Several weekends ago, for the first time, I accompanied my wife, Geraldine (aka Everywhereist, whose blog was just placed on Time.com's Top 25 Blogs of 2011 and then on Forbes' Top 10 Lifestyle Sites; woo hoo!), to Vancouver, BC for a professional conference focused on her career rather than mine (TBEX - the Travel Bloggers Exchange). Given that she's attended countless sessions on SEO, analytics, tech startups and scalable SaaS models, I figured it was the least I could do.
I only attended a few sessions, but one of the most crowded and exciting (for me) was a discussion on SEO run by Jennifer Miner of Vacation Gals (pictured above). I was amazed by the large percentage of the attendees who chose the SEO session over several others that sounded quite tempting and could only conclude that SEO was, indeed, of interest and importance to these tech-savvy travel writers.
Honestly, Jen rocked it. She didn't have slides, but she gave a genuine, heartwarming and information-packed session. For me, it was a wonderful opportunity to empathize with her audience and remember what it's like to look at the SEO world with a mixture of fear, awe and confusion, and I want to pay it forward by sharing my advice and experience with SEO, specifically geared to travel bloggers (though possibly of interest to lots of others relatively new to the field).
SEO 101 for Travel Bloggers: Topics
- Setting Up Your Site for Success
- What's a Keyword? And Why Do I Need to Worry About Them?
- I Don't Want to Write for SEO; I Want to Write Great Stories!
- What's the Deal with Links?
- Are Twitter, Facebook and All the Social Stuff Worthwhile?
Setting Up Your Site for Success
One of the first choices you have as a blogger is where to start writing. There are lots of options, but nearly everyone agrees that if you want to take your blog seriously, you should follow a process like this:
- Get your own domain name through a certified registrar. I like Dreamhost or BulkRegister personally (just $11/year for .com domains), but there's loads of good options.
- Host the site yourself. Folks like Dreamhost, Page.ly, Squarespace and Laughing Squid are worth checking out. One I've not tried, but heard amazing things about is WP Engine. They'd probably get my vote if you've got the $49/month to spend and are more serious about your blog's growth.
- Get a great designer or learn to make something beautiful yourself. Good places to find designers include Dribbble, Forrst, Sortfolio, ElegantThemes, ThemeForest and 99Designs (Note: there's some controversy in the design community about the crowdsourced model of 99 Designs, but you should make up your own mind).
- Choose a blog platform (aka the software that powers your blog). Wordpress, Posterous and Tumblr are all worth looking into - if you're a bit more adventurous, B2Evolution is interesting, too. I wouldn't choose Blogger/Blogspot for a variety of reasons too lengthy to go into here.
Alternatively, you could setup a site in 3 minutes flat on a subdomain of Wordpress (e.g. mytravelblog.wordpress.com), choose an pre-existing theme, don't customize the design/look and just start writing. But, that minimal effort also costs you many of the benefits - flexibility, the possibility to grow, optimization potential, monetization opportunities, etc - that come with a little more elbow grease.
If travel blogging is something you want to do not only as a personal endeavor, but as a professional one as well (whether you hope to eventually have ads, make money, or you simply wish to move beyond a hobby-site that is technically owned by another company), you'll need your own domain. That may sound a bit daunting, but all of the above can be done in less than a day, even if you're completely non-technical. If you're feeling overwhelmed, Page.ly might be the easiest of the bunch to handle 90%+ of this.
From here, you just need one more critical thing - analytics (aka a way to measure how much traffic you get, where it comes from and what people do on your site). Fortunately, there's an easy answer: Google Analytics. It's free, it's simple to install (one-click or plugin with most of the blog platforms I noted above) and it works wonderfully.
If you're looking to get much more serious about tracking + improving everything around your site, read this post - Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics + Marketing.
What's a Keyword? And Why Do I Need to Worry About Them?
When people go to Google, they search for things. As of June 2011, more than 3 billion searches happen every day on Google (and lots happen on Bing + Yahoo!, too). A good portion of those people are searching for information about travel, and if you build your site right and do a bit of what SEOs call "keyword research" (figuring out what people search for and how) along with "keyword targeting" (using those words and phrases in smart places on your pages), you can earn positions in the search rankings and get lots of high quality, valuable visitors coming to your site.
