Albeit experimental, the basic premise is that you have a multitude of ways to search for your ideal place to rest your head at night.

So, I hear you asking some questions:

Where are they sending bookings?

Not surprisingly, they are continuing with their alliances for the following in-direct distribution channels;

• Priceline
• Hotels.com
• Expedia
• Property website is an option though.

“[..]available booking options for the hotel, which may include both the hotel owner and resale vendors. You can choose to book the room through any of these channels, including the hotel owner.”

Reviews?

The other day we (seemingly) broke the news about the changes made in dumping 3rd party reviews. Seems to ring true here too in the fact that they apparently are only pulling from Google User reviews.  (Hint #2, get your staff to come up with ways to engage guests to generate Google Reviews).

What we like:

We do like the Edit Shape function which allows you to set a specific sector on a map for the results in the UI to reflect.

What we don’t like:

Look, we’re biased here.  We are paid to generate direct distribution for our hospitality clients, so any time a heavyweight throws in options other than booking direct to a client’s website, we’re never too happy. (We’re not saying there isn’t a place for in-direct channels, just not here). So, the fact that Google are obviously incentivised to send a stream of traffic to (and have been for a while, this isn’t anything new) will have some dampening effect on what effect, if any, a public roll out will have.

I’ve talked for years about how Google will make their move further into the travel sector. This is their boldest move yet but don’t forget – all Google will do for the foreseeable future is to stream traffic to other websites in the most profitable way they can. I dare say we’ll see options in AdWords soon for premium placements in these results. Chances are they will start off with the Display Network integration but the travels space is a huge segment for Google and some something more robust will come down the line should this experiment hit the open market. On the fullfilment side, Google will never get into the transactional side of this business.  They aren’t a customer support kinda company – period. So, they will generate revenus from traffic streaming in their normal ways.

Your thoughts?

In the last few hours Google has changed their algorithm that pulls in review numbers. Previously when you searched for a hotel, let’s say in Chattanooga TN, you were shown a count of reviews box to the right of each search result that numbered in the hundreds or even thousands for 1st page GP results. This was because Google pulled the reviews from a number of different sources to build the cumulative count of reviews. However, now Google shows an extremely low number. Why?

The review number for this hotel is now, just 15. Previously for the Chattanoogan this figure was in excess of  200 reviews ( Tripadvisor + hotels.com + yahoo etc. etc.). This change may have a close correlation with the gaining traction of Google +1. Google wants its active members to get involved and have the main say behind review results.

So what is the impact hotel and other industry local SEO effort? The number of Google Places reviews (and their quality) will likely have a huge say in future SERP rankings. For instance my search above ranks the hotels almost perfectly in review number order – 32, 15, 4 & 5.

So what’s your follow up question to that? Hands up please… That’s right… How do we get more Google reviews? Thats something that agencies and clients need to think about and resolve before Google leaves them behind.

· 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.

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.

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.