Improve your website’s visibility and get better search engine rankings by gaining links to your pages.

Do not underestimate the importance of link building in terms of search engine optimisation and getting your hotel website found. The process involved is building more Inbound Links to your web site from other web sites. A Search Engine views a link to your web site as a vote of confidence in your web site. Search Engines believe that if other websites are linking/referring traffic to your web pages, you must have something good to link to and that will naturally start to push you up the search engines for your chosen keyword – also called organic optimisation.

Overnight (usually) the search engines send robots or spiders (not literally) out and they travel virally from web site to web site tracing links like an enormous spider’s web. This is one of the main reasons why your website doesn’t have to be manually submitted to the Search Engines, as they initially discover your web site via a link from another web site. Once your hotel web site has been found, each page of your site is then indexed and ranked accordingly which is based on a complex set of criteria known as an algorithm. An algorithm is a piece of computer code that takes into consideration on-site and off-site factors collected by the robots or spiders. The date that they collect and collate is then assembled, and evaluated in order to come up with a Page Score or Rank. The end result and the aim is to be found when someone types into the search engines a search term like “Hotel SEO”.

Beware of web companies that guarantee you a position on the first page of Google for example, as they could guarantee your competitors the exact same thing!. When you have two hotel websites competing and on the face of it they are equal in terms of what they offer and how they were constructed etc then the criteria that are used to determine ranking will simply come down to the site with the best quality of links should rank higher then the one without. It’s all about quality and not quantity, the higher the page rank of a site that is linking to you, then the more weight is put on that particular vote. In the past, the site with the “most links” would have been ranked higher – not anymore!

A search engines function is to deliver highly relevant results, not some search engine optimisation company when you are searching for “hotel in centre of York”. So what is important to search Engines today when they rate your link? Well there are several additional factors when rating Inbound Links to your site and they are: The reputation or “Trust” value of sites linking to your hotel web site, i.e. is the link from a relevant site, how long the site has been online etc… The “Anchor Text” (the words that the link is embedded within the hyperlink) i.e. instead of putting your web address www.simplystep.co.uk you actually have your keywords linked in e.g. hotel websites. Theme or Relevance – a link from a destination guide web site that may also list other hotels in your region is “on theme”; a link from your local pizza takeaway is of little value – that’s little and not no value. Anchor Text – this is now so critical in maximising your online profile i.e. your hotel website being found at the top of the Search Engines Results Pages, so in every link that you attempt to get make sure you include your keywords in your hyperlink domain e.g. hotel website, York Hotels etc. Getting this work right is an essential part of any Search Engine Optimised campaign where the end result is to be found on the search engines.

Four steps to gaining more links/votes for your site:

• Ask your suppliers to add a link on their site to yours, they should be more than happy to add the link text exactly the way you want – just send them an email (once agreed) with what you want to say in your link – you may need to keep this brief
• Get your Sales Manager, Conference and Events team to ask their clients who use your hotel on a regular basis, if they do this this will also help them as they will be able to make bookings direct from their website. Or the one off larger conferences etc if they are using your venue for a conference, event, wedding or meeting…if you supply them with the link and anchor text, there’s a pretty good chance that they will simply add the link which will make it easier for their guests to book.
• Ask local attractions, bars, restaurants, universities, councils, tourist offices etc to link to you.
• Finally, and this will save you lots of precious time – speak to us and we will do it for you.