The first steps to improve the visibility of your hotel website

Demand share by channel in 2011 - OTA 11%

- Hotels’ website 17% - CRS/Voice 14%

- GDS 9% - Others 49%

International hotels’ brands have invested massively in the direct channel (p.e.: Hotels’ website) to counterbalance the importance taken by OTA.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is inside the fighting area of direct online booking websites.

The Search Engines most used are:

Google represents 82% of the global market share of search engines in May 2011.

In US, Google is only 65%. Yahoo and Bing represent 29%.

In China, Baidu represents 61%.

SEO for Google search engine is crucial

Sources :http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/articles.aspx/6967/OTA-demand-share-increases-in-2011http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine

If you have a bad designed website, using the Google webmaster tool will not help to improve the visibility of your hotel website !

Hoteliers have to hire an experienced team to design their hotel website.

The keys facts of hotels’ website should be :

o user-friendly designed o content oriented (article, videos, reviews, always produce new content) o social oriented (+1, Facebook,Twitter)o developed the websiteo in respect of technical guidelines

A small humour...

Get a account to login (usually a Gmail account)

Add your website Verify your website to prove that you are the

owner of this website=> Never skip this step or Google will not allow

you to use a large variety of services

Settings for your website

Set your preferred domain (www or non-www)

To tell Google how you prefer your site to be indexed.

http://example.com and http://www.example.com are completely different sites and can display completely different content. You can avoid potential problems (and get a better view of your data) by specifying your preferred domain.

Set a geographic target for your site If your site is targeted at users in a

specific region

Improve your website1. Submit a sitemapA sitemap is a file which lists the pages on your website. Google uses this file to enhance his search on your website.

2. Check crawl errorsIf Google has a lot of crawling errors on your website, it may decrease the index ranking of your website.

3. Review the site health and correct the alertsGoogle can detect if : - a malware on your site. - an important page is removed from your site. - an important page is blocked.

4. Run the Site Performance tool.It shows you the latency information about your site (low latency => good indexation).

All those improvements show to Google that your website is well maintained.So Google will give you a good index rank.