At the beginning of June 2010, Google officially launched Caffeine, their new super fast indexing platform. They have been testing it for the past year and claim that with the upgrades to their spiders and other indexing tools, more websites will be indexed and faster meaning fresher content and more relevant search results. So what does this mean for the hotel and resort industry and what can you do to take advantage of Caffeine?

The whole concept of Caffeine is based around bringing more relevant organic search results to the searcher. Decreased website indexing times means hotel internet marketing professionals can now develop and test pages of their websites and see results in search engine results positions far quicker. The launch of Caffeine will push hotel and resort marketing professionals and agencies to really think about the content and structure of their websites rather than just booking rooms via the web.  With the combination of the newly launched Universal Search layout and ‘Caffeine’, in order to remain competitive, a hotel or resort will now have to develop multiple facets of digital marketing in addition to taking care of their property websites. Items such as social media, online video, proactive involvement in review sites and tackling online PR efforts will become common place. We know from research that consumers want to watch an online video and read what others are saying about a hotel or resort before they spend their hard earned money. Caffeine and universal search combined will now allow a consumer to get a much more diverse picture of a hotel or resort before they even visit a property’s website. This makes SEO obsolete and Universal SEO comes into play. To ensure your resort or hotel internet marketing strategy is getting its jolt of Caffeine, make sure you get a cup of Fog Lifter in the morning and start thinking about updating your hotel internet search marketing plans. Fast.

We have several hotel and resort clients here at Screen Pilot which allows our SEO team to consistently explore new ways to gain coveted Google back-links as well as back-links in the other main search engines like Yahoo and Bing. The primary goal for the hotel and resort industry, when talking about the internet, is to sell rooms and generate great online reputation in social and other user generated content (UGC) media. This led to the creation of many “review” sites. In the travel vertical, TripAdvisor.com is one of the pivotal players in this space. Online travel agencies (OTAs) like Orbitz have integrated proprietary user reviews into their site and vertical search players like Kayak, have integrated 3^rd party reviews from service like Epinions and others. Trip Advisor’s key consumer proposition is creating consumer-facing content that other travelers deem relevant to their shopping process. Users can post reviews, rate certain aspects of a property and even share their vacation pictures. In an attempt to generate additional revenues and capitalize on their traffic volumes, Trip Adivsor, in a move away from their traditional business model, have created what’s called a Business Listing.  These listings would include a link to the hotel or resort website.  So, the SEO team here at Screen Pilot decided to have a closer look at the  TripAdvisor.com ‘Business Listing‘ option and to see if there really is any SEO value from having a business listing with them.

To begin the experiment we looked at numerous New York City hotels, that all have business listings on TripAdvisor.com, with a hyper-linked URL to their website. Next we looked up the back-links in Google and Yahoo for all of the properties. Surprisingly, none of them showed any back-links from TripAdvisor.com. On one of the properties we profiled, the Library Hotel, we did find a back-link from Trip Advisor, but it was coming from the French version of the site.  It also was part of a review that someone had embedded a link. As we could not find any back-links from TripAdvisor.com for these properties, we then went back to the Trip Advisor business listing itself and found the real issue.

Once we pulled the TripAdvisor.com business listing source code, we noticed that the actual link is not physically there but rather JavaScript code instead. This script is generating the link and its anchor text on the page. When the search engine spiders visit a page with a Business Listing on it, this script is not allowing the link to be indexed which would normally show up as a backlink from TripAdvisor.com. So, as a business owner, you are still getting the traffic from people clicking on the link in your listing, but from an SEO standpoint you are not getting the “link juice” from the TripAdvisor.coms’ 8/10 page rank!

Some might ask the question “Why not just drop the link in a review on TripAdvisor.com and that will suffice?” Well, on TripAdvisor.com you can’t do that. Unlike the French version of the website, the .com version does not allow reviewers to put hyperlinks within their reviews.

So the moral of the story is this, be sure you know the full SEO benefit you are getting from purchasing a listing on any social travel related website, especially TripAdvisor.com if that is something you think you’re getting. In their defense, we find nothing on their site that remotely even leads anyone to believe that there is SEO value in a Business Listing, it simply is assumed that because they are offering a “link” to your property website, there is inherent link value associated with it.

If you’re a hotel or resort owner and you want to talk to us about SEO for your property, please get in touch. We have tons of experience in amazingly successful hotel internet marketing & SEO campaigns and we are a full-service digital marketing agency.

On May 5, 2010, Google changed the way people use the Internet. They have combined all the elements of Universal search, images, videos, webpages, blogs, etc., into an easier way to harness all the online knowledge they hold available. With their new three column UI (User Interface), Google gives the searcher the ability to sort their organic results by images, videos, blogs and news, etc. and then take it a step further by then drilling down deeper within that particular aspect of ‘Universal search’. The question arises, how will this new UI affect the hospitality industry and how can the hospitality industry take advantage of it?