For example, in the search I've done above, you can see that Geraldine's post - The Shops of Covent Garden, London - is ranking in position 5. On average, about 5% of searchers for that query will likely click on her page. If there's 100 searches for that phrase each month, Geraldine will get 5 extra visits to her site every month. If she wrote 5 blog posts every day that performed like this, in a few years she'd have some pretty amazing traffic. And, of course, if she got to ranking #1 or #2 for some of those keywords or ranked #5 for things people search for 1,000 times each month, that could be even more exciting.
In the SEO world, we call the search words and phrases that people type into Google and Bing "keywords," and we do our best to understand what people are searching for, build great pages that would make those searchers happy and try to rank high in the results to earn as many of those clicks as possible. The first part of that - understanding what people are searching for, is the critical part of "keyword research." Here's how you do that:
(sadly, this isn't the best example, because there's so few searches for the phrase, but you get the idea)
The screenshot above comes from Google's AdWords Keyword Tool. It's the best known keyword research tool on the web, and is likely the only one you'll need as a travel blogger unless you become very advanced at SEO. There's a few important things to understand about the tool, so I've made some notations with red numbers:
- This is where you enter the words to describe what you're writing about. You can use one or two words or try to be more specific. The words Google suggests will be based on what you enter here.
- For travel bloggers, I generally would recommend that you use the language you'll be writing in, but don't exclude any countries. Travelers search from all over the world! Don't just limit your keyword research to the United States.
- This is very important, even if it seems a bit complex at first. The "match type" refers to the suggestions Google will give you, and if you're not careful, this can really throw you for a loop. Basically, "exact match" is what you want most of the time (but it's not checked by default, so be sure to do that!). Exact match means that Google will only show you the keywords and search volume for that particular keyword phrase. If you use broad match or phrase match, you'll often see a much higher volume of searches, but it doesn't mean that this quantity of people actually performed that search. You can learn more about match types here.
- Here's your data! Looking at these keyword "suggestions" you can see what Google knows about that people search for around these keywords and how many people are performing those searches globally. The "competition" column doesn't matter too much for you here - it refers to the number of advertisers who bid against a keyword and how much they pay, but since you'll be targeting the "free" or "organic" searches, you don't need to worry about these.
- Google will also give some keyword "ideas" that relate to your search terms, but don't match them exactly. This can be handy for finding opportunities of things to write about or what to title your posts.
When it comes to the AdWords Keyword Tool, I recommend you play around with it - experiment, have fun, see what different clicks and buttons do, the works! Just remember - the numbers Google reports are, relatively speaking, accurate, but not precise. So, if Google says that keyword 1 has 100 searches/month and keyword 2 has 200/month, that doesn't mean that precisely that many people search each month for those words. But, it does probably mean that keyword 2 gets about twice as many searches as keyword 1.
OK. You know how to see what people search for and now you're ready to start writing some posts to earn some of those rankings and get some visitors. But, what do you actually do with those keywords?
Use them smartly in your blog posts!
I've got an entire post dedicated to best practices for using keywords in your pages, but the simple rule of thumb is:
- Make the important keyword phrase the first words in your blog post's title (if possible)
- Use other relevant, important and/or identifying keywords in the title (for example, Geraldine's post on this topic was wisely labeled, The Shops of Covent Garden, London - both to indicate its location and because people might search for "covent garden shops, london")
- Make the headline of the piece/page match the title (searchers don't like to click on one thing and get another!)
- Use the keyword phrase and other important keywords in the content of the post - don't stuff or spam them in unnaturally, just try to include them where relevant and appropriate
- If you can, make your URLs (this thing - https://www.everywhereist.com/the-shops-of-covent-garden-london/) use the keyword as well. This is pretty easy to do in Wordpress and most other blog platforms
That's it! That's really all you need to do on the keyword front. If you need it in once sentence, it's this:
Find the words and phrases people use to search and include them prominently in the blog posts you write.
If you've done that, you're well on your way to good SEO.
I Don't Want to Write for SEO; I Want to Write Great Stories!
