What SEO means for your Tour & Activity Operator website

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of adjusting websites and pages to gain a higher ranking in search engine results. Google, Bing and Yahoo dominate the search engine market in terms of usage.

When someone goes to a search engine and types a set of words, the search engine releases robotic “spiders” that browse the Internet in search of the most relevant pages linked to those particular search terms. As the first few pages of results contain those that are most relevant, the higher your site’s search engine rank is, the more visitors it will receive. How do you get to first page of search results?

You have to consider how search engines work and be familiar with their rule book. You don’t have to be an industry expert, but you do need to understand the basic, accepted rules of SEO.

An SEO strategy for the entire website has to be determined as early as possible. All too often, businesses learn that they need SEO only after they have built their site. In that case, they have to update their entire website so it incorporates their SEO plan.

Optimizing a website involves many stages – from selecting appropriate keywords to writing clear and rich content. A combination of the two will increase the relevancy of your website to the search engine user’s search term.

SEO tactics are classified as being either one of these two categories:

• ‘White Hat’ tactics which search engines recommend as part of a good site design. Done right, this will produce long term results.
• ‘Black Hat’ tactics that search engines really punish you for using, i.e. spam-dexing (repeating unrelated phrases to manipulate the relevance of resources indexed). Sites that use these practices will eventually be caught by search engines, sometimes by being banned from search results altogether.

Those are named “White Hat” and “Black Hat” SEO methods. The first one tends to produce results at long term on the contrary to the second one whom already has anticipated the will eventually be banned for its methods.

In conclusion, an important part of creating a good SEO strategy is a sound understanding of how a search engine works – and Google’s search engine in particular. As they constantly alter their algorithms, you should religiously keep up-to-date with industry news to become a successful SEO manager. This way, you will learn how to adapt your web content in a way that benefits you.

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