Search Engine Optimization is a topic on the mind of just about everyone these days, and if you are not thinking about it, now is a good time to start. In general, SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to rank better in the search engines, thus increasing traffic and the presence of your website in a given market. SEO is comprised of many variables, but generally grouped in two parts: Onsite optimization and Offsite optimization (link building). There are thousands of companies selling SEO services, but wouldn’t it be great to have the tools to be in control? In the past unless you were a web junky and had a deep understanding of html and programming skills, there was little you could do to optimize your web pages for search engine success.

 

With Bookt’s online lodging solutions, you can super-charge your onsite optimization with just a basic understanding of SEO. First, determine your keyword targets. What are you offering? Recognize the competition for this these keywords. Understand that “Vacation Rentals” is far more difficult to rank for than “Long Island Beach House Rentals”… and everything in between. Don’t shoot for the stars right away, work on longer tail keywords that are less competitive
 

Now it is time to apply what you know. The next step is to understand what parts of a webpage resonate with the search engines. Aside from the content you clearly see on a webpage, here are some additional page attributes more specific to Search Engine Optimization

 

Page Title – The title of the page is seen at the top of your browser. This is arguably the most important page attribute to optimize

Page URL –The URL is also extremely important to write specifically.

Page Meta Keywords – These keywords read only by search engines, not users. They give the search engines and idea of what the page is about

Page Meta Description – a description of the page and it’s offering. This is seen in search engine listings as the description of the page/listing

Image Alt Tags – tells the search engines and users what an image is about

With hundreds or even thousands of web pages on your website, it is not feasible to manually fine-tune the content for every page. This is why it is so important to have smart, dynamic generation of this content automatically. Bookt’s platform dissects your business, lodging type, market area, specialties, and other important data and automatically creates these optimized pages for you! This allows you to start off with “smart defaults” that are already optimized. For your most important pages, the Bookt SEO Editor puts the fine tuning in your control, further optimizing these traffic driving pages.

Let’s take a look at an example. In this particular case, we are showing a popular category search page - “Vacation Cabins Near Gatlinburg”.  With the SEO Editor, we can easily fine tune the page details to support this keyword.