You should! SEO, done right, should never interfere with great writing. In fact, hopefully, it can help, by giving you a spark of imagination or inspiration about what readers want, how they think and where the core of their quest to discover new things begins. I've heard some SEOs and even some travel bloggers tell others that writing for SEO is different than writing for an audience. They'll say you need to stuff keywords in and write "on-topic" rather than rambling off on tangents and telling funny anecdotes.
I disagree. Great writing and great content of all kinds is at the heart of great SEO.
I'll illustrate:
The same things that make for "great" writing and a "great" blog are the things that will propel you to success in the SEO world. Perhaps the only ingredients you wouldn't normally be aware of as a fantastic writer are the ideas of keyword research and an accessible site (which we covered above).
That said, there are a couple issues to think about when it comes to travel writing, blogs and SEO. The first is how to make SEO work with narrative vs. non-narrative writing. For this, I'll use Geraldine's blog again as a good example, since her work is primarily narrative - it tells a story - rather than non-narrative like a travel guide to a specific location.
The post (An SF Experiment: Leaving My Bag Behind) isn't particularly good for SEO. And THAT'S OK! Not every post needs to be carefully targeted toward perfect keywords in an effort to drive additional traffic. If you can do it with 2/3 or even 1/3 blog posts, that's terrific. And it's pretty much how Geraldine does it, too (though I only recently convinced her to even try keyword research at all).
This post (New York's Eataly Market, Reviewed), although it does technically review the market, goes off on long tangents, includes humorous anecdotes and generally has a fun time with the subject matter. It's not a list of recommendations or an expository, tightly written review with facts and data - it's a narrative review. And yet...
You most certainly CAN use a narrative voice and still rank quite well, even for fairly competitive searches.
The second issue is a thorny one - how to deal with "Evergreen" vs. "Temporal" content. Evergreen content is stuff that doesn't go stale (or at least, that you don't want to go stale). It's intended to be relevant for years, maybe even decades. Think Hemingway on Spain or Bill Bryson on Britain. Temporal content, on the other hand, is best when it's just released and gets less useful over time (e.g. most technology news reporting is this way).
When you're blogging, posts naturally have a date/timestamp of when they're released. After that, they begin to go stale and readers looking at a post on a particular restaurant, tourist location or even a city may wonder how much is still relevant 6 months or years later. This is a good reason to consider, potentially, creating "pages" or "articles" or "guides" that live on as evergreen content and sit separately from your main blog. For example, Karen Brown's Italy Travel Guide is an evergreen resource while the Vacation Gals' Best Romantic Honeymoon Destinations page is temporal... But, it could be evergreen if they changed it from a blog post to a standalone page and updated it annually (and then changed the title to include the year, e.g. Best Romantic Honeymoon Destinations 2011).
What's the Deal with Links?
Search engines don't just rely on the text content and keywords you put in your pages (although, back in the mid-late 1990's they used to). They also care about what other people say about you. Hence, they look at all the sites and pages on the Internet to see who might be linking to your site and your individual posts. A blog with lots of other sites linking to it is likely to be considered more important and more worthy of ranking well than a blog few others have recognized and referenced. For this reason, earning good links from other good sites is a critical part of SEO - but, of course, it's not just good for SEO, it's great for your traffic, growing your brand and building awareness amongst non-readers.
There's a few key concepts to understand about links that I'll walk through.
The first of these is something called "anchor text." It refers to the words/phrases that web pages use when linking to one another. For example, if I link to this photo of a sunset with an ant holding a twig, I've just helped to tell Google + Bing what the photo on that page is about. It's now more likely that if someone searches for "sunset with ant and twig," that page might appear in the results. It would, of course, be much better if the page also had text on it that the engines could read, but that's not the point here. I'm merely trying to illustrate that how we link - in particular, the words we use in links, matters for search engines, so we should think carefully about them.
The big takeaway for most travel bloggers is that getting links that include words describing your post are often better than links that just have your blog's name or say something generic like "click here."
