Let’s break down a quick scenario. You are a hotel owner and you just spent a lot of money to create a well designed independent website. You have invested a significant amount of time and effort making sure your hotel is the best one in your area, but for some reason you are not getting noticed by search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. What can you do?
The best way to make sure the right people see your independent website is through a concentrated focus on various on-page factors affecting how well you appear in search results. Search engine algorithms are complex, taking multiple details about your website into consideration when determining which search terms you appear for and how well you rank for those terms.
It is important to note many off-page factors will also determine the ranking of your independent website; that being said, there is significant work you can accomplish on page that will make your website appear more attractive to search engines.
Keyword Strategy
On a fundamental level, the keyword strategy of a page is the first and foremost step to performing well in search. Keyword strategy determines what search terms you expect your website to rank on the first page of search results for. You literally cannot have SEO without keyword strategy; doing so would be as if you are setting off on a cross country road trip with no map and no destination. After a long enough time you will likely end up somewhere but without your keyword strategy you will have no way of anticipating where that is, how long it will take you to get there, or how well it suits your goals.
In order to create a fully optimized keyword strategy (for an individual page or for your hotel’s entire website) you will need to conduct a bit of research. The results of this research will provide you with insights on what you are currently ranking for, and provide you with the average monthly searches for terms you could be ranking for (knowing your current rankings should give you an impression on what you should target, and knowing the number of people searching for those terms can help you determine if what you have selected is a worthwhile target).
There are many reports from different sources regarding keyword search volume and your website rankings that you will need to look at when conducting keyword research, and an SEO could spend days pouring over the data in an effort to come to a conclusion on the best terms to target. We have a lot to cover in this post and we have a whole entry regarding keyword research for hotels, so I will keep this short and sweet.
