Since 2004 there has been a movement a foot, an uprising you could say, to come up with a better way to structure and present website content given the incorporation of videos and other interactive features within today’s websites. Before the development of HTML5, videos and other interactive features such as maps and flash applications were placed on websites using third-party websites such as YouTube and Google Maps. These features were considered a missed opportunity by most SEO professionals when looking at ways to get the most out of your onsite SEO efforts. That is where HTML5 comes into play. With the development of HTML5, SEO professionals and webmasters will have the ability to add different tags to these interactive elements. These tags will help to categorize and organize theses elements in a way that search engines can better understand. From an SEO standpoint, these new tags will give the ability to add more useful information about your interactive elements and how it relates to your onsite content. Here are some samples of tags that HTML5 will be offering:

· Improved page segmentation. Search engines are getting smarter every day and there are many reasons to believe that even now they are applying page segmentation. Basically, page segmentation means that a page is divided into several separate parts (i.e. main content, menus, headers, footers, links sections, etc.) and these parts are treated as separate entries. At present, there is no way for a webmaster to tell search engines how to segment a page but this is bound to change in HTML 5. The advent of these new tags will help to control what the search engines view as important on a webpage.

· A new <article> tag. The new <article> tag is probably the best addition from a SEO point of view. The <article> tag allows marking of separate entries in an online publication, such as a blog or a magazine. It is expected that when articles are marked with the <article> tag, this will make the HTML code cleaner because it will reduce the need to use <div> tags. Also, probably search engines will put more weight on the text inside the <article> tag as compared to the contents on the other parts of the page.

· A new <section> tag. The new <section> tag can be used to identify separate sections on a webpage. This is a another way to segment  the onsite content and the advantage is that each section can now have its own separate HTML heading. As with the <article> tag, it can be presumed that search engines will pay more attention to the contents of separate sections. For instance, if the words of a search string are found in one section, this implies higher relevance as compared to when these words are found all across the page or in separate sections. This concept lends itself to discouraging keyword stuffing and overuse of a target keyword when a webmaster is going for a certain keyword density.

· A new <header> tag. The new <header> tag (which is different from the head element) is a blessing for SEO experts because it gives a lot of flexibility. The <header> tag is very similar to the <H1> tag but the difference is that it can contain a lot of stuff, such as H1, H2, H3 elements, whole paragraphs of text, hard-coded links (and this is really precious for SEO), and any other kind of info you feel relevant to include. Since the Header tag will be the first that that search engines see when they come to spider your site, the advancement of what can be included in this tag will allow SEO professionals and webmasters to include much more relevant information about the website as a whole.

· A new <footer> tag. The <footer> tag might not be as useful as the <header> one but still it allows the inclusion of important information and it can be used for SEO purposes as well. The <header> and <footer> tags can be used many times on one page – i.e. you can have a separate header/footer for each section and this gives really a lot of flexibility to include as much information as you like based around the onsite contetnt.

· A new <nav> tag. Navigation is one of the important factors for SEO and since the advent of sitelinks within the organic results. The new <nav> tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages and the overall navigation of a website.

Some other interesting developments that will help your website succeed organically when using HTML5 are:

· New phrase elements, such as “Time” and “Meter,” will help build a “respectable/librarian” feel to a page and hopefully give the webpage/website a certain trust factor which is very good in the internet world.

· A new interactive element, “details,” that can hide extra information until activated. This one can be used for helping the search engines learn even more about your website and pages of your website.

· Embedded media elements such as video and audio will be easy to optimize with HTML5. The tags “video” and “audio” are self-sufficient and the alternative descriptions, for web browsers and accessibility, are included within those tags. This will allow for videos to be tagged much like pictures are being done currently.

Even with all of these great new tags and developments that HTML5 is going to bring to the table, HTML5 is still a ways from being fully implemented into the mainstream search engines. Looking to the future, it is always good to keep in mind these developments in website coding in order to get that leg up on your competition and to know how HTML5 will eventually affect your SEO plan.

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.

To help hotels and resorts stay on top of mentions, chats or general dialogue that might be happening about their properties,  Screen Pilot, a bleeding edge digital marketing firm, have compiled a Top 5 list of free tools that can be used right now to keep tabs on the social media-verse.

-Social Mention (socialmention.com) is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the social universe into a single stream of information. Social Mention monitors more than a hundred social media properties.

-WhosTalkin (WhosTalkin.com) is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics cared about most such as property brand name. Search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.

-Samepoint (samepoint.com) crawlers encompass every conceivable type of social media service. Categorization breaks out results by type of social media.

-Surchur (surchur.com) is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter etc.

-Trendrr (trendrr.com) allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. Compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating across a variety of sources.

No matter what tool you use, interpretation of the data is a different ball game.  Screen Pilot’s social media services can help you translate what all these results mean. Not only does Screen Pilot position hospitality brands in the social media space, but we help track the impact and revenues generated as a result of social media and other hotel internet marketing efforts. For results, best-practice advice and incremental revenues visit screenpilot.com