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Basic SEO for Hotel Internet Marketing

Do you work for a hotel or resort and want to set the best foundation for your SEO efforts? Follow these steps!

In each hotel marketing plan there is a chapter for SEO nowadays. Which is good news. But do hotels know how to set the right foundation for SEO? Only then amazing results can be achieved.

Let’s walk through this step-by-step summary of everything you can do to make sure your SEO efforts can take off.

#1 Creative Keyword Research

Doing high-quality keyword research is the first part of successful SEO. We all know this. But how do you really spot oppertunities? Here are some tips:

Use the Google Keyword Tool.
Do not focus a lot on competitive keywords with high search volume. Everybody already is optimizing for this.
Search for keywords that have decent search volume (more than 500 per month) and where the Google AdWords competition bar (green) is not so full. Low competition in AdWords usually means low competition for SEO too.
Try to find keywords such as “best time to visit X”, “things to do in X”, where “X” is a city or country.

#2 Have a SEO-Friendly Website

How can some webdesigners still build websites in frames, javascript/AJAX or flash (without HTML version added)? You might not have a clue what I am talking about. I am discussing some website techniques that work against you.

Have a look at the following:

A SEO-friendly website consists out of plain and clean HTML. Discuss it with your webdesigner.
Build your website in Wordpress or add Wordpress for a blog. Best thing you can do!
Add a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. If you use Wordpress install the plugin “XML-Sitemap” so it will be updated automatically for each new page you add in Wordpress. Otherwise, use www.xml-sitemaps.com to create static sitemaps.

#3 Use Keywords in Informative Articles & Webpages

After you did good research on your keywords, create pages around them. For example, for me an important keyword to get high rankings on is “hotel marketing” and “travel seo”. Look at this website and see where these words appear.

I know this is very basic SEO, but I also want this post to be valuable for beginners.

Add your keywords to:

<title>
<meta name=description>
<h1>
body text

If you use Wordpress this will happen automatically. Download and install Wordpress! It’s free. Also install the plugins “All in One SEO”, “SEO Smart Links” and “Link Juice Keeper”.

#4 Quality Linkbuilding

If you write quality content and promote it you will get linked automatically. Promote your blog and informative articles by using Facebook, Twitter, guestblogging, forums, social networks (ning.com) and blog commenting (not just for linkbuilding but for talking to people who can start linking to you if you build a relationship with them).

Before you will get linked automatically you need to start with some basic linkbuilding methods. Use my methods in the following posts to do quality linkbuilding:

Go! Go! Go!