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.

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

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.

In a bid to help the struggling travel and hospitality industry in Europe and the U.S., we’re launching a specifc QnA channel on Twitter which we will answer (in a Tweet) online marketing questions from sales and marketing staff at any flagged or independent properties. The Twitter channel to follow and post questions to is @HotelMktgQnA.

By posting a question or query or just general thought on the stream, Screen Pilot @reply to the query each day.

So if you ever wanted to know quick bits of info like the answer to “Should I bother with PPC on Bing?” or “Is a bounce rate of 40% on my emails campaigns good?” then follow this new channel at @HotelMktgQnA .

While you’re  there, go ahead and follow @ScreenPilot

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.

Riviera Resort & Spa