What are some great guidelines on how hotels can utilize their blog to compliment their sites SEO efforts?
- Don’t Blog Just to Blog. Each blog post should feature fresh material, creative posts, and informative content.
- Make Your Blog Post Focused. Make your blog post focused: e.g. write a post all about a specific special event being hosted at your hotel. This is more effective in engaging your audience than, for example, writing a general round up of everything that has happened in the area during September.
- Promotions Aren’t Always A Good Thing. Your blog posts should not just be used to constantly promote products. Don’t just keep posting promotions and offers, your audience is likely to get tired of this. If you want to keep followers make sure your blog posts are always informative and entertaining. Then when you do have a promotion it will seem even more special to your audience
- It’s Good to Share. You want your blog posts to have high quality content to attract interest that compels readers to share the information. You want to create content that gets reposted on social networks and in forwarded to other email accounts, so make sure that it’s easy to share with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ widgets.
- Keep it Short & Sweet. Your blog title should be short, simple and attention grabbing. Use keywords related to your hotel in the title and make sure it communicates what readers will find in the post. For example: ‘Luxury London Hotel Wins Again’ is more engaging than ‘10th Annual Hotel Tourism Awards of London Winners Announced at Glamorous City Event Near Kensington’.
- Optimise Your Blog Post. Optimise your blog post with keywords related to your hotel. So when you are writing a short paragraph try and include a relevant keyword. Do this in a way that the content still sounds natural. Link any relevant keywords in your blog post to the most appropriate page on the website. i.e. if your post contains the phrase “hotel in london”, use that text as a link to your home page.
- First Impressions Count. Use keywords in the first few words of the post. Search engines prefer pages that use keywords sooner, rather than later, in the text.
- Short Sentences, Bullet Points & Pictures. Make blog posts short, using short sentences, bullet points and lists to make your readers want to share the post. If you are posting photo’s or video’s make sure you give a short description that will encourage the viewer to watch the video or play the slideshow.
- 10 Ways How To… Use numbered lists and how to’s as blog topics: e.g. 10 Reasons Why London is The Ultimate Weekend Break and How To Impress Your Wife This Valentines
- Social Media Integration. Coordinate new blog posts with social media- add new posts to Facebook and tweet about them.
- Get Organised. Set up a blogging schedule, assign each blogger in your company a timetable, and make sure everyone writes on a consistent basis. Audiences like regular content.
