In Febuary 2008 during SMX West, I had the pleasure of interviewing the head of Google’s Web Spam team, Matt Cutts. He is very well respected in the SEO community for communicating and enforcing Google Webmaster Guidelines. The topic of our conversation was the Impact of Search on the Lodging Industry and Web 2.0.

Given the challenges in today’s economy, internet marketing has become a critical method for driving online reservations for hotels. Whether your hotel’s needs are short term, long term or both, there are a variety of internet marketing tools available to help you achieve your goals.

View and understand the keywords, meta tags, and description usage of a competitor’s webpage. This new SEO meta tags add on tool can help you fully understand why top ranking pages stay on top.

Maximize your internet real estate by including videos and a separate video sitemap to your website! Google announces their Google Site Map Generator tool. Now, via Google Webmaster tools, you can create a separate video sitemap file complete with title and description tags allowing yet another way for web crawlers to index your page. Their extension of the Sitemap protocol lets webmasters submit all video files and relevant metadata to Google in one file. What does this mean?! More Traffic!

Social Media is the future for the travel industry. Plan your marketing for the future with Social Media outlets, and ensure that you do not live in the past.

Email marketing continues to prove itself as an effective way to communicate with your customers—both existing and potential customers. There are several proven best practices in email marketing which can make your campaign increasingly successful.

SEO book has a extremely powerful keyword research tool which provides date from multiple sources including Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and more. The best part about this tool is it’s free.