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Become a Travel Agent
Home Based Travel Agents
What if every person that went on the Internet looking for a Caribbean Cruise in a search engine were delivered to your web site? How many cruises do you think you could sell? Let’s say that you could make this happen? Would you be willing to invest the time to accomplish this? Now, what if you could make this happen with absolutely no investment? You can and here is how to do it. We already know that potential clients use search engines to find the specific information they are looking for and that they use keyword phrases to define their search. When the search engine displays the results of the search there are two types of links offered. Sponsored links we have already explored in a prior article, but the free links that are offered are the subject of this article. Most of us tend to opt for the free links first because we have learned that these may contain the most relevance to our keywords. How did these sites get the top ranking positions? Try a Google search using the term Cruise Reviews. Note that out of the 3,810,000 responses, that CruiseReviews.com is in the number one spot. Here are the reasons. Keyword URLWe already discussed domain names and the power of a keyword domain name. You should try to obtain the specific keyword domain name for the product or service that you are trying to position at the top of the search engine’s results. Each search engine ranks the importance of domain names differently, but it just makes sense to obtain it. META Tag FunMETA tags contain the information that search engines look for when they visit your site. Browsers do not display them, but here is how you can see what META tags your competitor is using to gain top search engine placement. First, identify your competition by entering your keywords in a search engine that you are interested in romancing. Once the results have been displayed, click on the link to the site in the number one free ranking position. Once the page has completely loaded, click on your browser’s “view” tool on the toolbar and then scroll down to the “Source” or “Page Source” button and then select that. You will soon be looking at the underlying HTML code that makes up the site (including the META tags). Notice that the page (all webs are the same) starts with a <html> tag, followed by a <head> tag. The <head> tag is what search engines seek out to begin to rank the page, while browsers do not display this content. Following the <head> tag you will find other tags. Look for the <title>, <description> and <keyword> tags. This is the META information being offered to the search engines to obtain that #1 position. You can’t copy this information and use it, but you sure can use it for research. Look at all your competition to see what the common keywords are and start structuring your keywords around your keyword search string. Your META tags should shout the specific keyword string that your web site is built to respond to. Having a generic travel site that is not keyword specific will never allow you to get on top of the search engines. As you build and optimize your website, always think about the specific objective the site is trying to achieve and the keywords it is being built to respond to.
Keyword Density A major ingredient in achieving high search engine ranking is the density of the keywords that are used in the URL and META tags. By reaffirming that the site relates to the keywords, they should be the dominant keywords in the text portion of the home page. The major challenge is to write the keywords into the text for the search engines while still remaining readable for your non-search engine visitors. Link PopularityOne of the most important considerations by many search engines (especially Google) is the site’s link popularity. Search engines love it when they crawl a site and find hundreds of links from other sites connecting to the site they are crawling. If there is a link from a page that is especially popular, this is considered particularly important and you will gain a higher ranking. The search engines do not make the distinction between other sites that you own and those that you don’t, so this is one very motivating reason to maintain several sites rather than just one. Web EnvironmentIn order to gain high search engine placement, your site should reside on a commercially viable host server. Free web sites or sites residing on servers known for their non-commercial content, will not be crawled, or if they are, will be deeply penalized. Further, you should strive for at least 20 pages of content to get the search engines attention. Search Engine FunWhile this is a brief overview of the elements necessary to gain high search engine ranking, rest assured that you could work your way up the hierarchy into the number one spot in any search engine. If this conversation interests you, here are some excellent sites to explore. In my opinion, the best site to investigate for information on search engine optimization is www.BruseClay.com. This site is the end-all on the subject and is well worth your time and effort to understand its content. The site offers numerous free tools you can use to examine your site and your competitor’s. Another excellent site is www.SearchEngineWatch.com. This site will keep you in touch with the entire search engine optimization industry. Gaining the number one spot in the search engines for your particular keyword search string might bring you unimaginable opportunities. If you see your web presence as a major part of your future, then search engine optimization will be a major part of it. See you on the Web.
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