Since Google, Expedia, and other online travel agents have made it so easy to search online for hotels for a particular destination, it's very likely that your customer has found your property by searching for them. When he does this, you should make sure that your hotel appears among the first results thrown by the search engine. Otherwise, no one will see the name of your hotel.
by Glenn Withiam
Those looking for information rarely scroll down the bar to examine the rest of the page, and usually only look at an area in the upper-left corner of the results page thrown by the search engine, or one or two of the first names on paid Internet lists. These places are called the "golden triangle".
Your goal as an Internet promoter is to make sure your hotel appears in the golden triangle, and to do so you need to make sure your website is indexed by the web spiders of search engines, those programs that examine the contents of the web.
A new study from the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research looks at the basic principles of website optimization, using the example of the St. James Hotel in Red Wing, Minnesota. The study explains the analysis of the website by a team of Cornell University students, led by Assistant Professor Chris Anderson (you can read the full report at no cost on the CHR website, "Best Practices in Marketing and Search Engine Optimization: The Case of the St. James Hotel").
The team began the analysis with the principles of search engine optimization, which takes into account their algorithms and how web spiders represent them. These computer applications analyze each Internet page they find according to its relevance to a particular search. In large part, relevance depends on how consistent your site is; that is, if the pages are well organized and contain the basic search keywords.
To make your site as relevant as possible, you should start with a sitemap that is posted on your landing page. Search engine analyzers will recognize this map and follow your links to find and index all the pages on your site. Their goal is to make sure that parsers index as many pages as possible, because it's that procedure that directs the search results.
Each page will have a header, internal tags to specify photos, and text. Those three elements should contain the keywords relevant to that page and to the site as a whole. To determine the appropriate keywords, Google offers a free application, Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Another free app, SEO Digger, offers an analysis of which keywords stimulate traffic to a particular website; this differentiates whether it is your site or that of your competitors.
Another way to make sure your web pages are consistent is to limit each page to a single topic, and not try to put too much information on one page, especially unrelated material.
Of course, your hotel's web pages aren't just for web analyzers. They will also be used by your guests. For this reason, it is important to optimize your site for human use. For human users and analyzers, it's best to use an inverted pyramid scheme in your page content. Put the exclusive and most relevant content near the start. The golden triangle principle works on all web pages; people don't always look down and don't like to lower the scroll bar.
While this report has focused on search engine optimization, that is nothing more than one aspect of the marketing strategy through them. Your hotel may also want to bet on keywords for sponsored links that occupy the right side of the golden triangle, using a pay-per-click agreement. However, the long-term strategy should involve optimizing your site. By knowing what search engine algorithms are looking for, you can ensure that your website ranks highly relevant for searches with specific keywords. That should put your hotel in the Golden Triangle of internet search results.
