In my blog among other things I do reviews of websites and pass my comments and ideas for improvement. I did review of Expedia website in article about best online flight booking website. It was about 2 weeks ago. Now (Aug-16) it’s on #4 place on Google for “best flight booking” search, #1 for “best booking engine” and in absolute top for many other related searches. Don’t be surprised when you see other results on Google at this very moment - Internet is ever changing.
Don't be surprised to see references to WordPress blog in here. I run my blog in both - Blogger and WordPress at the same time. It gives me opportunity to test both interfaces and work on search engine optimization. See my post on this subject - with comparison of both sites.
As you may notice for many searches related to flight booking my pages appear very high. I have beaten sites like Expedia or Travelocity. Many companies pay big amount of money for search engine optimization to get to top spots or by buying these keywords. How could it possibly happen that I’m on top?
This post is not meant to be exhaustive explanation of Google PageRank mechanism and search engine optimization (SEO) - for this you can turn to some very good sources (I recommend TopRank blog or Pronet advertising primer).
Here is how it worked for me and advices on what Google checks:
- Web domain of my blog - must be good
My blog is within WordPress domain (my WordPress blog got higher Google ranking than Blogger one). The WordPress.com domain is well known for Google (many sites links here) and Google ranks it very high. The fact that I’m within this domain helps a lot already. Companies and people with their own domain need to work to gain high ranking for them. - Title of my page - must have your keywords
My title says “the right web - webdesign and webmarketing » best online flight booking website?“. Such long title is not best but does the job here. However the most important is that it has all relevant keyword that I want Google to rank - “best”, “online”, “flight”, “booking”, “website”. Don’t overdo this - 4-6 keywords is fine 10+ might be not…
Page heading - must have your keywordsYour keywords should be somewhere on the page in big letters - it should be header of the page. In most of blog templates - title is displayed in big letters. And that’s how it should be. - Content of the page - must be relevant
First of all - it must be relevant to the title and topic (here - to online flight booking). You must convince Google that your page is really about the keywords that you had in your title. Google checks this by looking whether these keywords appear on the page - not too often, not too rare. Best advice is - write good article on the topic and use keyword whenever it makes sense. No tricks here is good trick. Tip - If you want to check how Google sees your page in relationship to your keywords - check out the Google “copy of the page“. All your keywords are nicely highlighted there. - Content of the page - make it short
Keep your content short - this way it’s perceived as more relevant. Think about it - text of the article appears also on main page of my blog, yet the homepage doesn’t appear anywhere in the results of search for “flight booking”. Simply - it’s there among many other articles about many topics and it’s not seen by Google as that relevant. Thanks God we have permalink and each post in blog has it’s own page. - Links to the page - must have keywords in link name
This is one of the most important elements. There must be links to your page from other pages. And it’s not only about quantity (number of these links) - it’s even more important to have quality there. Quality means - these links must contain your keywords in the text. See two examples:
* Check out article about best online flight booking website
* For information on online flight booking - check this article
The first one rocks. The second is not really good. The second suggest that your article might be related to following keywords - “check” and “article” which confuses Google. - Links to the page - in blogs
If you look at my blog you will see that each title of the page is link to the page with post. If I choose title well and have keywords there that I immediately have keywords also within link. Great! Make sure that you use template that uses titles of posts as links - not your name, not the date, not the word “permalink” - THE TITLE!!! Choose the template that has this or update your template. - Url address of your page - must have keywords
The permalink to my post on best onlin flight booking website looks like this:
http://rightweb.wordpress.com/2006/08/07/best-online-flight-booking-engine/
You may notice that all the keywords are there in the url. Most of blogging sites automatically do it - just make sure that your title has them. If you do the url manually - make sure that it has all the right keywords. - Metatags
Well - I know they are checked by Google but they don’t matter that much. Actually - I haven’t inserted them at all. Google checks first and foremost on what is visible to people. And that’s how it should be.
Most important
In the game of search engine optimization most important is to choose right keywords and then to stick to them - in title, copy, heading, url, links, everywhere. One extra tip - when you test various ideas of optimization you often think - has Google refreshed your page? Are they already taken into consideration. Well - it’s no brainer - just check Google “copy of your page“.
I’m still playing with search engine optimization for Google of the page and links around it - I hope it will results in even better placement. I’ll share the results of my tests as we go forward.
You may ask about quality of this traffic… Is it worth to optimize to get traffic that might be worthless. Well - indeed the traffic is coming from keywords not related to webdesign and webmarketing. However all titles of my pages state clearly what this blog is about so I hope interested people come.
All your comments welcome! I hope my advices will help you improve your results. Share your ideas as well!
