Travel Marketing. Part 1. On-site optimization for a travel blog

Onsite Search engine optimization

It is one of the most important parts of your SEO campaign that needs to be done properly for any website, not just travel marketing. Unfortunately most webmasters ignore this part and spend a lot of money and time building links and still fail to rank properly.

First of all, with proper onsite SEO a local website can rank without any action, you probably won’t be able to rank directly. You will rarely be on the first page. However, it’s still better to be in the top 50 as soon as your article is indexed than to see it N/A in your favorite rank tracking tool.

Some people spend huge sums of money to buy links. There are services that define themselves in a single SEO solution, but they actually only sell links and without proper on-site optimization you will never see maximum results from it.

Articles — your travel blog Content

It’s funny to see people still using the old styles. I almost cry when I see a website with loads of articles and each article is about 500 words. Where does this magic number come from? In fact, if most of the posts on your blog are 500 words long, you’re living the footprint.

Longer articles rank better in SE and this is not a single person’s opinion. There are tons of tests and case studies by different internet marketers, and long articles always win in the end. You can take a look at the authority sites in your niche, they mostly produce top quality, unique and long articles, not staff of 300-500 words. There are crappy sites in the top ranks, but believe me, they won’t stay there for long. Normally they are sorted using the shake and burn methods, but we are looking for a long term project and stable sorting.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any short content at all. There are some topics you can’t waste words on but I think having a 3500 word article is better than a few 500 posts.

Travel Marketing — Keywords – Keyword roster

It is very sad to see that there are so many webmasters living about 7 years back. Keyword roster in 2016? No dear? It would be good to have your main keyword in the first sentence. But if it does not completely match the content, it is better to avoid.

Repeat a keyword twice in the post and use various long tail versions and don’t focus too much on the fateful part of that keyword. If you follow all the other steps in this post, you will no longer need keyword staff. Search engines are not what they used to be. Today, quality and accurate optimization mean more than ever before.

Use H1 and H2 tags

Normally having subheadings and headings within H1 and H2 tags is part of proper SEO optimization. You could have the H1 tag somewhere at the top of your article and the main title will do the job. Besides the H1 tag, you can add the H2 tag with your keyword as a subtitle somewhere in the article. Try not to look spammy and add other titles to the article without keywords, use long tail versions of keywords.

External and internal link

The main idea with on-page SEO is to help search engines identify what the content is about and help visitors find useful information.

Internal link

You create additional navigation for your visitors. The more articles they read, the longer they stay on your site. Apart from that, you are helping the Search Engine Robot to better index your site and crawl more content and show the correct post for each keyword.

External link

I think every post of your site should have at least 1 external link. You are not linking to any random site, you are choosing an authority site in your niche or linking to something like wiki pages. Linking to an authoritative website with relevant content will tell Google that your article is very similar. I don’t recommend making external links “unfollow”. It looks suspicious. The whole idea about the internet is to connect to each other without fear of losing the connection juice.

Proper URL structure

Ideally, your URL contains a keyword or your destination to post. Unless you’re just a Google-approved website, it’s better to avoid any numbers, categories, and dates in your URL. Numbers are required in your URL structure for Google news. I recommend having numbers at the end of your URL.

If your keyword is “how to train a dog”, your URL will be “yoursite.com/how-to-train-the-dog”. For the Google news approved site it would be “yoursite.com/how-to-train-the-dog-1385”.

In both cases, we used a keyword before the numbers in the URL. So Google will easily read and understand your site structure.

Responsive and fast

Website Loading Speed

I have seen many times how these important factors are overlooked by webmasters. If your website is not coded properly, your hosting is crappy, you have the wrong template, these and many other factors can slow down your website loading speed significantly. Not only is it annoying for your visitors, but it also affects your rankings, fixing your loading speed is an essential part of a travel marketing campaign.

You can use the application made by Google to control the loading speed of your website.

If Google created this tool for you that checks speed and shows you the way to improve it, it’s really important to fix it. I’m pretty sure they will reward sites by following their guidelines and rules.

mobile responsive

As part of the algorithm update since last year, Google has been watching sites with a mobile version more closely. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly version, it should be done before starting any SEO campaign.

You can open the site on your smartphone or run the Google tool to check how your site looks on mobile.

Unless you have the budget or the ability to recode your site to be mobile friendly instead of getting a plugin or mobile responsive theme before you find a suitable solution.

Titles and Meta Description

Absolutely, the Title for every post you make should contain the main keyword as exactly as possible. But it is better to make it look natural, together with H1 tag and URL structure we get a strong combination.

There is one important thing to remember about creating a headline, your headline will appear in the SERP and you want people to click. Sometimes you get more clicks in 5^pearl position than someone in the top 3 because of the attractive title.

Same goes for Meta Description, nowadays Meta tags don’t play an important role in rankings. But it can still be seen in SERP. Having a well-written Meta Description can encourage visitors to click. Think about which site would Google give a better position: for a site higher in the SERP and one that no one clicks on or that people are interested in?

Pictures and other media

Having images in your post makes the blog better and helps visitors stay longer. SEO wise images can also help you rank better. You can get visitors from Google images, especially in travel niches.

Don’t forget to add the alt tag for each image you add to the post. By default Google does not read images. Having your tag helps Google understand what the page is. Be more creative, don’t use your main keyword as an image tag. Better have a long tail version of your keywords or something that better describes an image.

I personally believe having more media helps with rankings. The longer a visitor stays on your post, the better your bounce rate will be. We should never forget that we are building a site primarily for our visitors, not for the search engine. The more interesting information, beautiful images and videos we share on the topic, the longer a visitor stays and the higher their trust in your source.

The information I shared above will be more useful for those who are new to SEO. As you can see, there is nothing really difficult. You need some time to be patient and follow step by step. Before you spend a dollar on SEO service or start link building, do your on-page SEO properly and it will help you rank better and faster.