We provide website and e-commerce solutions to over 2,000 hotels in 26 countries, and we excel in search engine optimization (SEO) for these websites. And when asked about digital marketing, their common sense revolves around choosing the right keywords, creating user-friendly content, and optimizing on-site (also known as on-page) SEO.
With over a billion websites vying for visibility on top keywords, a less-discussed option is to help search engines crawl, index, and rank your website more quickly and efficiently. There is an important element: technical SEO. Having a great hotel website but poor technical SEO is like building a beautiful house on a weak foundation.
Here are seven things to consider to get your website's technical SEO right.
fast loading time
The loading speed of your hotel website is an important technical SEO metric. We found that faster web page loading not only improves the user experience, but also helps increase direct bookings. Factors that improve loading times include dynamic compression of images and videos, hosting of his web assets around the world, strong server capacity, etc. Conversely, if your site loads slowly, your bounce rate will be high and users will leave your website without doing anything. please think about it. Why wouldn't Google crawler want faster crawl response times too?
secure website
Security plays an important role in technical SEO, and Google emphasizes the importance of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). This is a protocol that allows data to be authenticated, encrypted, and decrypted between a web server and a browser. Secure websites are represented by Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) rather than HTTP. A secure website increases your credibility, maintains a professional web presence, and positively impacts your SEO.
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Optimized XML and HTML sitemap
A sitemap is like a blueprint for your website that allows search engine crawlers to navigate through different pages efficiently. A well-designed HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemap can be very helpful in your SEO strategy. Without going into details, HTML is the language in which websites communicate with users, and XML is the language in which websites communicate with servers.
SEO friendly URL structure
Often overlooked, the URL acts as the address of your website and has a huge impact on its traffic. Google and other search engines scrutinize URL structures to provide more relevant results. Creating SEO-friendly URLs is critical to increasing your website's online visibility.
mobile friendly website
To rank high in search engine results, you need to optimize your website across all devices: desktop, mobile, and tablet. Online research shows that almost 60% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. That's why a few years ago, Google released a mobile-first index update for all new websites. This means that content is now ranked and indexed according to the mobile version of the content, rather than the desktop version of the content. A mobile-friendly website increases your hotel's online presence, provides a better browsing experience, and makes it easier to share links.
Schema markup
Schema is metadata that can be used by search engines. Simply put, it is the code that allows search engines to find and deliver relevant and useful content to users. Once incorporated into a web page, it creates an enhanced description called a rich snippet that appears in search results. Technically, schema markup provides more information during crawling. Although there is no evidence that they directly impact organic search rankings, rich snippets can help your web page appear more prominently on search engine results pages (SERPs). Online research has proven that this increased visibility increases click-through rates.
robot.txt
This is a file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs are accessible and which are not. Also refer to the site map. Robots.txt is not a tool to keep your web pages away from Google. If you want your pages to be excluded from Google, you'll need to either block indexing without indexing or password-protect your pages. Basically, Google loves a good robots.txt file.
At Simprotel, we understand that driving bookings through your hotel website requires thousands of right actions. It's like dying with a thousand pieces of paper. Therefore, different elements are required to have a synergistic effect.
Author Tarun Goyal is the founder and CEO of Simprotel.
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