As a hotel industry professional, if I came up to you and said, “Let’s all get together and help TripAdvisor’s SEO”, what would you say? I’m guessing that the majority of you would say something to the affect of, “No way, why would I do that?”. After all, for the hospitality industry, TripAdvisor is up there with all other third parties that drive consumers away from our direct channels, give consumers more control of our messaging and show up prominently in search engine results. Now, what if I told you that we are already doing this? What if I told you that we are all working together to help TripAdvisor rank better in Google, and compete against us? Don’t believe me? Read on. Read more »
Bing Relaunches With Increased Social Integration
Bing has announced some pretty major changes to their search engine product. The changes are heavily focused on bringing better information from social networks to search results. The video here provides some overview information of the changes and new features that we gathered from Bing’s announcement. Below the video we’ve listed some additional resources that you’ll find useful.
Personalization On The Web, Good Or Bad?
Personalization on the web is not exactly a new topic. Sites like Google have been personalizing content and search results for many years. They started back in the mid-2000s when they were personalizing results for logged in users based on their search history. Starting in late 2009 they started personalizing search for everyone, something they announced in this video. It was here that they started using many of the other available signals like IP address, language, search history, data from other Google products like Gmail to personalize search results for everyone. Most recently, at the beginning of this year, Google announced Search plus Your World (SpYW), their most aggressive and obvious effort in the area of personalization. This post is not too talk about SpYW, there are plenty of others that have written in great detail about how it works, etc.
Google is not the only one implementing personalization technology and tactics, Facebook is also using a great deal of personalization. That is two of the largest websites in the world, impacting millions of people every day. So, the question I want to pose in this post is, when I mention “personalization” on the web, does that invoke positive or negative sentiments?
Hotel Marketing Month In Review For April 2012
See what you may have missed out on recently with all of the posts from the O’Rourke blog from the last month.
Are Your Facebook Posts Being Hidden?
As the level of “noise” on social networks like Facebook increases you should be thinking about what impact this has on the messages you are sending out.
Google Made 50 Search Changes In March
Google is constantly evolving the way they handle search and always making small updates and changes. In March 2012 Google made 50 changes to their ranking algorithms that marketers should be aware of.
How To Use The Site: Search To Improve Your Search Strategy
The site: search will change your life. See how you can use this simple Google search tactic to improve your SEO strategy and gain competitive insights.
Facebook Charging Big Bucks For Logout Ads
Facebook is charging big bucks for some of their advertising opportunities. We’ve not yet seen any major hotel brands experiment with these big ticket opportunities.
Client Case Study: Social Media Push
See how QR codes in printed materials can help increase “likes” and reviews.
Video: Latest Google Change – Over Optimization Penalty
Despite best efforts from the search engines the local search environment can be a mess. This post reviews what the landscape is so complex and what you can do to ensure you stand out.
Contact us directly if you want to learn more about how we can help with any of your Internet marketing needs.
Facebook Timeline Images From The Hotel Industry
With the launch of Facebook’s new Timeline format last month we thought we’d go through and see what some of the largest and most popular hotels brands did to take advantage of the new format. It is quite interesting to see how different each brand is and the differing approaches that each has. What brands did we miss? Which brand pages do you like the best? Let us know in the comments. Read more »
Video: Latest Google Change – Over Optimization Penalty
This past week Google announced another algorithm change in their ongoing battle against webspam. Initially, many in the search industry were calling it an “over optimization” penalty. It has now been coined the “Penguin Update”. Get the highlights from this change, learn how it may impact your hotel and hear what our recommendations are.
Here are some other useful resouces with other information about the announcement:
Client Case Study: Social Media Push
The Renaissance and Marriott hotels of Washington, DC came to O’Rourke with a challenge to increase the number of TripAdvisor guest reviews and Facebook “likes” for individual properties.
In response, O’Rourke created business card size handouts that were distributed with room keys upon check-in. Using QR code technology for instant response, these cards makes it fast and easy for guests to scan the code with their smartphones and immediately like the property on Facebook or write a review on TripAdvisor.
For the full success story click here.
Facebook Charging Big Bucks For Logout Ads
I don’t normally logout of Facebook, I’m usually on a computer that I know no one else will be using, so the privacy and security risk of staying logged in is minimal for me. However, the other day, for some reason, I did log out and I noticed something that I had never seen before. On the Facebook logout screen was a huge, full-screen ad for Bing. Read more »
How To Use The Site: Search To Improve Your Search Strategy
I was keeping up with my digital marketing reading a couple of weeks ago and came across this article from Internet Marketing Ninjas blog. The blog post talks about something called the “site:” or, if spelled out, “site colon” search. The site: search is a feature of Google and Bing and is something that I use everyday, multiple times a day, for all the reasons that the blog post talks about. But as I was thinking about how often I use it and how great it is, it made me think that most people probably have no idea that this feature exists. I think it is so awesome and worth sharing. So how does it work?
If you go to Google and in the search box type – site:www.orourkehospitality.com (or click this link) you’ll see an example of what I’m talking about. Next, try this same search but replace www.orourkehospitality.com with your site’s address.
Here is a visual example of what you should be seeing:
Click to enlarge
I think this is so valuable for a number of different reasons:
- At the top of the page, right below the search box, you’ll see a notation – “About 31,500 results”. This is an indication of how many pages Google has indexed from your website. As you go through the pages of results you may see that Google has found pages that you don’t want showing up in search results. You may also find that there are several pages that Google hasn’t found for some reason. With this knowledge you can then go back and work to fix any issues that are found.
- With the site: search you can very quickly and easily see all of your title tags and meta descriptions. This will help identify whether your site is optimized for search engines the way that it should be, or if you still have content optimization opportunities. In the visual example above you can easily see that our site’s content is optimized for many of the keyword searches that we care about.
- The last reason is competitive intelligence. You can perform this site: search for any website. If you put in the URL for one of your competitors you can quickly see how many pages they have in Google’s index and see what keywords they are optimizing for. This can give you can indication of whether your competitor’s SEO efforts are a step ahead of you, or vice versa.
I would encourage you to play around with this feature because you may find some interesting things. The site: search is just the tip of the iceberg; there are many other advanced search operators. This article from SEOmoz has a nice summary of some of the other search options if you want to get more advanced. Enjoy!
Google Made 50 Search Changes In March
Yesterday Google shared their monthly blog post outlining all of the algorithm tweaks and changes they made in the past month. According to yesterday’s post there were 50 changes worth noting for March 2012. I always look forward to this post from Google because it helps us stay on top of what is happening, share relevant changes with our clients and help correlate any issues with documented changes. Read more »