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Search Trends and SEO Tactics for the Travel Industry Hillary Bressler CEO and Founder .Com Marketing @hillarybressler #etsnyc October 2009

Top 3
Travel Statistics

Travel Search Trends
66%
of leisure travelers use
the Internet to plan some aspect of their travel
© 2009 .Com Marketing

56%
make reservations online

34%
of travelers visit search engines
first when considering
Vacation destinations

Top 3 Search Engines

Search Engine Market Share Google remains the market leader U.S. Core Search Share, August 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch) -0.4% y/y 0.03% m/m 3.9% Ask -1.3% y/y -0.01% m/m 3.0% AOL +0.9% y/y +0.4% m/m 9.3% Microsoft -0.4% y/y 0.0% m/m 19.3% Yahoo +1.3% y.y -0.1% m/m 64.6% Google

Google’s World
Between 60-70% of searches happen at Google.
That doesn’t mean you should put all your SEO eggs in Google’s basket, but it does mean if you’re not being found on Google, you’re not being found.

Top 3 Things That Make Bing Cool

Bing is now the fastest growing search engine.
Launched July 2009
In August ’09 Bing gained 0.4% of the search market, to achieve 9.3% of total search query volumes in the U.S. In the same month, Google’s market shared dropped by one point to 64.6% while Yahoo’s market share remained unchanged at 19.3%.

The farecast technology works to help identify trends in flight prices, showing you as you search whether or not fares are expected to stay the same, get cheaper, or rise in price. Bing Travel Tools

Think of Bing Cashback as a Credit Card rewards program, but only a million times better. Depending on the retailer, your purchases could net you as high as 30% of the purchase price back in cash form (though most offers are between 5 and 15%. Bing Cash Back

Bing’s Graphical Search

Bing’s Webmaster Central

Top 3 Changes In Search from 2008 to Today

Beyond Web Links
Google search results page is no longer a list of 10 web page links; it now includes
Videos
News articles
Blog posts
Images
And More….

In turn, this means that SEO isn’t just about tweaking your web site….
It’s about creating and optimizing whatever forms of content make sense for your business and industry.

http://mashable.com/2009

Adding video to your pages will help with your rankings.
Google weights websites with videos at a higher priority then sites that do not have video.

Video is the number one tactic that US marketers will be focusing on in 2009. If you’re not doing it, chances are your competition will be.
eMarketer 2009

The famous Blendtec iphone video has attracted over 6,000 links resulting in a top ten ranking on Google for the word, “blender.” http://mashable.com/2009

Content + Links = Search Engine Success

Searchable PDF’s Google on October 7, 2009 announced that its search results now feature an option allowing users to view formatted PDFs from within their browser.

Google Sidewiki Google Sidewiki is a new feature being Sept 23, 2009 to the Google Toolbar that allows anyone to leave comments about pages as they surf the web. Anyone can view your comments who also have Sidewiki enabled.

Not so thrilled with the idea that people might leave comments on your site? I suspect many will be uneasy about this, especially if competitors begin link dropping.
Unfortunately, there’s no way you can block the comments from being displayed.
Google Sidewiki

You can, however, claim the first comment for yourself. If you’ve verified ownership of a site through Google Webmaster Central, then you’ll see a special notice whenever you comment on one of your own pages:

User Influenced Search
Google’s SearchWiki, a major addition to its user interface that allows users to edit search results.
When using SearchWiki, you can re-order, remove, or add web pages to the search results for any query.
You can also add notes to specific listings.

What comments are shown, and in what order?
Google secret sauce…… time.
The official line is this:
Using multiple signals based on:
The quality of the entry
What we know about the author
User-contributed signals such as voting and flagging
SearchWiki

When I talking with Google about Searchwiki they gave me a few other factors, such as:
Use of sophisticated language : “This page sucks” isn’t sophisticated; think complex sentences and ideas.
User’s reputation : Are your comments being voted up or flagged down?
User’s history : How long have you had a Google Profile? How long have you been commenting?
Apparently, Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Searchwiki supports.
SearchWiki

SEO Mantra
Still Very Important
meta tags, title, header,
alt tags, and content is
still King!

