You can never have enough data about your small businesses’ keywords – the phrases that people type into a search engine to find you. As you probably know already, either through experience or reading through our resources like the bestseller DIY SEO guide, you can get a lot of this knowledge for free with a little sleuthing and hard work.
But many companies overlook one key way to find their perfect keywords…
Search engine optimization is like the poor stepchild of online marketing efforts – no matter how hard the industry tries, it gets shunned and kicked down; SEO is an unloved and often overlooked field.
And you know what? A lot of that negativity is deserved – because there are unethical SEO efforts taking place within every single industry on the internet. Spammers manipulate the search results, pay for unethical inbound links to their sites, and generally bring a bad name to the legitimate SEO industry.
Let’s, for argument’s sake, call this the “dark side” of SEO.
Legitimate and ethical SEO efforts, on the other hand, are the complete opposite of spam. Ethical SEO-ers only optimize their sites for the keywords that actually help searchers find correct, legitimate, and targeted information. The optimization tactics are straightforward and websites build honest and gradual inbound linking campaigns with an aim toward increasing organic search rankings.
For arguments sake, we’ll call this the “light side.”
I think you see where I am going with this. Just like the Jedi Force in the Stars Wars universe, there are two sides to SEO, and one side is actually useful, ethical, and even needed.
You’ll be probably aware of the fact that all the major search engines are making it increasingly easier for small tourism business owners to take a proactive approach toward online marketing.
In the last few years, the growing importance of local search and the integration into search results (in Google especially) has created an increasingly fundamental avenue for small tourism businesses to promote awareness about their businesses and gain additional traffic to their website. However, many business owners simply aren’t aware of the impact that their local listings can have on their site’s traffic.
We would like to introduce you to the concept and importance of local search and provide you with some tips in order to get your tourism business listed inside the major search engines local results with no fluff and no stress!
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.
Andy is definitely an SEO expert. He helped me identify some stubborn search engine optimization problems and offered specific solutions. He understood exactly what I was looking for and provided detailed results with a very quick turn-around. He's friendly and easy to work with. I give him my highest recommendation and look forward to working with him again.
Marc Menninger, who asked for some support with his search engine optimization efforts.
Hi. I'm Hannah.
