So what should travel companies be doing to make sure they don’t miss the boat on Google+?

Currently, brand ‘Pages’ don’t seem to be as influential as ‘People’ profiles. However, brand pages do appear for branded terms, so it’s worth having a page if only from a reputation management stand point. You can use it as method to populate the search results when people search for your brand, pushing down any potential bad reviews on third party sites.

From an SEO perspective, there is less you can do on a page than a personal profile, though there are still some key points to follow to ensure you gain maximum SEO value from your page:

• Use your proper business name. Don’t spam the name with keywords if they aren’t legitimately part of your business name.
• Complete  your profile as fully as possible. Fill in all the possible fields and add photos and videos if you have them.
• Use keywords in the tagline and other fields as much as is appropriate without appearing spammy.
• Link your page and your website together using the rel=publisher tag

Engagement is key

Once everything on your page is populated, the next stage is to get people following it. This can be done in a number of ways, but engagement within your community is key to making your page a success. Below are some methods to kick start the engagement on your page in order to garner a strong following:

• Post to the Public – don’t limit your content to particular circles unless it is especially sensitive. Get it to reach as far as possible.
• Create Conversation – go to other people’s statuses and add thoughtful comments. This will raise people’s awareness of your page and make them more likely to follow you.
• Encourage Employees to promote you – personal pages can follow people, pages can’t, so leverage people in your company to promote your page and help get it off the ground.
• Talk Directly to People – use the @ function to talk specifically to people or to highlight content they may be interested in. Don’t overdo it though so they get annoyed!
• Respond to Others – if people go to the effort to +1 your posts or comment on them, go and say thanks and respond. They’ll be grateful and likely continue to share you content in the future.

Google+ is certainly in its early days, but there’s no doubt that it is going to play a big role in SEO and the online marketing sphere as a whole in the future. The key is to hop on board early and build a strong core following so as its influence grows you are in pole position to take advantage.

Marketing is crucial for these kind of sites to get their name out there and to turn their idea from a passion into a business. This marketing might take many forms, but is more than likely to include either offline advertising, social media or SEO.

For those that choose to focus on SEO, link building will undoubtedly be one of the activities on the cards, though it is surprising how much the approach will vary from site to site. Some people choose to flood their site with as many links as possible, buying links for the quickest and easiest route to success, though quickly discovering this puts you at risk of a penalty. Others go for the natural approach, crossing their fingers and hoping great links come their way. But this often results in slow progress…

A successful link building campaign combines many elements and can be daunting for a newcomer, so I’ve put together my 5 top tips for new travel websites to make a flying start to a link building campaign:

BE NATURAL

Whilst you may be manually promoting your site and submitting it to different places on the web, it’s important to do so in a natural way and not one which will flag up potential spammy approaches to Google and the other search engines. Submit to directories, but don’t do it with auto submission software. Try and get links from genuine blogs, but don’t pay for links on hundreds of sites created just for SEO. Whenever you are considering whether a link is worth it, ask yourself if it would be useful for a user. If the answer is Yes, then you’re good to go.

BUILD YOUR BRAND

Google’s ‘Vince Update’ put more emphasis on brands than ever, moving the focus of search results onto those sites which had established themselves as an authority in their niche, not just those that had the most links pointing them with a particular anchor text.

A natural anchor text profile will also feature a very brand heavy selection, as this is naturally how people link to your site. Ensure you build links using your brand name (SEO Travel) or your web address (e.g. seotravel.co.uk) as this will form the foundation of a strong, trusted link profile. Once this is in place you can then start to use ‘optimised’ anchor text to give you the final push.

TAKE CARE WITH ANCHOR TEXT

Whilst anchor text still plays an important part in rankings, it is no longer as simple as creating 100 links with ‘adventure travel’ as the anchor text to rank for that phrase. Once you have established a good foundation of branded links, you can start to incorporate some optimised anchor text. However, use different variations of the phrases you are targeting and include the brand within that sometimes too.

For example, if you are trying to rank for ‘travel insurance’ build some links with travel insurance as the anchor text, some with backpacker travel insurance/gap year travel insurance/holiday travel insurance and some with brand + travel insurance as the anchor text.

A recent study by SEOMoz showed that partial match anchor text actually has a higher correlation than exact match, and this approach will keep your profile looking natural whilst still providing the relevancy needed to rank for your target phrases.

VARY THE TYPES OF LINKS YOU GET

As well as varying the anchor text you use, you need to vary the types of links you get. Again, this will create a natural link profile which the search engines will trust. Write guest posts, submit to relevant directories, do link exchanges with people in your community. All of this will contribute to a rounded profile and great rankings!

CREATE GREAT CONTENT

No matter what any SEO cynic tells you, great content can get you fantastic links. The key is to promote that content once you’ve created it so people know about it and can link to it. This can be blog posts, infographics, ebooks or anything your creative brain can think of! As long as it is on your site it can attract links. And whilst every piece of linkbait you produce might not be as successful as you’d like, when something works you will end up with loads of great promotion and dripping in more links than you can handle!

Hopefully these tips will help you get started on a successful link building campaign and heading towards great results with your new website.