Top 3 Search Trends For 2010

Trend: Social media integration
More Video
More Photos
More Blog postings
More Tweets

Role of Social Media in SEO
The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence social communities or content so that your social media pages show up on the search results .
Do a search for Zappos on Google , for example, and you’ll easily find more than shoes: Twitter, Blog and a YouTube channel are all on the first page of search results.

The key is finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content . Whatever the tactical mix is, it’s an investment in time and relationships – not a short term “link dump” to promote optimized link bait. http://mashable.com/2009

Twitter and SEO Google is already indexing tweets (albeit not in real-time) so Twitter pages and even individual tweets have already started appearing within Google search results.

Select an account name wisely
Write keyword-rich tweets if possible
Select the initial characters of each tweet carefully
Twitter and SEO

Myspace page

Linkedin page

Linkedin Group

Flickr Photostream

Twitter Account

Trend: Google Wave
What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Google Wave Video - http://cnettv.cnet.com/google-wave/9742-1_53-50072681.html

Trend: Google Books
As of Sept 26 th 2009, you'll be able to download over one million public domain books from Google Books in in a PDF and EPUB format.
A free and open industry standard for electronic books.
So once you download a book, you'll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format.

Google Books

Google Books and Travel

Top 3 ROI Tactics

Measuring ROI of Social Media

84% of Social Media Programs Don’t Measure ROI

Measuring ROI
Pageviews
Unique visitors
Members
Posts (ideas/threads)
Number of groups (networks/forums)
Comments & Trackbacks
Tags/Ratings/Rankings
Time spent on site
Contributors
Active contributors
Word count
Referrals
Completed profiles
Connections (between members)
Ratios: Member to contributor; Posts to comments; Completed profiles to posts
Periods: By day, week, month, year
Frequency: of visits, posts, comments
General Internet Tracking (outside of enterprise-sponsored communities)
Net Promoter Score
Meme Lifecycle
Number of mentions (tracked via web or blog search engines)
Marketing/Sales Cost per number of engaged prospects (community vs. other initiatives)
Number of leads/period
Number of qualified leads/period
Ratio of qualified to non-qualified leads
Cost of lead
Time to qualified lead
Lead conversion
Number of pre-sales reference calls (to other customers)
Average new revenue per customer
Lifetime value of customers
Customer Support Customer satisfaction
Number of initiated support tickets per customer per period
Support cost per customer in community
New 'friends' after 30/60/90 days
Number of friends met online that users have met offline
Number of friends met online that member has subsequently collaborated with
Number of ideas that the user has gotten and then used in their work

Tactic: Measuring ROI
ROI is a function of your goals and may not always be monetary, consider ROO (Return on Objective)
Branding
Awareness
Relationships
Engagement

Multiple conversion events are likely, be sure to include those
Do you include their sales if they call instead of using your online booking engine?
What if they went to the website for all the information, then bought at your ticket counter?
© 2009 .Com Marketing http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2009/08/the_new_search.html

Don’t forget to include some measures on likely future events
Your website is often a first and early step in the purchase process.
How will you include future bookings generated from current spends in your ROI calculation?
Consider longer sales cycle times and conversions. Booking long in advance.

Top 3 Cool Tools

Free tools
Post Rank allows you to enter a feed URL and returns statistics about its posts, including which are the most popular based on how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites Google, Digg, Del.icio.us.

Free tools
Xinu is a handy website where you can type in a URL and receive a load of useful statistics ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more.
With Google Trends , you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time.

Free and Paid tools
Google Analytics and Feedburner are essential, free tools to help analyze your company’s blog traffic, subscriber count, keyword optimization and additional trends.
Quantcast.com and Compete.com offer free measurement tools
Clicky - cheap web based tool similar to Google Analytics.

CONTACT
Hillary Bressler
[email_address]
407.774.4606 ext 203
Twitter: @hillarybressler
Linkedin: Hillarybressler
PowerPoint Can be found at:
www.slideshare.com/hillarybressler
Hillary’s new book...The book includes best-selling authors Stephen R. Covey ( Seven Habits of Highly Effective People ), Brian Tracy ( Million Dollar Habits ) and Ken Blanchard ( One Minute Manager ).

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