Mom + SEO Junkie = Burnt Toast

I noticed today that Tripadvisor.com has redesigned most of their site - a few sections arent done and it appears they will be rolling the whole site out gradually.  Interface is more user-friendly and it seems they have changed a few things - “Other Lodging” is now “Specialty lodging” - which is basically semantics if you ask me, same dang thing. I do like the new look a bit better - their old homepage was so crammed with stuff it was hard to know what to do with it.  2 things annoy me about tripadivsor.com:

1. They’re owned by Hotels.com and some other sites - so the only way to get a link is in their “other resources” area and that’s insane - getting a link from YOUR LISTING - never - they’ll only link to your hotels.com listing
2. Getting adwords (adsense) ads to show up there is a bit of a mystery.  All of our travel clients want “sponsored ads” on Tripadvisor - and we can get them there - sometimes - and purely by luck.  Not sure what the magic formula is, but some insight would be nice.  Google wasnt much help and Tripadvisor is pretty close-mouthed about the whole thing.  I would really really appreciate being able to run a site-targeted campaign there - they’d make a LOT of money off of my clients HINT HINT HINT.

I’m going to do a more detailed write-up of the changes over at the Blizz Blog - complete w/ screenshots, etc. so check over there tomorrow (12/18) afternoon for more details.

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The key to marketing travel online is to sell an “experience.” The old saying “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words” is never more true than when someone is shopping on your hotel or vacation rental website. Now that new media is emerging and is easier to use and embed in websites, there really is no excuse for not taking advantage of videos to help you sell the experience you want every guest to have.

Today in HotelMarketing.com there is a great article about Internet Video and the Travel Industry that goes over the reasons WHY you should be marketing your hotel or travel website with videos. Some of the highlights include:

The Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International reported on Sept 4, 2007 that a recent Travel Industry Association/Ypartnership TravelHorizons study found that two-thirds of online adult leisure travelers consume online video and audio clips.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Aug. 14, 2007 that Cisco says consumer video will be responsible for a significant portion of the Internet-based traffic increases from 2006 to 2011, with video streaming and downloads increasing from 9% of all consumer Internet traffic last year to 30% in 2011.

If you need some practical real world convincing, check out the results I got when I made a slideshow of not very good photos for a vacation rental client we have in Gulf Shores, AL -

This was really not a very professional attempt, I was messing around with Windows Movie Maker and just took some pics off the client’s website and made a slideshow. I uploaded it to Youtube and 2 months later it was ranking #2 in Yahoo for a really competitive term. Yahoo is really proud of themselves for being able to include video in SERPS a la Google - so I’m not sure this will last - but the key seems to be to tag the video correctly. I put tags in the upload that were simple and not multi worded - condo, rentals, gulf, shores, alabama, al - that’s it - and we’re #2.

That same video is ranking #5 in Google Video search - which is above the fold and actually not bad for a video that is not that great in quality. I’m going to redo the video with better photos and see if I can get it replaced or remove the old one and get the new one ranking.

All in all - the time investment was small, didn’t take a lot of hard work or expensive software, and the ranking ability of the video is stellar. Embedding a good video on your website and optimizing the text around it can give your own website the same exposure. Google and Yahoo do not index videos on individual sites, only through Metacrawler and Youtube type sites - but the optimized text can help you rank in the web results for searches and bring visitors into your video page, where you have the opportunity to sell them on the experience.

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