OM4Tourism sites ranking high with Google spiders

We’ve just seen our first two sites designed specifically for tourism operators reach a Google PageRank of 4/10. This is an excellent result, and if you’re not sure why, I’ll explain.

An online marketing site is designed to get results.

It’s a dynamic system that attracts the site visitors you want, engages them in your content and converts them to paying customers.

To achieve this, your prospects first have to find your site, and many will do this by keying relevant search terms into a search engine - the top 2 being Google and Yahoo.

What Google “spiders” do when they search the web is decide which site pages are important enough to display in the ‘organic’ listing when someone searches on your keywords. By ‘organic’ listing, we mean the main listing on the left of a Google search results page, as opposed to sponsored links that have been paid for.

Here’s how Google explains PageRank to online searchers:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.”

So a PageRank of 4/10 within the first few months of going live is a very good result for NingalooBlue.com and GreatOceanRoad-Torquay.com.au - many sites never make it that high.

However, there are other factors that help their sites to be found by their target readers. Google continues:

“Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”

This is where Keyword Analysis is essential. Having an authoritative site is important, but using the words and phrases that your prospects are keying in is vital. These are your keywords, and when Google spiders crawl the web looking for content that matches those keywords, you want them to find your site. Where, how and how often you use those keywords will help Google to make the match.

And before any of this can happen, Google has to be able to ’see’ your site in the first place - that means submitting your site to Google for indexing.

So - there are 3 vital steps here:

1. Create authoritative content on your destination or style of travel that attracts back links from equally authoritative sites.
2. Carry out Keyword Research & Analysis and incorporate your top keywords into your site content, headings and tags.
3. Submit your sitemap for Google indexing.

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