The web is literally awash with travel websites. Search on Google for ‘discount air travel’ and you will find over 32 million websites. Try ‘cheap accommodation’ and there are over 11 million sites competing for your customer’s dollar. So how do you make a travel website rank highly on Google and the other search engines.
Broadly speaking, strategy in this space is similar to many physical world markets. You have to choose between being universal and being focused. If you want to be universal, i.e. offer a site which provides airline tickets, hotel and car rental bookings anywhere on earth you have to remember that you are up against some pretty stiff competition. The number one ranked site on Google for ‘discount air travel’ is Expedia. It has over 5 million back links as measured by www.marketleap.com. The cost of overtaking these mega sites for popular terms like ‘discount air travel’ is prohibitive. You will never get there. So if you want to be a universal site you must focus on less popular search terms. Look for variants on the popular search terms and try to rank highly against less popular terms. There are still very large numbers of searches done each day on terms like ‘discount plane tickets’ and it will be much easier to rank against this kind of term. Indeed the #1 ranked site on Google for this term isn’t even a home page: always a sign that this space is not too competitive. It also has a PageRank of only 4, which is not difficult to beat.
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