It’s not big news that the internet has changed the landscape of travel. A few years ago you would have called your travel agent to help make your travel plans, and that agent would probably have offered you one or maybe two hotel options. Today the choices are seemingly limitless and a bit overwhelming for your potential guests. And overwhelming for hotels too – how much of your marketing budget should you spend on the internet? Where should you spend it? An independent website? Pay per click advertising to support your brand site? What is your best opportunity to capture your fair share of that every growing population of internet shoppers?

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The chart below shows the growth of Online Video Advertising across all industries in the US. We believe that the lodging industry will see a significant adoption of the online video advertising because most consumers want to see, touch, and feel the hotel before booking their lodging online. As search engines move towards Universal Search and start showing results from online videos, it is more critical for hotels to have online searchable videos – the key being “searchable.”

The Online Video developed for Search Engines is vastly different from the standard videos that you can get from companies specializing in video creation. It’s the same parallel as a search engine friendly website vs. a website that is set up as a brochure. Search engine friendly websites can be found for different key words from the search engines; however, to view a brochure style website, you have to know the website address to get to that site. The search engine optimized video and standard videos differ from each other in the same way. A search optimized video can be found by users typing things relevant to your market on main search engines and in video search engines; to find your standard videos, the consumer needs to know the website address for the site where that video is posted.

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Recently Google and other search engines launched a feature called universal search. Universal search shows mixed search results from several online advertising media such as websites, video, mobile, local, images, news, and several others.  Currently this feature is in beta with some of the search engines and the engines show universal results only for select keywords.  We expect that over the next few months, universal search results will start showing up for keywords typed in the internet search engines. 

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The Sitemap is essential for the success of any Search Engine Optimization campaign. The general rule to follow for an internal linking structure is making sure that all pages are no more than two links away. In other words, I can navigate to any given page on my website within one or two clicks. Once this system of internal linking is in place the sitemap acts as an “insurance policy.” Meaning that sometimes the search engines get confused which links to follow, thus the sitemap acts as a guide for a confused search engine, or even a confused individual.

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We are all familiar with the Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer tools. These tools provide webmasters a great deal of insight into the performance of a site by providing site metrics such as when the site was last indexed (read) by search engines, if the site has any HTTP errors, if there are certain URLs that search engines cannot read, etc.

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1. Search Engine Friendly Design with Conversion Elements
2. Search Engine Optimized Content and Meta-tags (both Brand Website and Independent Website if applicable)
3. Lodging Directory Listings
4. Pay Per Click
5. Search Engine Optimized Online Video
6. Email Marketing
7. ROI Tracking
8. Consumer Generated Content
9. Destination Blog
10. Mobile Compatible Website

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Article Contributed by Kimberly Ehrlich, Milestone Internet Marketing