The secret of getting search ranking

The world of the web is a bewildering place for a small tourism operator. There are so many huge travel sites out there that it’s easy to feel like a very small fly caught in a vast web waiting to be eaten alive by the search engine spiders.

How on earth do you get attention amongst all the noise and flash?

First, have faith in the search engines.
Second, be authentic.
Third, be brave.

Search engine spiders don’t look for glossy, flashy websites. They don’t care how big your business is. They look for rich, relevant content. How great is that? This means you being authentic - talking online about your expertise, the experiences offered by you and your destination, and the people involved.

Make sure you optimise your site too, which simply means making it easy for the spiders to read the content. If you’re nervous about how to do it, this article demystifies the process.

Another important factor is inbound links. If there are other authoritative, high-ranking sites pointing to you, Google will take this to mean that you must know what you’re talking about.

Our travel sites zoomed straight to a 4/10 PageRank after just a few months of going live simply by paying attention to these factors: content, SEO and links.

What’s great about search engines is that they’re constantly onto those who try to fake it. So if a site tries to buy or sell links, they get penalised. Inbound links need to be genuine links prompted by excellent content on your site. And an inbound link is worth a lot more than a reciprocal link (i.e. you link to me and I’ll link to you).

Here are two of the best ways to get inbound links:
1. Have useful, relevant content on your site AND use your blog to link to useful content on other sites. Not only does this add value for your readers, but you’ll attract the attention of those other sites, and if they like what they see, they’ll add value for their readers by linking to you.
2. This is where being brave comes in - write articles about the travel experiences you offer and post them on article syndication sites, such as ezinearticles.com. Getting an article published on a site like this will automatically get you up to 3 inbound links from a high-ranking (6/10) authoritative site.

So the secret to getting search ranking comes down to:
Having faith that Google will rank you for the right reasons without bias (not forgetting SEO).
Being authentic in your content and your intentions when you manage links.
And being brave enough to publish your content beyond your own site.

Tags: search engine optimisation, SEO, travel websites
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