Web 2.0 for Travel & Destinations 101

Considering how mature that travel and tourism is online compared to most other industries, I continue to be amazed at how few resort, destination and attraction websites follow best practices for site design, content strategy and search engine optimization. It’s like they (or the “experts” building and maintaining their websites) are stuck in a mass marketing mindset. Don’t get me wrong: many of these website look great. Unfortunately, all flash and no substance won’t cut it in a Web 2.0 world.

Grab the low hanging fruit first.

In web 1.0, website were things marketers used other media campaigns to point to. Today, particularly in travel and tourism, upwards of 90% of all travel planning begins online. The place most people start? Google. The position of Google as the de facto search engine of choice rests squarely on the company’s ability to deliver the most relevant search results. They go to great lengths to evaluate every page on every website, indexing and ranking each based on its relevance to a particular search term.

As an example, Google wants to make sure that when you search for “family-friendly resort in the Poconos” that you get what you’re looking for. Unfortunately, the resorts aren’t doing their part: on the first page of the results, one in ten is a resort. Nine of ten are aggregators and repackagers who make my search more difficult and commodify the resorts competing for my business.

The answer to this conundrum?

Simple. Stop naming home page URLs “www.domaine.com/home,” and create many pages with relevant content (words first, pretty pictures and gizmos second) using an seo strategy that will place each page at the top of Google’s organic search results.