages, then you should skip it since it’s a waste of time asking for links such as that.  You will notice that excluding all sites from that is possible.

If your site is commercial, you want to link to other commercial web pages, even if it’s just a singular one, and you should visit the commercial link, and from there identify why the page is linked to there. Is the link to a product specifically, or is the link to an informational article.

If you link to an article, you’ll have a much higher success rate if it’s a useful article. You may also link to a product page within the article, which is the next best thing to do, and it isn’t as useful as going straight to the products page, but it helps. If you have a commercial site, getting natural links about products is ideal, but it’s difficult since many don’t’ link directly, so set your expectations for this in a rightful manner.  Remember that obtaining links does take effort too.

When building links, you should review the pages that are linked, and from there, suggest similarly useful web pages, and link to more than just a page too, but you should suggest other pages as well. You can link from sites whose readers will find this useful. If they don’t already exist, work to create pages that are useful to sites that you want to link from. Remember as well not t worry about metrics including domain authority. As long as it isn’t a spam site, and it’s relevant, then that’s fine.  Finally, you should make sure that you don’t fret if the link is redirect or no-follow.  This is still a useful link at the end of a day, and it can be good for you to try especially if you notice that you need links.

Building links can be incredibly hard, and there is a lot that’s going on, and a lot that you can deal with. The right links and the right building can be incredibly useful.

Tackling Technical SEO before Link Building

Link building is the ideal approach to build traffic and authority for your website. But link building alone wouldn’t do anything beneficial. There are some prerequisites which you must fulfill if you want your website to perform well after your link building efforts. I am talking about the technical SEO here.

If your website doesn’t stand well on the technical grounds, it might not perform on the web no matter if you pay proper attention to the quality and quantity of links. In this scenario, it is worth mentioning the top goals of technical SEO.

  • Good technical SEO makes it easier for the search engines to crawl through your website.
  • It helps your website to attain top cross-platform compatibility.
  • It helps the website load faster.
  • It helps in efficient implementation of plugins if you are using CMS, e.g. WordPress.
  • A technically accurate website doesn’t have any problems with misconfigured Google Analytics code.

Keeping these five points in mind, you will realize the importance of technical SEO for your website.

A few things that you need to consider in order to implement right technical SEO are worth mentioning in this regard.

Focus on website’s ability to let the search engines easily crawl through it

When it comes to making your website an easy ground for the search engines to crawl through, you are going to have to make sure that you have worked on HTTPS secure implementation in a flawless way. Unfortunately, not many people get a chance to work on the website audit while doing such implementations.At least a surface-level audit can be quite helpful in identifying any major issues which can affect the transition to HTTPS.

You will have to see whether or not your site loads on both HTTPS and HTTP at the same time.If you have both of the versions loading, you have issues with the security certificate. In this scenario, you first need to create a full redirect pattern in HTACCESS if you are using Apache or CPanel servers. And if you are using WordPress, you will need to use a plugin to force the redirects from http://.

The website structure should not be complex

While getting your site ready for technical SEO, you have to pay proper attention to the structure of your website’s URL. Things like randomly generating parameters, difficult to understand URLs, and some other factors can cause issues with your technical SEO.

Another problem to talk about is the duplicate content. Duplicate content in this scenario refers to the content which can be accessed through two URLs. Nevertheless, any form of duplicate content is not going to have any SEO benefit for you.

Platform Compatibility & Page Speed

If you have not worked on the coding to make the site design effective, it will result in the glitches which may not leave an ideal impact on the users as well as search engines. For instance, a site that doesn’t adjust properly in different screen sizes usually has the design coding problems. This is what you are going to have to rectify if you want the website design to be efficient and effective.

Another feature to talk about is the page speed. Page speed is directly associated with the user experience.If your website takes more than a few seconds, it might get a reputation of being a slow loading website. This website is going to have higher bounce rate, directly affecting the ranking of your site.

While there are many other technical SEO factors which come into play, the above mentioned factors are the major ones. You have to make sure that you have worked well on making your website technically correct.