There's also an issue that came up quite a lot at the TBEX conference around "homepage vs. deep links." I think there might be some misconceptions here, so I'll try to illustrate what this means:
The link to the "home page" is certainly a good thing, and travel bloggers shouldn't be worried if their homepages earn lots of links. Often, the vast majority of a site's links will point to this page, and that's fine. However, it can be quite valuable to earn "deep links" like the one to the "Driving in Manhattan" post above. These links help pass good signals about individual pages, as well as the site, to the search engines. One isn't necessarily "better" though deep links are often less common and therefore more prized. But, it really depends on the quality of the linking source (is it a good site?) and whether it's doing other good things like sending traffic and good anchor text.
Finally, let's talk about "Followed" vs. "Nofollowed" links:
The basic concept is that some links exist on the web that search engines don't want to trust (especially spam in comments, forums or other open areas of websites). There's a special tag called rel="nofollow" that can be applied to the HTML code of any link to make search engines ignore it for ranking purposes. I highly recommend you use this in your blog's comments (or they can be overrun by spam that might even make Google/Bing frown on you). By default, most blogging platforms already do.
Oh! And last, but not least, if you're looking for some great ideas around building links, check out the link building category on this blog, and read the Beginner's Guide to SEO section on Link Building as well as Yoast.com's Link Building 101.
Are Twitter, Facebook and All the Social Stuff Worthwhile?
Almost certainly and almost always, the answer is "yes!" Classifying exactly how and precisely how much is a more challenging question, but search engines like Google and Bing do access some forms of data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google's new Google+ (to be honest, Google doesn't use too much directly from Facebook and Bing probably isn't using much from Google+, but you get the idea).
Sharing links on Twitter may have a direct positive impact, and an indirect one, too.
But, even if/when the search engines aren't directly taking signals from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. these networks are helping to spread the word about your site and your content. Using them to promote your posts in organic, natural, useful ways is a great thing, and you should almost certainly invest some effort trying out these networks and discovering whether your blog is a fit. Twitter in particular has been a huge driver of traffic for Geraldine's blog, so I suspect there's value there for many other travel blogs. Facebook has been good, too. LinkedIn, less so, but this is likely because it's geared toward a business + career focused audience. If your site caters to business travelers, you could well have a great match there.
I know I'm biased due to my marriage, but I also love to travel, meet new people and read great expository and narrative writing (both of which I'm terrible at). I hope this post can help some aspiring travel bloggers to grow their audiences and bring more visits to the amazing world of travel writing.
If you have questions, feel free to post them in the comments below and I'll do my best to help out!
The one issue you didn't address is competition. Travel is different from many niches in the amount of competition from very large players you have to deal with. There is a LOT of competition in the travel space. Trip Advisor, Expedia, Yelp, Lonely Planet, Fodors, Frommers, etc. These are huge brands which tons of authority that tend to dominate most of the lucritave keywords. Trip Advisor has a full time SEO team and Google seems to love traditional publishers. It is extremely difficult to do well on any good keyword unless you are wiling put in time doing link building, which really isn't possible or realistic for any given blog post. This was the entire crux of my argument from the article I wrote last November in ProBlogger which you wrote an article in response to. I'm not really disagreeing with anything you are saying, but after several years in the trenches doing travel blogging I've found the best bang for my buck to be with social media, not SEO. The primary reason has to do with the enormous amount of money thrown at SEO in the travel sector. I just can't compete with that. After 5 years of blogging and over 2,000 posts, the vast majority of my search engine traffic still comes from people looking for my name or the name of my website. I personally have a lot of authority when it comes to travel. I've been to 100 countries and have spent 4.5 years of my life on the road. However, I can never have more authority than Trip Advisor, Lonely Planet or any large player in the eyes of Google's algorithim. I can't even come close. I can only have that in the eyes of actual people.
Great points.You got your point across very well!
I think those are totally fair and reasonable points. Social is certainly going to be a great temporal strategy to get traffic to posts, particularly after they're published, and for Everywhereist, it outranks Google as a traffic provider, too.
That said, this post is designed mostly to help answer questions around search + SEO. And, I do think there's opportunity, even for small/niche travel sites to succeed, but the keyword targets will likely be smaller, more focused on "the long tail" and probably not as directly revenue-generating as those targeted by the big guys.
