What are the greatest challenge in search engine optimisation that small travel businesses will face in 2010?

This is the question that I’ve been reflecting upon in last few days, conscious of all the innovation and changes that every single day affect the way we work with the search engines for travel and tourism marketing.

When we speak about search engine optimisation, or SEO, the only certainty that we have is what we have done in the past.  For the future, we will know exactly what is working and achieve good results, through constant testing, mistakes and efforts.

However, I think 2010 will be a big year for travel and tourism marketing when it comes to search.

Google Caffeine

2010 changes start with the full implementation of Caffeine, the new Google algorithm, the core of the company’s technology.  Google promises that the new search tool will improve the speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness of Google search.

Tests conducted recently by Mashable have showed that the “New Google” aims at providing an increasingly better search experience for the user.  Early reports state:

1) Caffeine often doubled the speed: users will get results faster (though many web users will not notice this).
2) New Google relies more on keywords: the algorithm has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results.
3) Search is moving into real-time: Being able to get info on breaking events is clearly a priority for Google. With both Twitter and Facebook launching real-time search engines, they need to respond.
4) Increasing attention to links:   It’s also very likely that the new algorithm will put increasing attention and precision on the Link Popularity, thus better filtering the real value from the noise in order to provide better results and higher quality.

Caffeine focuses on increasing speed, relevancy, accuracy, and volume ofcontent — things that Microsoft really hit on when it released its search engine.  Of course from these tests, is still quite hard to understand how Caffeine will revolutionise the way small businesses need to react to protect/increase their own search engine rankings.

Bing

And then of course we see another big player, Bing.  According to a Nielsen report delivered last September, the growing rate for the Microsoft Search Engine is faster than any other search engine. It was reported Bing had 10.7% of the total search market, up 2% from the month before. Today, its share is somewhere around 8-10%.
In the last few months Microsoft has worked hard on marketing to promote Bing, but also has introducing great features like visual search and voice support.  It’s clear is that Microsoft can’t afford to lose the battle, and for travel search marketers competition between engines can only be a good thing. What is also clear though, is that for travel search marketers, the job just got a lot more interesting.

The Focus is Changing

There’s a urging pressure to abandon the pure “ranking” as most important search engine optimisation metric. In fact, search result pages themselves are changing, and many more are the elements that need to be included in your kit while developing an effective strategy for your tourism website: maps, news, photos, videos and, most important, there’s real time!

Search engines are evolving into “answer engines”, and a web page or a document can’t just contain only text, but, according to these latest innovation, it’s important to create, include and optimize also other types of content, in other to enable the search engine to offer a greatest variety of answers to the travel searcher.

The increasing importance of real-time search results and the latest inclusion of Twitter and Facebook results in the search results provide an additional warning sign to small businesses: start to actively using social media and optimize content for them.

So what your priorities should be?

Search Engine Optimisation is no more simply on page optimization, it has to be approached in a more holistic way. Specifically:

1) In the past few years, SEO has been about all-Google, all the time, so the rule of thumb was to optimize for Google, and the rest pretty much takes care of itself. This advice is still valid.  However, in order to keep up with the latest innovation, it’s a good think to monitor both the Google Webmaster Central as well as the Bing Webmaster Centre.

And Rember that the basics rules of search optimisation are still greatly important for both Bing and Google, thus:
- Make it easier for search engines to index your website, by having a “sitemap” and a good internal link structure
- Work hard on embedding keywords in pages
- Get quality inbound links

2) Focus on the real results: conversions. Pure ranking are not reliable anymore (third position can lead to extremely good results or either very poor ones…). You can have great rankings for many keywords! But what if your customers aren’t actually searching for those or your content doesn’t give the customer good enough reason to actually purchase?  Content must be tweaked, tightened, and tweaked again.

3) Leverage Social Media. By using simple tools like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube not only you’ll increase your chances to appear in Google or Bing search results but also your customers will notice that you’re willing to start an open and authentic conversation with them when you take the time to upload, optimize and share new content! Ask your guests to tell their story on TripAdvisor – Embed a link in emails, tag lines, Websites, business cards.

Here’s the truth: you don’t need to be a techie to achieve fantastic results!

To Learn More…

Take advantage of everything you need to know about the world of search in our popular do-it-yourself guide, DIY SEO – Do It Yourself Search Optimization.  It’s an ethical, practical guide to all-things-search.

If you prefer some one-on-one support for your search engine marketing needs, our Search Engine Jumpstart package might be just the thing to increase your base of paying customers in 2010.

Photo by: elsie