If you would like a little help along the way then feel free to get in touch and SEO Travel would be more than happy to get you started on the road to link building success.

Sad Pandas
The aim of the Panda update was to reward high quality content and ‘punish’ large sites which house low quality or duplicate content without providing real value for the user. It resulted in many large sites seeing a severe loss of organic traffic, in particular article submission sites, voucher code sites and information portals. Many more suffered, though Google gave away clues as to what you needed to do to recover from Panda 1.0 which resulted in sites across the web scrambling around and updating content as quicly as possible.

Travel Industry
But what does it mean for the travel industry and travel websites? Panda has basically reinforced the need for your site to be full of quality content that users will find useful and trustworthy. If your website has reams and reams of duplicate content or is packed with low value, unregulated content from guests then you need to switch the focus to creating quality, unique content that users are more likely to share. This might be a long job, but it will be worth it in the long run if you want the Google machine to be your friend again. If you want ranking success then you need to give the Panda what it wants!

Link Building Implications
The Panda update also has implications on how you carry out the link building activities on your site. If your link building campaign was focused on article submissions or paid links on low quality sites then you’ll be getting less link juice from those sites since Panda struck. The emphasis on carrying out a white hat link building campaign and participating in the travel community has become more important than ever.

If Panda has hit your site hard then get in touch and SEO Travel will help you get your site back in line with Google’s guidelines and bring back the visitors that the Panda ate up.

However, SEO is about more than one phrase and one ranking. People are often surprised when they finally get their target keyword on to page 1 and traffic doesn’t come flooding in. Whilst rankings are certainly a good indicator of your site’s progress, it’s important not to get too obsessed with one indicator at the expense of the many others that show your site is progressing. In the end, it is traffic and conversions that will make your business grow, not that vanity ranking you’ve chased for months.

That’s where domain authority comes in. Building the strength of your domain in a white hat way will allow it to rank for countless phrases and bring in the targeted traffic that your business needs. Whilst it is possible to rank relatively young domains on page 1 for difficult headline phrases through a targeted campaign, it’s important not to forget the overall target of your campaign in amongst the digital reeds.

One excellent indicator of your site’s increasing domain authority is the number of phrases that it is found through. If this is going up, your headline rankings are improving and traffic is on the up then it’s likely you’re on to a winner. If one of them is missing though, then it’s time to start asking questions. If your SEO company is only telling you about how one ranking is improving exponentially then don’t be afraid to ask for more details on the things that matter; traffic, conversions and your bottom line.

One of these changes was Google’s increased desire to rank internal, more relevant pages rather than homepages. Google has always said that it ranks pages, not domains, though this would seem to be changing with this recent development. We also saw a strike down on ‘anchor text’ links, as Google becomes more capable of phasing out sites that are trying to game the system. These sort of changes mean that your approach to SEO in 2011 needs to be more ‘white hat’ than ever as you wil see diminishing long term results from the spammy tactics that would have gained results not so long ago.

With these changes in mind, i’ve put together a few tips and predictions for the 2011 search landscape, with an eye on how it will effect the travel industry in particular:

• Google has put more emphasis on brands in recent months and building your own brand online will be crucial to a successful SEO campaign in 2011. If you are a relatively new travel brand then you need to be getting branded links and brand mentions across the various areas of the web, whether that is directories, PR submissions, blogs or social media. As you establish a powerful brand and a wide digital footprint search engines will trust you more and deliver you for more longtail queries, as well as your headline phrases.
• Social media will play a more important role than ever in 2011. Not only is it about building a community around your brand and harnessing these channels to establish brand advocates, now it is about illustrating your brand presence to Google who will use that as a factor in its rankings. If you don’t already have a presence on social media channels like Twitter and Facebook then 2011 is the time to start.
• Ignore local search at your peril. Google has started to incorporate local search results into the organic search listings for many queries and it has opened up a huge opportunity for smaller travel business to grab a piece of the search pie. If you have a business address then you should have a verified Google maps listing, especially if you provide a location orientated service (e.g. hotel in Leeds). Even for big online travel retailers, having a location optimised website will provide more search success than ever before in 2011.
• Heavily optimised sites are likely to come unstuck. As Google cracks down on things like anchor text links, many travel websites which hopped on the SEO bandwagon a long time ago (and used slightly gray hat tactics) may see their success diminishing as Google begins to punish over optimised link profiles. If you’re link profile is full of anchor text links and not many branded ones then it’s time to get building them, and fast!
• Interacting with travel bloggers is something that should be done by every travel company. The community of travel bloggers is huge (and ever growing) and they are more than happy to endorse travel companies if approached in the right way. Establish a presence on Twitter and build relationships with them. Once you have built a level of trust you can broach different ways you can work together and they are more than likely to oblige if you produce ideas which will be mutually beneficial. These are the people who can spread your brand through the travel community and this sort of exposure will bring with it both PR and SEO benefits. Don’t overlook them…

These are just a few of the issues that have appeared to me as the more important considerations for 2011. No doubt we will see more big changes from Google in the coming months that we will need to react to. One things for sure, white hat SEO is now more important than ever as Google, Bing and other search engines develop their ability to filter out those trying to game the system. Play fair and you’re likely to see good, long lasting results!