Importance of Search

Travel and Hospitality Industry Research:

• 80% of website visits begin in a search engine or a directory service. (Forrester)
• 72% of online travel buyers made travel relevant keyword searches in the weeks prior to their online booking. (comScore Networks.
• 60% of online travel shoppers claim to use search engines to research their vacations. (PhoCusWright)
  
• Check out our whitepaper with travel industry research

Local Search

Local Search is a vital Component of SEO.

• Local search is the second most popular online activity after e-mail
  Piper Jaffray (2007)
• 60% of all local business searches now happen online (33% happen in print yellow pages) and 82% of the people using local search sites follow up their research with offline action
  TMP Directional Marketing-comScore, August 2007
• Out of the 130 million monthly unique users of Yahoo last year, 116 million of them came to Yahoo with local intent.
  Hilary Schneider, Executive Vice President, Global Partnership Solutions, Yahoo!
• The Internet will influence a trillion dollars in offline/local retail spending by 2010/11 JupiterResearch, Forrester Research, 2007

1. Claim your business on Google local and Yahoo Local.
   
   
2. Don’t ever just link to yourself… links from pages with all of your contact info
   
   
3. Online Yellowpage distribution. www.localeze.com
   
   
4. Using online mapping and Travel Review sites when possible.
   
   
5. GDS/Net Rate listings Increase your Local

Google Image Search

Image Search can drive a lot of traffic and is worth a bit of attention. Sometimes Google ads image search right into its search results.

1. The more important your page, the better the images can do… so focus image optimization FIRST on 10 powerful pages on your website.
   
   
2. Images should be surrounded by related keywords on the page and use a short alt tag (image tag).
   
   
3. Create an image sitemap that link directly to image files instead of html files.

Google Video Search

Video delivered by Google and Youtube is growing fast and offers several benefits:

• A large community of users watching video. If you have a quality video, expect good numbers.
• SEO benefits from videos. Example Search
  
• Videos are easy to embed into your websites.

Universal Search Components

Already Covered: Adwords, Maps, Original Organic, Local, Video and Image search.

The other components of Vertical Search:

• Google News
• Google Base (Sample Search)
  
• Blog Search
• Desktop

Also, Google Webmaster Tools are worth checking out!