Getting the most out of search engines (continued)

Getting the attention of the search engines

An estimated 80% of web users find what they want on search engines like Google and Yahoo. You must achieve a high ranking on these in order for the site to be found by potential customers.

To achieve tihs, you will need to seed your pages with appropriate keywords. A search engine like Google sifts through millions of pages online daily, looking for content to add to its “index”. These indexes function like a huge reference library: when people perform a search with keywords such as “luxury hotel in Spain”, the search engine will go back and look in their indexes and return linked results that they think are the most valuable to the person.

How will you know what keywords to use? There are many online tools that can help you. Google’s AdWords is free and will show you the demand for certain keywords, as well as generating ideas for similar keywords, for example, ‘honeymoon hotel’, ‘romantic hotel’, ‘romantic vacation’ for a hotel trying to attract honeymoon couples. Do not use keywords that do not accurately describe the content on your page – every keyword need to be related to the service you are actually selling!

Once you have come up with a list of keywords to use, use these in your copy when you describe your hotel and services. Also include them in your page titles, meta description and keywords, headlines and links that you create to other sections on your site.

Cont...