I would also note that the last 12 months suggest a big shift and biasing of Google and Bing to use Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Quora/Google+/etc. as signals and influencers. We might indeed see that the success you achieve with social closely mirrors the success you can get with search/SEO in the not-too-distant future.
Your point about competition is certainly true Everywhere trips, and in terms of SEO (from the few things i know) obviously the big fish are unbeatable. Even so, i noticed that many people interested in travels are starting to "skip" these big names, even if they are number one on google search. What a quality travel blog offer is a different type of "service". Geraldine's example is perfect. She has not a website based on "impersonal content", on the contrary, her opinions are very personal and many people prefer to listen to a more "human" voice than a sterile sequence of hotels, places, facts and reviews. I'm not saying they are two different markets, but they target different needs. So in terms of SEO it's well worth spending time on optimize the articles (where possible) even if you'll never end up being number one, or 2/3 on first page....there will always be people skipping these big names, so the first "blog" that is smart enough to provide good quality content and good SEO, is the one that will catch the attention of this "niche inside the niche" travel.
A great number of my clients are in the travel market and I work every day with travel bloggers. i have to say, apart form tech, marketing and seo bloggers, travel ones are most SEO savy. I have to admit, they tend to make me run for my money. they know how to spot promotions, and they won't accept anything less then quality articles that need to be tweeted, shared, liked etc...
Since online travel community is rather big, it is just normal to expect that any decent travel blogger is well learned in SEO...
Wait, Rand, you know SEO? WHAT?
Okay, stupid jokes aside, this was a decent run down. I think you hit on just about 95% of the general questions that come up with clients as they are introduced to the industry.
Yes as "practical SEO" says the travel indutry is such that they need to be SEO savvy. Website and online booking is the medium that users take up the service. I guess positioning of the service plays an important role for travel companies to avoid "SEO Competition"
'SEO, done right, should never interfere with great writing.'-This is correct if you write in English only. Writing SEO article in language that has cases, genders, declinations and conugations (like most languages) is more difficult and sometimes it's the meaning and quality of articles that suffers.
That certainly was a 101 - detailed but not too scary! A great resource for anyone new to SEO.
very nice and informative summary for new site owners. Please note the correct link to b2evolution is https://b2evolution.net/ and not .COM as linked above
Thanks for pointing that out, we've updated the post.
Great post Rand, I'll be sure to share this one with others. Congrats on the feature in Time's Top 25 Blogs of 2011. Very well deserved :)
Thanks for detailing about seo, i have used all the tool of seomoz and all tools are very useful for my logo design website. thanks for sharing.
Wow, this is gold! Wish this article was around 2 years ago when I started my travel blog...
is https://varyhost.com a reliable reseller host?
whats seo?
I really enjoy reading travel bloggers. I get jealous most of the time because they travel a lot but they always write the best stories and share the best experiences. Congratulations to Geraldine!
very nice, I Like It
great post!! but I'm disappoint with nofollow tag. I tried to do a linkbuilding campaing with nofollow comments and I think Google doesn't ignore them...
Lovely Post, encouraging people to write about their travels is a great way to find out whats out there. We generally deal with South East Asia bloggers and find that not enough of them work off Wordpress, I would suggest WP as the platform of Choice and writing in narrative and creative way to keep people interested, people are generally interested in cheap things to do or food and adventure. Most South East Asia blogs fail to deliver on this. Great piece =)
Thanks for the detailed info. on blogging & SEO. I come from old school journalism, but am looking forward to entering this brave new world! Your tips give a nice overview on how to jump in the waters. Thanks again for posting!
Nice post Rand, and just now i arreadly know how to write a text quicky.
i have been reading up on SEO for days now and have only finally understood it in the half hour i read this post. thank you for dumbing it down for us "dummies".
This is awesome. I'm still very new to the whole concept of SEO.
I thought I'd have a hard time understanding but in all honesty, i didn't. Now, it's actually a whole lot easier than I'd first expected! :)
Hi,
I think these tips will really work. I have started my travel website just 1 month ago and i will definetly try these things on my website: www.mytguide.com
Such a useful post to established and novice bloggers, congrats on yours and your wife's success, I've only just discovered her blog thanks to ProBlogger and it's incredibly witty-love her voice!
