How to do SEO on a travel related website

What is SEO?

For those who do not know, SEO is a set of writing, editing and posting techniques that make it easy for text to be found by search engines (Google, I'm talking about you). And there is no life on the internet without the search engine. Yes, Facebook is important, Instagram has its value and Twitter will continue forever my darling - as much as I myself have abandoned the bluebird network for some time - but there is nothing that compares to Google in the ability to take readers to a website.

And the problem, you may have guessed, is that no one who wants to know more about traffic in India would type in Google the phrase "This wonderful India and its crazy traffic." No. The research will usually be with things like "transit in India" or, when the researcher is detailing, "How is the transit in India". So, here's the first lesson we've learned about producing online content, something we're doing with, I dare say, relative success five years ago: often the title is the first thing to be sacrificed.

That's why there are, in travel blogs and other niches, so many equal titles and few creative ones. Proliferate the "What to do in New York", "Where to eat in Berlin" and "Where to stay in Pindamonhangaba". Forgive bloggers for this apparent lack of creativity, dear reader, but there is truth is that we must make sacrifices so that a text like those mentioned above, which are made to take specific questions of those who already have a destination defined by the forward reach their target.

But SEO does not stop there, obvious. Here are some simple things that should be the concern of any beginning blogger.

Keyword:

Another very important concept is keyword, which is basically what I wrote in the paragraph above: a keyword (s) used to search for something in Google. Bangkok, for example, is a keyword used to search for the capital of Thailand (or Bangkok, which shows little short keyword targeting). Since "Where to eat in Bangkok" is a more complex keyword, called long tail, which allows for search bottlenecks - anyone who does this research is interested in a particular subject and is more likely to read the articles they find and even consume the products offered to you - an eBook with travel tips to Bangkok, for example.

Defined the concept of keyword, it is important to know what to do with it. For example, it is agreed that the keyword should appear in the title, in the URL, in the meta description, in the first paragraph and if possible even in some subtitle. But be careful not to overdo it: remember that you write for people, not for robots. Besides, Google itself has already found ways to punish sites that make excessive use of SEO techniques, producing strange and unattractive texts for readers. Too much use of keywords can cause a page to lose positions in Google.

I'm grateful for the day when Google will make an even more drastic change in that system, being able to put the original and well-written texts for humans first - in fact, I'm praying for the return of maximum creative freedom. But while that does not happen, the important thing is to be found in search engines, but without sacrificing our essence, right?

You can search for good keywords on multiple websites and there are even paid mechanisms for this. Free tools offered by Google itself are Adwords and Trends.

URL

URL is the acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. In good Portuguese, it is basically an electronic address that takes us to a certain page. It is important that the URL says something about a text. URLs made up of random numbers, for example, are bad. In general, good URLs count on the title of the article (including the keyword), avoid many stop words and are not too large.

Do you have URLs that need to be changed? Okay, but do not forget to do the redirect, otherwise the effect may be the reverse - URL errors are not well seen by Google.

Structure of the text:

It is important that Keyword appear in the first paragraph and also throughout the text, but not just that. It is also essential that the text flows in a natural way. Subtitles (H1, H2, H3, no WordPress), for example, may contain other explanations and even the keyword. And, remember, be careful not to overdo the hand and leave the text very robotic. It happens often there

Images:

Two very common mistakes - and that we made at the beginning of our walk - involve not editing the photos. I'm not talking about Photoshop, you see, but upload the photo the way it comes from the camera. This produces two problems from the point of view of SEO: the photo enters the blog with the camera's default file name (IMG027, for example). In addition, the image may be much larger than the one needed for the blog, slow loading, which is also disruptive in the long run, and take up more space than necessary on the server. Therefore, always shorten the photo to a site default.

Do not forget to also fill alt tags - a text within the image that Google uses to read the file and know what it is. Just in WordPress, click on the image and fill in the field with something that explains what it is about (example: if it is a photo of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, write this).

Meta description:

It is a sort of one-page summary, a text used by Google to explain, in the search results, what the person will find there if he enters the link. In addition, Facebook itself uses the meta description to do the same thing, with the fine lines below a title and explaining a link. When a meta description is not met, Google (and Facebook) pull the first few sentences of the text to perform that function. A well-made description also increases the rate of clicks on the link.

Link Building:

To find out if a site or page deserves credibility, one of the things Google looks at involves the links that point to that address. That's why it's important to link your own posts to each other in a natural and balanced way. It's also important to get other sites and pages to link to you. Because of this, there is even a black market for links on the Internet, where companies buy artificial links and disguise the demand for advertising.

If Google finds out, the site can be punished - and even disappear from the search engine. A company that is interested in the link, not in advertising, almost always pays very little and is not willing to use the attribute in follow, which is Google's guidance for such cases, used to show searchers that link should not influence ranking

There are several ways to make your site be indicated by others, with already consolidated relevance. Providing guest posts and frequently commenting on other sites are two valid strategies, but we are convinced that the most important thing is to write, on your own website, content of great quality that cannot be ignored by others. The links and directions come naturally, including from websites and large portals. But it takes time, of course.

How to Evaluate SEO Work: Analytics and Yoast:

Google Analytics is the search engine's own tool that lets you see detailed statistics of your site visitation - how many visitors per day, where they are, what they are looking for, the most visited pages, age and used browser - everything is there

Repeat with me: you do not write for robots:

It is fundamental to know these basic rules to have the courage to do something even more important: to break them. Sometimes you will find here in 360 texts that ignore many of these rules. Titles were once again creative, we often forgot about the keyword and we understood that, after all, we wrote for humans, not for Google robots.

The central question is to understand that there are several types of readers within a blog. We have readers coming from Google who want answers to a specific and urgent question. These readers, who are the majority, come in here, read a text, and soon go their way to another site. But we also have readers coming via Facebook - and those do not like squares like Google's. The good thing is that Facebook allows pages to change the original titles of a link before posting it, making it possible for a text thought to Google to be more interesting for those who are on the social network.

Finally, there is our favorite reader, the one who types 360meridianos.com in the search engine and enters here, every day, looking for news, legal texts to read and interesting information. It is for him that we write our best texts. This is why 360 will never be a blog focused and focused only on Google and SEO. We do not have anything against sites like that, but our goal is not just to create a place of passage. We want to create communities, encourage dialogue, reading and reflection on tourism.

It was crucial to understand the difference between these three audience profiles to be able to ignore some SEO rules, especially in texts not so focused for a reader coming from Google. For example, this article does not have the keyword in the first paragraph. Yoast is yelling that this is a mistake, but it will be ignored and the text will continue like this. One possible analogy is with the camera photometer. It's important to know how to use it, but a good photographer knows that you have to skip the markings one time or another. Also, as we have already explained in other texts, even our table of posts is designed to serve these different audiences, with a balance with texts focused on SEO, texts for the everyday reader and texts thought for viralization on Facebook.

There is nothing sadder than a good text, but sacrificed for a first paragraph full of keywords and made to hold the attention of Google, not the reader. Blogging is telling stories, blogging about travel is telling travel stories. Nothing more than this. And only robots are interested in a story that begins with a standard phrase, repeated exhaustively and disconnected throughout the text. Hopefully, one day even the Google robots will not stick to such texts.

Author Bio-Graph:

Kazim Raza is a Digital Marketer and Search Engine Analyst. I love socializing and playing soccer. One of my target is to guide people how to earn a living via online marketing. There is a proper method to do this, and once you learn what that is, you become unstoppable.