Blogs are potent devices to raise awareness around any business, be it in the travel and tourism industry or otherwise. They help travel agencies garner newer clients and audiences. But in order to achieve propulsion and online visibility, your content has to have the right ingredients. This is where this Pathfndr article can help you, to get the parameters of your content correctly.
You and your teammates at the company may be spending hours behind your computers compiling intriguing content for your existing and future clients. However, if you do not play the game well enough, your blog will find itself sitting at the end sections of a Google search result page. To avoid this trap, you need to be thorough with particular SEO strategies.
Follow this blog post that has been crafted with the aim of helping you optimise your blog content which will allow a bigger traffic flow to your web portal. That will propel your travel site up the ranks in popularity, leading to growth and higher revenue flow. So, peruse through the points that we will share in the following sections of the article, and witness a brighter response from the online crowd.
SEO Blog Post Checklist: How to Optimise Your Web Content
Be Specific with the Keywords you are Employing – All solid SEO strategies begin with keywords. ‘Keywords’ are a set of words that online users type in a search engine to find what they are looking for. Therefore, if you fail to optimise the travel content that you are producing around the main search engines available on the internet, then you will not see them popping up among the results in your Google search.
Before you begin writing and publishing travel content for your company website, it is essential that you have made it a point to target the precise keywords. To know more about how to conduct keyword research, click on this link. After you have successfully assembled the necessary keywords, the next move will be to apply them strategically to your content stock.
You have to remember not to force a keyword in any part of the blog. In other words, keywords should not block the natural flow of a sentence. You should always include keywords in the first paragraph of the piece. After that, keywords should feature in one of the H2 headings. Keywords should be placed in subsequent parts of the piece and spaced evenly.
The manner in which you place keywords in your write-ups allows search engines to figure out what your travel content is all about. It is from that point onwards that the search engines group the travel content into indexes, which are then accessed by readers. By following the correct strategy vis-a-vis keywords, you make sure the reader arrives at the proper spot to get the information that they are scanning for.
Keep the Title of Your Travel Content Intriguing
The main keyword should be a part of the title at every instance, as it is the keyword that people are going to type in on their search engines. Once they notice its presence in your blog title, they would most likely make the click. The title that you put up for your blog post should be in sync with the subject matter you have compiled.
Remember to keep the title of your blog post short and to the point. Short titles are SEO friendly, as they are less likely to get cut off by Google’s search results page. Try to keep the title within the 55-character limit to ward off search result issues.
In order to strengthen the blog post you put up, use adequate adverbs and adjectives to raise the curiosity factor of the reader. Starting the title with “How to” or “List of the top” is very effective in drawing the attention of online browsers. You should send out the precise message of your blog post through the title at all costs. Framing more than one title can be done to check which one works better in the field.
Ensure All URLs Are Optimised
The URL or permalink of your travel content should carry the primary keyword without fail. To enable this to happen, you have to adjust this in your content management system (CMS). Along with this exercise, you also have to maintain a crisp URL at all times. This is because short URLs are better grasped by the content crawlers of Google.
For example, if you have put up a blog titled “10 Tips to Book a Food Tour in Goa” and the keyword happens to be “Food Tour in Goa”, then you can go with the URL “food-tour-in-goa”. Keep in mind that if you do not alter your content’s permalink by yourself, the CMS you are using could attach a numbered URL or match your blog title by automation.
Try to keep the URL uncomplicated by avoiding numbers and dates. Finally, once you have set the URL, do not switch it after intervals. This will cause the content that you have put up to lose all the SEO credibility that it has managed to obtain.
Your Meta Titles and Descriptions Should be SEO-Compatible
You must have noticed that when someone types a word or a phrase into Google’s search engine, the results usually show a title with a short snippet of information about the same right under it. This is known as the ‘metadata’ of that particular page. From your end, the metadata has to be optimised on your CMS in relation to the target search query.
To make sure the user gets what they are looking for, you will have to change the metadata by including the primary keyword in the meta description and the meta title. While the meta title should be around 60 characters, the meta description should be somewhere between 120 and 150 characters. In case you go overboard with the upper limit, the search engine will trim the excess text automatically. The goal will be to make both the meta description and the meta title striking as well as conspicuous to the roving eye of the online browser.
Your Pictures Should Include Alt Descriptions
It is said that a picture can say a thousand words. So, the moment you add pictures to your travel blogs, you add a tremendous amount of value to them. Not only do they become visually imposing, but you also increase their chances of getting the attention of the user on the online platform. When you are about to publish your travel content on your CMS, you will do good by optimising the blog pictures for SEO. This will allow Google to index them properly, and hence raise the chances of them appearing on the image search results.
During the process of uploading a picture in connection to your blog post, you will have the choice of including an alt tag. The alt tag is essentially a short recounting of the same picture. Since Google indexes alt tags as well, this would turn out to be a vital ranking factor for your travel content in search results.
One more advantage of adding alt tags to your pictures is the fact that even if a picture does not come up, the alt tag would. This would give readers an idea of what the image is all about. Alt tags should be connected to the theme of the content and should be written in brief. Adding the primary keyword and related key phrases to the alt tag is also a beneficial idea. These will go a long way in making sure search engines know what your images, and by extension, your content, is all about.
SEO Blog Post Checklist: Final Thoughts
This is where we come to the end of our write-up on the ‘SEO blog post checklist’. We have listed five of the most important pointers that any travel content creator should keep in mind before posting anything online. Apart from the ones we have discussed in detail, you should also pay heed to the formatting of your travel content. Adding backlinks to your blogs will also ensure that the content that you are publishing is full of quality and polish. The links would allow readers to discover much more as they go along the ride.
There is a lot that goes into SEO in contemporary times. If you are thorough with the critical aspects, you will find your travel content flourishing online. And a robust blog section on your company website will contribute to the success of your travel operator business in the long run. Therefore, take the time to get the basics of SEO right, and then proceed to publish your content. You may take the help of online travel operating systems such as Pathfndr and check out its website to learn more about SEO systems.