As kid, the tech world scared the hell out of me. I was a flip phone loser for years and only just recently converted to an smarter device and unlocking the potential these devices can do. But, I'm 27 and it still scares the hell out me. I'm diving into the world of Travel Blogging and other domain based businesses and it is a relief to have resources like this one to guide me toward the right steps and making my work process that much more efficient.
I'll be saving this post and aim to use it at a future date. Thanks for the insight and the services, much appreciated.
Really good useful info. Thanks Rand!
Fingers crossed it will help with the creation of my own site which I am currently building
Thank-you and keep up the good work. I look forward to reading more.
A nice concise view of the SEO world. Can anyone talk me through keywords for posts vs. keywords for the entire site itself? As with many travel blogs, my site has a raft of destinations and topics and therefore keywords work well for posts but not so much for the whole site. Unless you opt for something generic like 'world travel on a budget' or 'backpacking the world' which is still going to relate to a huge number of sites. Is it best to focus on post SEO and less so about whole site? As per the theory around deep links? Have been using Yoast for Wordpress and this seems to encourage me to do a lot of what is outlined above - a few more points for Yoast.
SEO is such a moving beast, hard to know where it will go next!
A fine post with lots of detailed information for travel bloggers SEO. I have found wuite a few bloggers via google image search so I definitely think this is important!
Hi, author, thank you for sharing this useful post. very informative..
Sorry, pease check your description for this post. there is a spelling mistake instry instead of (industry) i saw in Google SERP. plz check and correct .
This was an enjoyable read that didn't fry my brain like some articles about SEO. Very informative and I completely concur that SEO does not mean you can't write well. My process is simple. I choose the topic. Then I choose the keyword. Then I outline the topic, write it, and finally go back to check the SEO worthiness. If I need to add in the keyword to make it work I can do it naturally without upsetting the flow or direction of the writing : )
Damm i need to be following @randfish closer to know when he comes to my town so i can sneak out from behind him and slap him around with a large trout. errrr sorry irc jokes.
I really enjoyed this article. It really isn't just for travel bloggers, is it? If the SEOMoz blog was a forum I'd be making a vote to "sticky" this post. I think it's an incredibly valuable resource for anyone who is just starting to blog no matter what niche they are in!
Love this. I have travel blogger friends who I do the occasional SEO favor for. From now on I'll just point them in this direction. Great summary as always.
Facebook like definitely help with SERP ... the evidence is , my site.. which get a lot less tweet compared to Facebook Like / Share
That's an extremely easy to understand how-to post for thoses who "look at the SEO world with a mixture of fear, awe and confusion". Shared and bookmarked!
In my recent post on similiar subject - https://www.marketingsutra.com/blog/search-engine-optimization-for-blogs/ - I mentioned that newbies often create too much categories and then stuff their posts with huge amount of tags. Avoid. Also I'd suggest to establish a cohesive editorial policy / blogging calendar.
Happy Blogging!
Alex Grechanowski
Marketing Sutra
Interesting post, can see bloggers will love it, I have done a bit of work in the travel niche for large scale clients I do agree people are quite switched on in the area, but once you start dealing with authority websites you can do well in the niche.
I agree with the points about looking for areas in the market where you can still gain traction for smaller keywords, some of the bigger keywords you see alot of competition =(
Would be a great life to travel the world blogging, I met a blogger for lonlry planet the other night, seemed to be loving it.
If you write it, they will come. Completely agree that "SEO, done right, should never interfere with great writing."
This goes back to what was said previously that an SEO is now more of a "Web Strategist" --a person who has to figure out who would be interested in this content, how to build a relationship so that the person will link to it (relationship needs to be in place prior to the story being published), and how to drive traffic to the story (creating buzz through social media). The more worthy the content--quality content that's engaging--the more likely that traffic will come.
If SEOs think what story is best to write (and when is a good time to publish the story), the traffic will be there.
@StephStMartin
Thanks for a great tutorial and a "back to basics" for those with SEO experience. Most of my connections are to B&B's (small lodging properties) so there is a very close relationship to the solo travel blogger - and many are still getting started.
A great post for startups.
