Website SEO is one the most important areas that influence the popularity of the resource. To fulfill your goals as an affiliate and attract more bookings, it’s important to remember a few fundamental steps for the travel SEO optimization, which will be covered in this post.
1. Make a Research for Trendy Travel-related Keywords
Number one thing is to write the content people are searching for on the web, and place the keywords into your posts and other page elements. When search engine robots crawl through your travel resource, these keywords will help them identify the thematic quality of the content, and help to assign your website a search engine ranking, based on those keywords.
The easiest and the most effective keyword research tool to use is called Google Keyword Planner.
It is very user-friendly and allows you to see search volume and forecasts for your keywords, as well as historical data and popularity of the keyword idea during different seasons.
For the travel blog post, it’s better to use destination-specific or service-specific keywords, like “chiang mai to bangkok” or “phuket to phi phi ferry”.
Once you have selected a few keywords for the post that match your idea, try to incorporate them close to the 12Go Asia partner tools. Put them around the search form, add deep links to those keywords with a prefilled origin and destination, make it easy for your readers to find the exact route tickets they were looking for.
2. Build Links from the Authoritative Sources
Link building is a very important SEO ranking factor, which also increases your organic traffic. The more links your travel blog has from thematic and authoritative resources, the better is your performance in search engine ranking for specific keywords.
Search for the travel websites related to your niche, and approach them for an opportunity to place a dofollow link to your own resource (this is important), since a nofollow link won’t bring you any link juice for travel SEO. Not only will the incoming links help you rank higher in Google, they are also a major contribution to your online reputation. When prospecting for the links, check the website Domain Authority using tools like Moz Domain Authority, or Domain Rank by Ahrefs.
Examples of high-authority travel domains for link placement:
3. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
- Responsive web design
More than 60% of the users browse the web and make bookings from their mobile phones. With this in mind, make your website design and functionality as mobile-friendly as possible.
Choose one of the responsive WordPress or other CMS themes, which is already optimized for various devices and browsers. Or, if you know the coding, invest some of your time to adapt your design to different device types.
- Optimize mobile pages load time
Don’t make your readers wait. Use the tools like Page Speed Insights to find the weak spots on your website, and optimize them accordingly.
Make sure you also publish the mobile version of the website in the AMP format. It will supercharge your page loading times.
- Avoid Unnecessary Flash Animation
Flash animation often contains no useful text for indexing by the search engine crawlers and is useless for the travel SEO.
- Use Larger Text
Make sure all the buttons are easy to click with a thumb, and not easy to miss.
4. Work on The Internal Linking
A travel resource with a large number of pages should have a nicely-designed structure of internal linking. It is recommended that any two pages should be accessible by 3 clicks from each other, to guarantee the perfect user experience. Easy ways to achieve this:
- Put website navigation in the form of menus
- Breadcrumb the URL trails in the top of your pages
- Make sure your same-topic posts link to each other
5. Make a Continuous Competitor Research
Use online spy tools to keep track of your competitor’s SEO strategies. Investigate the following things:
- How do they rank for the same keywords you are using?
- What is their backlink profile, what authority websites have placed the links to their resource?
- What is their activity in social networks? See how many shares, likes, and comments they have, Google notices most of such activity.
Take your time to optimize your travel SEO according to those findings.
Would you like to share any ideas of how SEO could affect the travel resource, or have any questions? Let us know by writing to affiliate@12go.asia.
