Welcome to the Screen Pilot water cooler. Our team randomly posts things they find interesting, funny or just generally think might be of use to others. If you've come in through the side door, you can knock on the front door here.
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 3rd 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.
We’re pleased to announce a new price point for self-managed SMS marketing and promotions.
Say for example you’re in charge of your hotel’s internet marketing, then bolt on or low cost DIY SMS marketing solution starting from just $125/mo per keyword plus per message costs of $0.10.
Use the keyword in your print collateral to drive subscriptions for golf promotions, restaurant promotions or anything else to target a local, last minute audience.
And if you ‘re interested in SMS marketing, why not talk to us about your overall hotel mobile marketing strategy – from mobile web to tracking performance on mobile initiatives, we’ve got the mobile experience that others don’t to take you down the right path.
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.
It’s not been long since we started working the Riviera Resort & Spa in Palm Springs. An amazing place, you really need to check it out if you ever need to stay in the Palm Springs area. So we started working with them on their search marketing and as with any new domain, had a pretty hefty uphill struggle and knew that things were going to happen overnight. With persistence, patience and quite a bit of our ‘know-how’, we’re happy to say that Riviera has now penetrated the top ten organic results for Palm Springs hotel and resort phrases. What does that mean, well YoY, it’s a 1,546% increase in traffic for ‘palm springs hotels’ alone and we all know what qualified traffic turns into.
By the way, they’re actually celebrating their 50th Anniversay so if you’re looking for a Palm Springs escape, maybe a spa weekend with the girls for Christmas to prep for all that shopping, then check out their 50th Anniversary deals.
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 3rd 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.
