After a few years of providing services to the hotel industry, there are a collection of issues regarding SEO I see on a regular basis that can have a major impact on your online marketing campaign.

For the most part, these issues arise when either the incorrect mindset is taken when approaching the optimization of your site (trying to trick the search engines or attempting a quick ranking strategy), or they are the result of following bad advice (by hiring the wrong SEO professional, or reading a bit of bad information on a blog somewhere).

Following is a list of those common issues, as well as some reasoning and common solutions.

1. Linking to the homepage

The situation is this. The keywords for each page have been identified, including those for the homepage. Through an internal linking effort, the home page is linked to using the desired keyword.

The idea is correct in that using the proper keywords to link to pages of your site is a common, beneficial SEO strategy, but the execution is where things drop off.

The homepage is most often going to be getting the majority of the inbound links from other websites. This happens because when people want to point visitors to your site, or when you issue a press release, the linker usually links to the homepage of their source.

Of course, there are exceptions. But that’s most often the case.

The idea is to use that “juice” your homepage is getting from links to increase flow (be it visitors or search engines) to specific pages.

For example, you would want to point visitors to your “Accommodations” page, so you would link to that page with the appropriate keyword.

This strategy goes wrong when other pages link to the homepage. In effect, you are transferring what juice a sub page has (mostly provided by the homepage itself), back to the homepage.

Solution

Simple enough. Remove internal links to the home page. We aren’t talking about navigation of footer navigation links. Just the ones within the content of your pages. That’ll ensure that the strongest page (the homepage) is providing flow to the sub-pages, and not wasting potential strength by going the other way.

2. Lack of Address on site

Often times I take on a client who’s address isn’t even on the site, or if it is, it’s on only the contact page.

The thing you have to remember about SEO is that every little bit of information you put on your site is going to be read by visitors and search engines. And when a search engine crawls a page on your site, you want to make sure they know exactly where your property is located.

It’s so important because the major search engines have local services (like Google Places) that rely on being able to associate a property with an address and your website. Being able to associate all this information on your site is a big plus.

Solution

Again an easy one. Try to get the address of your property on every page. There are detailed exceptions to this one. For example, a PMG or website built to showcase multiple properties will have to use a different strategy. But if your site caters to one property, it’s best to put your address on every page.

You can also go a step further by adding the hCard format to your address, accommodating the search and return function used by some search engines and online services.

3. Images instead of text

Another major problem I see is putting important information in the form of an image instead of “regular” text. I see this alot with the address, heading information and the phone number.

Remember, if something is written, but displayed in image form a search engine can not read it.

Solution

Where you have information that you need to show the search engines, use text instead of images. There are exceptions that I’ve come across (usually due to a desired page heading look), but those are extremely rare. Even in those cases, one should consider the use of Cufon instead of imagery.

Watch Out

One more thing to note on this one. You may get the advice that “it’s ok as long as you put the information in the alternate attribute (sometimes called the “alt tags”). While the search engines read that information and take it into consideration, it doesn’t even come close to comparing to the weight of the written word.

4. A lack of keyword focus

I could (and will) write a post explaining this topic in more detail. Suffice to say, the issue with a lack of keyword focus can be summed up like this.

For each of the pages of your site, you should be optimizing for a single set of like-keywords. For example, your “Accommodations” page will focus on “…accommodations…” terms, your location page will focus on location terms (like “things to do in…”). But if you try to include like terms on multiple pages, and optimize those pages following that trend, then you’ll cause problems when Google tries to determine which pages of which sites rank for which terms.

At best, only one of your pages will rank. At worst, you will have spread your focus too thinly and none of your pages rank for a given term.

Solution

Again, if you have someone that can make changes to your site, you may not need to hire someone else. Take a step back and consider the pages of your site, and the message you are trying to convey to your visitors. Group your like terms together and identify the pages that are focused on those.

When it comes to the details of actually optimizing, it’s probably best to find a professional. In the mean time, just make sure your site flows naturally and isn’t fighting itself for rankings.

5. Multiple Properties – One Website

This in itself is not a problem. Rather, the execution can (and most often does) hinder a site’s performance.

A lot of times I’ll see single sites with multiple addresses at the footer or on a single page to highlight each property. Basically, you’re trying to optimize and relate to multiple locations on a single page.

This is further compounded when the properties are in different cities.