Effective Link Building Strategies Which Are Not Spam

In the recent times, there have been more discussions about link building. Main subject of the matter is usually about making the link building approach look more natural. Most of the business and marketing agencies focus on the ways to develop something to get links from the people without asking.

While the above mentioned approach is here in the industry due to search engines asking the marketers to focus on users and this approach is surely great, the marketers need to know about the ways to actually building links (in a traditional sense) while making sure that they are not doing anything illegal.

Good news is that there are actually some ways to build links without violating the rules. And those ways are what we are going to talk about here.

Advertising

The matter of fact is that you can actually build links while advertising about your site. Here is what John Mueller has said in this regard:

“So basically on the one hand that involves some amount of self-promotion from your side like you have to get some people to come and visit your website somehow so that they can recognize that this is actually a good website.

    And there are lots of ways that you can do that. And then that also involves one of those people or some of those people going well, this is a really fantastic website and I have another website that I can link… from where I can link to your website.

    So it’s not the case that every visitor coming to your website will say it’s a fantastic website and I also have a website and let me link to your website from my website, but some of these people they can.”

In this scenario, you may wonder about the types of advertising that you can do. You can build awareness about your site with the help of PPC. In this scenario, you need to avoid entering into the deal with the advertising networks which can be prone to clickbot activity. The major disadvantage of clickbot activity is that you might end up paying for non-existent traffic.

Social media

Social media has always been considered a separate platform when it was compared with search engines. But the matter of fact is that this platform works in great association with the search engines. If your business is able to receive bigger traffic on social media, it is certainly going to benefit search engine’s ranking of your website. The reason is that you can use social media to build awareness about your business and, so, you can enhance your sales.

Podcasting

Podcasting is becoming more popular with every passing day. The reason is that it has the capability to share information in a way that the listener doesn’t have to pay attention to the text.

Thus, if a podcaster asks you to be interviewed, take it as an opportunity because you will be able to talk about your site and business. In this scenario, it doesn’t matter whether or not the podcaster shares a link to your website. You will be able to spread the word about your business and website.

Building Links Naturally With the Help of Guest Posting

Link building and guest blogging are quite successful SEO methods to bring good traffic to the website. While there is no doubt about the fact that link building is vital, not many people are quite fond of guest blogging due to a number of unsuccessful examples. But the matter of fact is that guest blogging can be quite successful if done in the right way.

What is guest blogging?

Guest blogging is a practice of posting your content on other people’s websites. Those websites need to be related to your niche.

Now, the technique mainly involves putting a link of your website in the guest post. However, this practice of adding link is becoming more difficult because most of the website either add no-follow attribute to the added links or they do not allow the link addition at all. Still, this practice is gaining fair amount of popularity among the internet marketers due to its potential.

An easy and effective way for marketers is to collaborate with the site hosts to get their content published on their sites.

Benefits of guest posting

There are quite amazing benefits of guest blogging. Some of them are worth mentioning here.

  • The first benefit of guest blogging is that it helps you increase the brand awareness. Guest blogging is the digital example of conferences where different companies meet with each other and get an opportunity to bring their brand into a spotlight. When you publish a blog post on someone else’s website, you are essentially targeting an audience existing on that website.
  • Before you post an article, you will first need to sign up. This signup process also involves creation of your bio in which you can place a link to your landing page. You can even invite people to subscribe for your newsletters.
  • For guest blogging, it is quite essential for you to collaborate with other influential companies. This way, you will enter into a community of contributors. And so, you will be able to share and gain knowledge within your niche.
  • You will not have to wait much for the customers to come to your site, read the content and take their time to get convinced about buying your products or services. More than half of this job will be done by the guest blogs on other sites as the potential customers visiting those sites will be able know what they need to know about your brand. So, chances are they will come to your website with intent to purchase.

So, guest blogging is essentially a way to build links but it can serve a bigger purpose. Marketers are always in a search for the platforms where they can promote their business in a better way. A website, which offers guest blogging, is surely a good platform but you have to make sure that they have strong moderation system in place to allow only the high quality blog posts. Another way is to ask influencers within your niche to publish your content. In turn, you can offer them to post their content on your site.