But also a reminder for all of us not to focus too much on SEO - this means to stay "natural" in writing and in style, I guess only those can succeed.And a reminder not to neglect "Social Stuff".
Facebook like definitely help with SERP ... the evidence is , my site.. which get a lot less tweet compared to Facebook Like / Share (because indonesian use facebook more then twitter)... and it does help a lot :)
Reading on this post makes me fell vindicated on the 6 months SEO work that I've done with my Island Vacations site. I launched my first blog post on December 28, 2010 on a tight SEO format. Nevertheless, I've had stumbled upon blogs who exhorted fellow bloggers to "write for humans, not for the engines." Hence, in my succeeding blogs, I went light with my SEO especially the use of keywords for fear that it might "annoy" the readers as other bloggers had pointed out. Nevertheless, after quite sometime, I decided to go back into my strict SEO format in my blog posts. My SEO work had really bore fruit as I gained my PR 3 without passing through PR 1 and 2 last June 28, 2011. Truly, SEO is a very exciting and challenging endeavor in travel blogging.
[link removed]
Congrats! However, I'd be quite careful not to ascribe any degree of success vs. failure based on your PageRank score in the toolbar. Instead, I'd use the number of visits that search engines are sending to your site as a baseline for performance.
Where did you get the data for the SERP results and clickthrough data: https://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/shops-of-covent-garden-ctr.gif
Believe I used the Chitika data for that - https://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-organic-seo-click-through-rates/
Whew - I cannot tell you any more, I have already told you more than I heard... That was incredible - I'm going to print it out and keep handy to continune to digest it. It think it proves the case, if you want something bad enough, with the right guidance, anyone can get to page 1 for their market or industry. Way to go Randfish. Maybe I should expand into other fields and ventures...
Rand great post not only for travel bloggers, but for all bloggers. I will use it in the future to help clients understand the importance of blogging. Thanks.
Nice post Rand,
I shared with not professional bloggers friends and try to convince my wife to read it too ;).
Just a couple of questions, that I ask you as those friends do them to me:
Ah.. and my question: how much time Everywhereist is now spending on her Analytics after the two great nominations?
Not too much - she's actually spending a lot more time worrying about the quality of her writing now that so many folks are reading the blog each day.
Re: link buying and selling - https://www.seomoz.org/blog/our-stance-on-paid-links-link-ads.
Re: guest blogging - I'm all in favor of it, but you do want to be choosy (both about who blogs on your site and where you spend your time contributing). Good post here - https://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-tips-for-blogger-outreach
Ahhh... the joys of being a travel blogger.
Rand, first of all, I love your wife and her stuff (not inappropriately). Follow her on Twitter and read her blog and as a fellow travel blogger, she's aces.
As to you, I had heard you were a rocket scientist (and I have browsed this blog a bit, but need to spend a lot more time here, frankly), but this is the best short summary of SEO for travel blogging I have ever heard. I will look forward to linking to it, with appropriate anchor text, the next time I write a little bit about the mechanics of travel blogging. Really, really excellent content from the beginning steps on up. Thanks.
This a a fantastic post Rand, my favorite part was the way you explained linking to the home page vs a sub directory. It would of been really nice to get some examples as I used to look after travel affiliate programs and finding new travel affiliates was always really hard. I have to agree with @everywhereTrip that finding realistic opportunities that major travel publishers aren't throwing lots of money at would be a good addition to the post, as well as a short introduction about how the average blogger starting out can realistically acquire links for their new blog? Overall a great blog post and given how you describe such technical concepts, its good to see this to revisit explaining the basics and sharing that the concept of SEO doesn't have to be overly complex for the average joe! What's your thoughts Rand on how the beginner travel blogger should go about starting monetizing their blog without the detriment to their rankings given the search engines treatment towards some affiliate websites?
On monetization, I admittedly don't have much expertise. My best advice is to find others who've been successful in that arena and get in touch. It also helps to have a focused, niche audience, as advertisers and sponsors will be more inclined to pay higher premiums even for lower trafficked sites when the audience is a perfect match.