The biggest effect will be how searchers use the internet. While not new – just a lot more obvious to users – these enhanced ways of sorting organic results will allow searchers to explore new angles of a subject. In the hospitality realm, this means searchers will be looking for you in many new ways such as through blogs, pictures, videos, and maps. This new UI will also expose hotels or resorts that have not invested in videos or other forms of social media. The ones that did will be in a great position to harness these new streams potential search organic traffic, while the others might begin to fall back.

If you are one of the unlucky ones that did not invest in developing online videos or in other forms of universal search, you can still get in the game and take advantage of this new Google UI. Some of the ways you can do this is by developing various videos illustrating the many facets of your hotel or resort and posting them on YouTube or your favorite online video site. Another way is to claim your local business listing and develop it with your coupons, pictures and videos. This will ensure your business will have the opportunity to show up in the local listings and on Google maps. Another way is to have plenty of pictures on your website that have proper alt tags. This will allow them to be found easier and with the targeted organic search terms you are going after. As for blog and news sort feature, that can be developed through press releases or even putting a blog on your own site.

Whichever way you look at it, the new Google UI will provide the hospitality industry the ability to gain a lot more exposure through previously under exposed search channels. If your website is older or you have not been investing in a universal online marketing plan, you can still take advantage of the many new features Google is offering with this new UI. Universal search is where the Internet is heading and the sooner the hospitality industry understands and takes advantage of it, the more profit there is to be made.

Google just introduced new features to their search results that brings a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.  Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before.  When they are relevant, Google will show the most recent posts towards the top of the search results page.

Where do the feeds come from? Google announced official partnerships with the following web entities; Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to power their aggregate real-time feeds.

Get a first look at the new search interface and some sample searches.

So the big, very big question is what does this mean?  More spam unfortunately. More attempts by affiliate marketers to skew the system in their favor and more automated recycling of posts to always have a presence in real time results. It’s not going to be a bed of roses while the search engines get to grips with reputation management of the contributors that author content on these new partners. We know that Twitter’s user profile management is basic at best. Silly algorithms that weight banal factors as negatives or positives can easily be circumvented and before you know it you’re being stuffed with affiliate cookies and pimped malware for having clicked on what you thought was a legitimate real-time search result from your ‘trusted’, favorite search engine Google.

Moving away from the pessimistic side of what will happen, there will be advantages. More so for mobile search’s integration of real-time results. That’s another post however.

Anyway, real-time is  rolling out over the next few days and when you have it, you’ll see it just happening withing your search results.

Charlotte, NC — Screen Pilot, a digital marketing and technology firm, has several simple steps for marketing professionals to realize the benefits of understanding what is occurring in their online marketing world. If you don’t have analysts to decipher your company’s Internet marketing results, there are five easy ways to add clout to your marketing budgets. You might just be surprised at how underutilized your existing web reporting tools are.

1. Uncover Hidden Potential:
Marketing professionals need to customize the way they track their digital marketing campaigns. They should take a look at what kind of measuring tools they currently use. Are the goals that have been set for a web reporting platform meeting the needs of the company? By creating a list of must-haves, it’ll be easier to narrow down what the needs are and how they can be fulfilled and by which products.

2. Add Tracking To Your E-mail Campaigns:
You can add tracking parameters to your e-mail marketing activity that enables marketers to start tracking visitors and their actions once in your web site that are driven by e-mail efforts. Setting up to measure conversions, from shopping carts or other areas of your site that are important to you, will enable you to see which e-mail campaigns have higher returns on investment (ROI) than others. With this tip, you can now test scientifically based on the ROI and not solely on the click-through rates and engagement factors.

3. Are Your PPC Campaigns Set-Up Correctly?
If you have potential customers click on your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and immediately leave your site, your advertising money spent is wasted. You could be missing opportunities if your web statistics aren’t giving you the whole picture about the visitors you get from paid search channels like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Reporting from search engines only goes halfway in educating you on how effective your PPC actually is. Set up your reporting to measure key performance indicators from paid channels. It can help you increase ROI and make intelligent decisions about how and where to spend your marketing dollars.

4. Don’t Rely on 3rd Party Reporting:
It is very common that the amount of clicks the advertisers say you have is different than what you receive. Countless times we are requested to create audit trails for costly marketing channels that report higher numbers of clicks from their networks than you actually receive. Using your web statistics platform correctly will tell you exactly what traffic you received from a specific campaign and the value of that traffic.

5. Track Calls from Campaigns:
If you sell product offline then you need to track the call volumes that are generated from each specific digital campaign and types. This will easily tell you how effective a campaign’s response is when people go online but don’t convert. Quickly what channels such as PPC, email, banner ads and other create calls and which don’t. By adding this new dimension it might make you adjust some efforts for best returns.

If your current tracking and measurement tools aren’t producing results, you may need to reconsider the platform.