At our company, we provide website and e-commerce solutions for over 2,000 hotels across 26 countries and we excel with search engine optimisation (SEO) for these websites. And whenever we are asked about digital marketing, the conventional wisdom for them revolves around selecting the right keywords, crafting user-friendly content, and optimising on-site (also called on-page) SEO.With over a billion websites vying for visibility for top-ranking keywords, there is a less-discussed yet crucial factor that helps search engines to crawl, index and rank the website faster and efficiently — technical SEO. Having a great hotel website with poor technical SEO is like building a beautiful house on a weak foundation.Here are seven things to consider helping get your website’s technical SEO right:Fast load timeThe speed at which your hotel website loads is a crucial technical SEO metric. We have observed that faster-loading web pages not only enhance user experience but also contribute to increased direct bookings. The factors that improve load time include dynamic compression of images and videos, hosting web assets across the globe, a strong server capacity, et al. Conversely, a slow-loading site leads to higher bounce rates — where users drop off your website without performing an action. Come to think about it: why wouldn’t google crawlers also like a fast response time for their crawls?Secure websiteSecurity plays an important role in technical SEO, with Google emphasising the importance of a secure sockets layer (SSL). This is a protocol that allows for the authentication, encryption and decryption of data between a web server and a browser. A secured website is denoted by Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) rather than HTTP. A secure website instils credibility, maintains a professional web presence, and positively impacts SEO.Optimised XML and HTML sitemapsA sitemap is like the blueprint of your website that aids search engine crawlers to navigate through different pages efficiently. A well-designed HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemap helps a great deal in your SEO strategy. Not delving into details, HTML is the language your website speaks with the user, while XML is the language your website communicates with the server.SEO-friendly URL structureOften overlooked, URLs function as the address of your website and significantly influence its traffic. Google and other search engines scrutinise URL structures to deliver relevant results. Crafting SEO-friendly URLs is pivotal in boosting your website’s online visibility.A mobile-friendly websiteTo rank higher on search engine results, a website must be optimised across all devices — desktop, mobile and tablet. Online studies say that nearly 60% of all Internet traffic is from mobile devices. Therefore, a few years ago, Google came out with a mobile-first indexing update for all new websites. This led to content being ranked and indexed according to the mobile-version content and not the desktop-version content anymore. A mobile-friendly website boosts your hotel’s online presence, offers a better browsing experience and also facilitates link sharing.Schema markupSchema is metadata available to search engines. In simple terms, it is a code that helps search engines to find & deliver relevant and informative content to the user. Once it is incorporated on to the web page, it creates an enhanced description, often referred as a rich snippet, that is displayed in search results. Technically, schema markup provides more information during a crawl. Although there is no evidence that it has a direct impact on organic search rankings, rich snippets do make your web pages appear more prominently in search engine result pages (SERPs). Online studies say that this enhanced visibility has been proven to improve click-through rates.Robots.txtIt’s a file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs it can and cannot access. It also points to the sitemap. Robots.txt is not a tool to keep a web page out of Google. If you wish to keep a page out of Google, you need to block indexing with no-index or password-protect the page. Essentially, Google likes a good robots.txt file.At Simplotel, we understand that driving bookings through a hotel website requires doing a thousand things right — it is like death by a thousand paper cuts. Therefore, you need various factors to be in synergy.The author, Tarun Goyal is the founder and CEO of Simplotel.
Published On Apr 1, 2024 at 01:00 PM IST
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https://hospitality.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/speaking-heads/a-hoteliers-guide-to-technical-seo/108930634