We've been working away to monetise Italyum.com, an Italian Recipe site for about 7 years. Based on that experience, I can say that the perennial cash cow is Adsense. Needs a lot of experimentation to get the best results, but worth it. Play around with locations and types of ads, contrasting vs complementary colours. There is an increasing amount of interest from agencies wanting to place spot ads and articles. Whilst I'm less keen on publishing other people's articles on this site (aside from interesting recipes), it's quite lucrative.
Affiliate programs, (even one with Amazon) proved less successful, despite a lot of experimentation. We did run an interesting experiment using some server foo that generated a fair bit of income from Amazon, but it did not go down well with them. We've also tried smaller companies, and have done some contra-deals, mostly for fun. (Delicious Italian ingredients in exchange for ad space.) All in all though, Affiliate programmes we've found disappointing.
We are now re-investing our Adsense income into developing apps which seems a natural extension. We have an iPhone / iPad app out there, and are developing one for Android right now.
All this activity turns around 1500 visitors a day into around £10,000 a year. Not earth shattering, more a nice back burner income, from a nice back burner project.
Rand, it's a unique skill set you have where you can write well on very complicated SEO concepts | techniques and still write a very basic, easy-to-understand post like this, aimed at readers outside the SEO community.
Many people get caught up in our own industry jargon and lingo. It's easy to do.
Well done.
And congrats to your wife, Geraldine.
Your post very clearly articulates the importance of not just writing great content, but building a brand and a community around that content. In the post-Panda world, it's apparent this is now mandatory, rather than just a 'best practice'.
From a user's perspective, this is great too, becuase it will likely weed out tons of lower-end content sites in the search results.. and push those with human's approval up even further :-)
Thanks for sharing Rand, and contratualtions to @Everywhereist!
Not exactly advanced SEO, but actually very good for a lot of the newer crowd here to think about how to do efficient blogging for SEO while also keeping things fun for them. Also a nice refresher course on the fundamentals of SEO.
Gives me a few ideas to experiment with on a personal blog of my own. :)
Congrats to your wife for running such a successful operation.
Great great great content! Helped me to get the big picture.
I really enjoy reading travel bloggers.
It's a great joy for me that i can also write out my testimony for others to read and be happy with me.
Most people do contact AZIBA for different kinds of problem but i have a specific reason of contacting him for help,i am a married woman of forty five(45) years of age and since Five(5)years now i have been single my husband left me because i was unable to get him a child, on one faithful day i was in the office so a friend came to me and we were discussing some issues related to my problem and she made mention of a name PRIEST AZIBA and she said something that drew my attention to the name on how the PRIEST helped a lady of 55years in GERMANY in getting a child and she said the man can also help me. i doubted it but she forced me in giving it a try which i did, i contacted AZIBA and lay my complains about my husband and why he left me, but i still don't believe he can help me because i thought all hope was lost. believe me or not after taking orders from the priest and he assured me that in the next(5)days my husband will come back asking for forgiveness.
my brother's and sister's it's a miracle,words are not enough to express my happiness, there is nothing GOD can't do he has used this man to give me the happiness of my life, as am typing my husband is right behind me and am six(6) months pregnant. most people may not believe in my testimony but i would advice you give a try just as i did. contact him on his Mail:[email protected]
Webs: https://PRIESTAZIBASOLUTIONCENTER.WEB.COM
Very detailed post with helpful tips. Thanks for sharing!
This is a great post and hopefully will be found by others than those great travel bloggers who are brilliant for world tourism because they tell it like it is, getting a true reflection of what they have seen and whether its worthwhile following in their footsteps.
I commend Rand on this post as it sounds like he is in relaxed mode and been able to dedicate his very busy time by getting the chance to just for a moment sit back and observe the world by looking through Geraldine's window.
The approach he wants this community to consider when blogging using the step by step process above is a great piece of advice, not just for this community but for the many others who have the challenge of actually constructing content for any type of web page.
In my opinion I think having good writing skills is the most important ingredient that many individuals engaged in writing for the web overlook. It is very important to try and write from the heart about what you see, or trying to get a constructive opinion over, or if in the world of ecommerce what you offer.
Its that challenge for many to then create that all important page to make it interesting and have people take some form of action from it.
Time for me to go and push today's post around the globe, as this article will undoubtedly help many achieve - onlinexcellence.