How to SEO optimize your travel agency's website

From the experience we have with travel agencies, Travitude team knows that the SEO topic is one of great importance for those who own a travel agency that has a functional website.

To help you understand the SEO optimization concept and what are the most important aspects you need to check for your website to appear as high in Google search results, here are some of the concepts and SEO rules that you need to keep in mind for effective indexing of your website.

First, you need to know that there are 3 types of SEO optimization:

→ On-Site - refers to the "qualities" that your website needs to have, how it's built

→ On-Page - refers to the way the website is populated with content, taking into account certain rules

→ Off-Page - refers to the "links" you set up with other external websites, websites that are appreciated by Google and who have a very good position in search results

I'll detail these 3 types below and how Travitude (website and search engine pre-integrated travel providers) can help you respect as many of the main SEO rules.

I. On-Site Optimization

1. The website must be optimized for mobile. Currently, more than 70% of searches on Google are made using mobile devices (phones or tablets).

✓ The Travitude website is mobile-optimized.

2. Redirect www / non-www. Use rel = "canonical" for your site domain. A website can be accessed with both www and non-www. Google will index both website versions. Thus, you may be penalized for duplicate content and your site will not be displayed in searches. For this reason, it is best to choose one of the two versions and to make a "canonical" redirection from non-www to www or vice versa. Google will know that this is the same website and will only index the version you are redirecting to.

✓ The Travitude website has this function predefined.

3. Install a SSL certificate. Did you notice that websites sometimes start with "http://" and sometimes with "https://" and have a green locksmith joined? "Https://" signals this SSL certificate. Essentially, SSL establishes an encrypted link between the web server and the visitor's browser. This communication channel ensures the private (and secure) transfer of data between the two. Google does not penalize websites that do not have SSL certificates but uses it as a ranking factor. Also, as of January 2017, Google marks HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit card data as "Not Secure".

✓ Travitude website comes with an integrated SSL certificate.

II. On-Page Optimization

4. Keyword research. Before you start writing any type of content (including title, meta description, name of an image, etc.), you should know what volume of searches is on Google, on a particular topic, or on certain keywords - what users are truly looking for. To find out what people are looking for and the search volume, you can use Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner (for which you need to have a Gmail account) that are free of charge.

5. How to Use the Keywords. Once you've found the right keyword, you can start optimizing your page and writing content around it.

Warning: A web page must be built on a single keyword family. That means it is recommended to use one keyword (and derived from it - synonyms, prefixes, suffixes, singular, plural, etc.) on a single page of the website. For example, let’s take the keyword "antalya holiday". We can derive here “antalya holidays”, "stay in antalya", "stays in antalya", "antalya stays". Repeat the main keyword in the page so you have a density of about 1%.

Using keyword variations is an optimal option because it reduces the risk of "over-optimization" penalization, which allows you to cover more content from the same semantic field (multiple long-tail keywords). It is good to know that longer terms are superior to short terms.

✓ The Travitude website has dedicated fields for the manual entry of Keywords, but if they are not manually entered, they will automatically be taken from the link and/or title of the page.

6. URLs. The URL (link) should describe exactly the purpose or content of the page. It is important for users to understand whether the page meets their needs until it is opened. I will now refer to the URL that is behind the website name (e.g.: www.website. com/URL-content).

Important: The URL must contain the selected Keyword for that page. URL length must not exceed 100 characters; Separate words by hyphens (-), not by underlines (_); avoid dynamic parameters (sortBy, sessionID, lat, long, etc.)

✓ Travitude has optimized URLs for listings of offers and hotels coming from suppliers.

✓ When you create a new manual static page in Travitude to promote your offers/services, you have the freedom to manually set up this URL. For example, if you want to set up an offer page for Antalya, you can configure it as follows: www.website. com/antalya-holiday-offers.

7. Use meta-title and meta-description. Metas are the title and description that appear in Google when someone makes a search.

The Meta-description is a summary of the page and appears as a text fragment in the organic results list under the title of the page. In Meta-description, it is recommended that you use the keyword near the beginning.

The tracked keyword must appear in both Meta-title and Meta-description. Google limits the title to 60-70 characters and the description to a maximum of 160 characters, so you have to carefully choose what you write in the title and description so that it reflects very well the content of your page.

✓ In Travitude, Meta-title and Meta-description are automatically taken from the content of the page (title and / or url), in case they are not entered manually by you in the dedicated fields. Also, the metadata that is automatically downloaded is set to a maximum of 150 characters.

8. H1 and H2 tags. The H1 tag (the main title and the highest title visible on a page) should appear in its upper-middle part. This visible title on the page must take the form of a "synonym" (not the same text) of Meta-title - including the main keyword or a close variation of the keyword. The titles on the page must fit in a row or two.

The H2 tag is the subtitle of the page. Subtitles must clearly convey the ideas of the page.

9. Content is very important to Google. It is necessary to have original and well-documented content. Repeat the keyword and its derivatives by no more than 2 or 3 times per page; conceives the first paragraph of the text as a summary of the page.

✓ Travitude offers you the opportunity to introduce your own descriptions and pictures of the offers/hotels that come from pre-integrated suppliers.

10. Do not overdo optimization of the page. The content of the page must provide valuable, relevant information and to be constantly updated.

III. Off-Page Optimization

11. Use "Link Building". Link building is the process of building links or exchanging links. Thus, through this process, inbound links are created (links that send to your website from other locations on the Internet). To get a higher score, you need to attract quality links, do-follow links from as many websites as possible with high-quality content and high traffic. This is the main obstacle of any SEO specialist because it is very difficult to get such links.

12. Other ways you can tell the search engine (Google) that your site has quality content is to insert social media buttons into your site and urge users to share your likes, share your articles, leave comments, etc.

✓ You can share a Facebook offer directly from the Travitude website. On every hotel/offer presentation page there is the "Share on Facebook" button. So when you share, the offer will appear on Facebook automatically, with title, description, image and URL.

If you’d like to have a fully SEO optimized travel website, then Travitude is the right choice.

Seems to good to be true? You can test it for 7 days, with full access to all the features and admin interface.

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