Mr. Verma

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

Your New Customer: The Web Crawler

By Rohit Verma, Executive Director, Cornell Center for Hospitality Research

It’s no secret that the internet has radically changed the way you market your hotel, just as it has changed the way customers search for rooms. For instance, we think of the internet as a force for disintermediation, because it has largely replaced traditional travel agents, as guests use search engines and online travel agencies to buy rooms. The middle person, the intermediary, has been cut out…or has it? Perhaps we’ve just replaced one set of intermediaries—the human travel agents—with another set, namely, the OTAs and, more generally, the many search engines that reside on the internet. Needless to say, if customers simply visit your website and book a room, you really have bypassed the intermediaries. Chances are, however, that to find your site, your customer has conducted a web search for “hotels in your town,” or “hotels near the ocean,” or “hotels near the theme park.”

If your would-be customer has started her hotel search by typing in a query to Google, Bing, Kayak, or another search engine, you need to make sure that your hotel comes up near the top of the search engine’s results page. As you probably can guess, the reason you need to be near the top of the results page is that searchers rarely scroll down the page. In fact, in a study of web searchers’ eye movements, a team at Cornell University found that the “hot spot,” where users focus most heavily, is an area in the upper left corner of the page—essentially the top two or three of the unpaid, or “organic” hits. The secondary location is the top one or two of the paid listings. These locations are sometimes called the “Golden Triangle.” Users in that Cornell study spent less than six seconds looking at a particular hit before clicking on it.

Your goal as an internet marketer is to make sure that your hotel appears in the Golden Triangle, and to do that you need to make sure that your website is indexed by search engine web crawlers. For this reason, it helps to think of the web crawlers as customers, and to make sure that the hotel’s website is as hospitable as possible to them. Now, the crawlers are nothing more than computer apps that are driven by each search engine’s algorithms. But you still might want to think in terms of marketing to these “creatures,” because those algorithms—those web crawlers—are the key to a successful web distribution strategy.

Ensuring that your property lands in the Golden Triangle requires you to optimize your website for the web crawlers. A new report from the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research discusses the basic principles of website optimization, using the example of the St. James Hotel, in Red Wing, Minnesota. Built in the era when successful hotels needed to be near train stations, the 63-room St. James is a member of Historic Hotels of America but is otherwise not a member of a hotel chain. Like many other hotels of this type, the St. James no longer relies on train engines to bring in guests, but instead needs to make sure that guests will “ride in” via search engines.

The report explains the website analysis conducted by a team of Cornell University students, led by assistant professor Chris Anderson. (You can read the full report at no charge on the CHR website, “Best Practices in Search Engine Marketing and Optimization: The Case of the St. James Hotel.”) As we discuss here, the student team analyzed the St. James’s website to see how to improve its optimization, in relation to the web searches for people thinking of traveling to Red Wing or vicinity.

The team began its analysis with the principles of search engine optimization, which takes into account the search engine algorithms, as represented by search engine web crawlers. These computer apps analyze each website they find according to how relevant it is to a particular search. In large part, web page relevance depends on how coherent your site is (meaning whether the pages are well organized and contain the critical search keywords), but is also depends on the number of inbound links to your website. The more closely related those links are to your site, the greater your site’s relevance. You can arrange for reciprocal links, but that is not as powerful as inbound links themselves.

To make your site as coherent as possible, you should start with a site-map that is posted on your landing page. The search engine crawlers will recognize this map and follow its links to find and index all pages on your site. Your goal is to make sure that the crawlers index as many pages as possible, because that index is what drives the search results. In the absence of a site map, though, it’s entirely possible for the search engine crawlers to overlook web pages. Each page will have a heading, internal tags to specify photos, and text. All three of those elements should contain the relevant keywords for that page and for the site as a whole. For instance, the Cornell team determined that the most effective approach for the St. James’s web page headings and the tags for photographs was to include the hotel’s name as part of each element. Within the text itself, optimizing keywords should appear as about 3 to 7 percent of the copy. To determine appropriate keywords, Google provides a free application, Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Another free app, SEO Digger, provides an analysis of which keywords drive traffic to a particular website—whether that means your site or those of your competitors.

Another way to make sure that your web pages are coherent is to limit each page to a single topic, and not try to put too much information on a page—especially unrelated material. The Cornell team adjusted the St. James’s site to group the hotel’s promotional packages on a cluster of pages, for instance. This arrangement replaced a single page that had listed all the packages. The web crawlers’ algorithms could make little sense of a page with so much unrelated copy. As the Cornell team explained, in the original single-page package version, the only way a web user could find that page of specials using a search engine would be to type something like “winter green eagle watching Victorian getaway.” Since most queries are just a few words, it’s unlikely that anyone would ever get to that page. Instead, the hotel now has a several pages of packages, “romantic getaways,” for instance, which should be easier for the web crawlers to index.

Of course, your hotel’s web pages are not only for the web crawlers. Your guests will also be using them. For this reason, it’s important to optimize your site for human use. For the St. James, the first suggestion was to install a booking mask, which appears in the same location on every page. The booking mask allows your guests to book a room at any time without clicking away from the current page.

For both human users and the crawlers, it’s best to use an inverted pyramid scheme for your page content. Put the most relevant and unique content near the top. The principle of the Golden Triangle works on every web page; people don’t always look down and they don’t like to scroll down.

Although our focus here has been search engine optimization, that is just one aspect of a search engine marketing strategy. Your hotel may also want to bid on keywords for the sponsored links that occupy the right side of the Golden Triangle, using a pay-per-click arrangement. The St. James briefly did this, but the hotel primarily relies on optimization. Pay per click should be used tactically. It is particularly effective for promoting special offers, time-limited campaigns, rolling out a new URL, or times when you want complete control of a listing. However, the longer-term strategy should involve optimizing your site and treating the search engine web crawlers as if they were customers. By knowing what the search engine algorithms are seeking, you can ensure that your website is rated as highly relevant for specific keyword searches. That should put your hotel in the Golden Triangle of web search results.

Rohit Verma, Ph.D., is Professor of Operations Management and Executive Director for The Cornell Center for Hospitality Research. Prior to joining Cornell faculty, Mr. Verma was the George Eccles Professor of Management, David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. He has also taught MBA and executive development classes at several universities around the world including DePaul University, Chicago, IL, University of Sydney, Australia, Norwegian School of Logistics, Norway, Helsinki School of Economics, Finland, and Indian School of Business, India. Mr. Verma can be contacted at 607-255-2688 or rv54@cornell.edu Extended Bio...

HotelExecutive.com retains the copyright to the articles published in the Hotel Business Review. Articles cannot be republished without prior written consent by HotelExecutive.com.