You’re turning away guests..
October 9th, 2008 Editorand you probably don’t even know that you are!
According to the research done by the Oban team that was reported in September:
“International online customers say they are often forced to search in English”
Travel sites do not cater to their international users. This was the finding of their short documentary on international travel search behaviour. The interviewees were asked how they used the internet to research their trip to London.
“What we had expected,” says Greig Holbrook, Oban’s managing director, “was that the travellers would say that they search in their native language. But instead, most of them admitted they were forced to search in English, since the travel sites often do not give them a multilingual option.”
Nearly all the people Oban interviewed said they would prefer to search in their own language.
Clearly there is an opportunity worldwide for travel sites to reach new markets by listening to their potential market, and catering to their multilingual needs. To see Oban’s short video, visit www.faceofglobalsearch.com.
Next to English, Spanish and Chinese were cited as the most frequently used languages on the web followed by French and Dutch.
Despite Google’s popularity, only a third of the respondents noted the site as their favourite for looking up travel destinations. Trip Advisor was favoured by 18 percent of the entrants, followed by Alibabuy, Expedia and Lastminute.com.
The most important quality wanted in a travel site was ease of use (30 percent) while 15% used traveller reviews. Multilingual sites and those with eye-catching design were highly sought-after.
Only one percent of entrants said they never booked their tickets online. The majority of entrants (19 percent) booked holiday tickets online once a year. Only slightly fewer respondents said they booked online two and three times per year, at 13 and 11 percent respectively.
Here’s the shocker:
Chinese speakers don’t Google
None of those who surf the internet in Chinese chose Google as their favoured travel search portal. They prefer their own engines like Baidu much more. With the huge increase in Chinese searchers actually buying online in 2006-2007, it makes more sense than ever to make sure that optimisation for China is focused on local search engines.
Tags: foreign tourist, multilingual, Searching, translationPosted in Bed & Breakfast, News, Resources | 1 Comment »
Keywords for search-friendly content
October 7th, 2008 EditorKeyword A core function of a search engine is to match up the words someone is searching for with the same or similar words on a webpage.
You must know how your reader is searching and you must use their keywords in your content. If you do, you’re half way there.
Use one idea per page
Ideally, each of your webpages should focus on a single idea. If you have a page that communicates many things using lots of keywords, then the search engines (not to mention the people who will be trying to read it) will find it hard to understand what the page is really about.
Lead with your main keywords
It is very (I mean very) important that you lead with your main keywords. Keep the following in mind.
Start with the strongest keywords you have and put them in your heading and summary.
- If you are use a keyword in a sentence then start the sentence with it, or at least have it as close to the beginning of the sentence as possible, provided it makes sense.
- If you are using a keyword in a paragraph, make sure that you use it in the first sentence.
So if you were writing about bed and breakfast accommodation, here’s how you might write the heading and summary.
Bed and Breakfast Hosted Accommodation
Bed and breakfast is the term for a wide variety of hosted accommodations that provide a comfortable bed for the night and a substantial breakfast in the morning. The hosts offer warm and generous hospitality throughout your stay.
There are several categories of accommodation that come under the general heading of bed & breakfast.
Use exact keyword phrases
Certain keywords are going to be extremely competitive; so slight refinements can make a big difference. For example Bed and Breakfasts will bring up a different Google search result than bed and breakfast. The first has 10 million or so results but the second almost 59 million! As the tourism industry and B & B in particular, is fiercely competitive for search terms any tweaks that you can make (that work!) will be of benefit. (As a general rule, people tend to search for the plural more than the singular.)
Measure keyword density
What we’re talking about here is the number of times that a particular keyword (you can check with this tool) is mentioned in your text. Consider the following:
- In the heading and summary above about Bed and Breakfast, there are a total of 54 words, seven of which are the keywords “bed & breakfast hosted accommodation.” This gives a keyword density for this text of approximately 13%. This is about average for quality keyword density in such a small sample of text.
- Over 250-500 words of text, say, the keyword density should be in the region of 3–5%. What is critical here is how the content reads. If you put too many keywords in the text, it will lack flow and will likely read as hype. If that happens, then most readers will just go elsewhere.
- If you write a very long text, you will generally find that it is hard to maintain a reasonable keyword density, as it is generally hard to maintain a focus on a particular set of keywords over a long piece of text. This is a very good reason for keeping your content short and for focussing on a single idea.
- Have no more than three keywords (or keyword phrases) per page. Use emphasis where appropriate Search engines give a little extra value to content that uses emphasis. Embolden your headings and summaries.
(Alternatively, you can use the tag for your headings.) Some advocate the use of italics. But, italics are hard to read on a screen. (They make the text look as if it is having a nervous breakdown.) Remember to always to put the reader first, not the search engine. - Get your keywords into your links. Write your hypertext links like you write headings – get those keywords in. Search engines give special emphasis to words found in links. Avoid using phrases such as “click here” and “download now,” as people don’t search for expressions like these.
I will cover more about keywords and title tags in another post.
Tags: keywords, search engines, SEOPosted in Resources, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment » « Previous Entries