Think about it like this. When optimizing and promoting a hotel’s website, a lot goes into ensuring that the content, meta tags, internal links and inbound links are focused in a manner that insinuates relevance to a search term or a few like-terms. And “orlando hotel” is a much different term than “valdosta hotel.”

This is pretty much the same idea as the “Lack of keyword focus” problem, but with the specific problem relating to location.

Solution

Every site is different, and each offers a different opportunity to focus on multiple properties. Usually, the best route is to opt for multiple websites. But, in many cases you can simply segment your site to focus on individual properties; each focusing on a single property’s accommodations and amenities as well as it’s location information.

Again, there are a ton of solutions for this issue. Talk to your SEO to see what they think.

6. Multiple Websites – Same Content

Usually, when the problem of multiple locations arises, we suggest different sites. But that can lead to a different problem itself.

Obviously, trying to create content for each hotel you manage/own can be difficult and it’s easy to fall into the idea of using the same content for each site; updating only the property name and address.

Now you run into an issue of duplicate content. Believe it or not, there are cases that make this a non-issue. But not many. Usually you will find that one of your properties seems to excel while the others lack the same progress online.

Generally speaking, duplicate content causes problems when a search engine must decide what sites to rank for a given search term. If there are multiple candidates with the same content, then it is in a search engines best interest to only rank one of them, leaving room for variety (so their users, the searchers have different sites from which to choose).

Solution

Decent copy is pretty easy to come by these days. You just have to make sure you are hiring someone with a little experience with hotels (SEO experience would be a plus).

Also, remember that each of your hotels are different; each with their prime selling points. You probably have a good enough grasp to write your own content (with editing as needed).

Every once in a while we hear

“I read that it only needs to be a difference of X%”

There aren’t any rules for this one. Instead, just try to approach each of your hotel websites differently and you’ll be fine.

7. Stuffed URLs

The situation comes from the idea that keywords in a domain name/URL will have a positive impact on rankings. While the statement itself is true, people often forget that the amount of impact is so small that it is far outweighed by the negative impact a messy domain name will have.

In fact, if you push it a little too much, your rankings can actually fall because of such tactics. But for now let’s look at a situation:

Take a look at the following URL from the “Accommodations” page of our fake hotel:

http://freshpaint-jacksonville-hotel.com/jacksonville-fl-accommodations.html

Now say that to someone. How does it sound? A little cumbersome to say, let alone trying to remember it.

Now consider the following:

http://freshpaint-inn.com/accommodations

A little easier to read/say/remember, yeah? Yeah.

It’s like this. Google knows exactly where your property is. You’ve optimized your content to show them, you’ve gotten listings on other sites to show them, you’ve placed your address on every page of your site to show them. If you try to shove your city to them in every URL you can, they may just swat it away. That, and now it’s impossible to tell someone about your site without running out of breathe.

Also consider this. Inbound links are a very important factor in your site’s rankings. You want to make your domain name and subsequent pages as easy to remember in case someone wants to link to your site for some reason. If they mis-spell it, then you don’t get the link.

Solution

Easy enough. Keep the page names simple, relevant and concise. That’s it. No need to get fancy.

For a little help on this, you can check a similar post we wrote on choosing your domain name.

8. Excessive Linking Out

This issue can usually be found on your “location” page (or one that is similar). It happens when a hotel wants to share places of interest in the area by linking to restaurants, tour guide sites, etc. Too many, and you can run into problems of sharing too much of your site’s value or strength.

There is a “no more than 100 links per page” rule that even Google uses as a guideline. But we think it best to be a bit more cautious. If you have a large number of links, but not enough to make Google drop your rankings, you are still giving away your valuable juice.

Solution

I’m not saying you shouldn’t link out to anyone. In fact, a policy like that will actually hurt you, as other sites will then refuse to link to you. Also, linking to other, relevant sites that may be of interest to your visitors will provide an added benefit to your site, and you can believe Google takes that into consideration.

Instead, try to be conservative with the sites to which you link, focusing only on the ones that will provide a real value to your visitors or add depth to your hotel’s site.

You can also institute a few “nofollow” attributes. But again, this may alienate you from the rest of the online world. Don’t want that, do we?

There You Have It

That pretty much wraps up the common obstacles I see. Generally, try to approach your website with the visitor in mind. Keep things simple and relevant and you should also reap some benefits of search rankings.

Also remember that every site is different. If you have a specific question about your site, you should ask your SEO what they think. You can also send me a quick question. I am happy to advise where I can.