Value-added Travel Sites: Stand Out from the Crowd by Offering Insightful Content
Well-written, helpful content is what separates the average online travel site from the exceptional travel site. It's one of the unchanging rules of the Internet: offer good content, and eventually search engines and site visitors will recognize your efforts. This doesn't happen quickly: it can take months before the effort poured into content pays off and steady traffic reaches a new site, but it's worth the time to generate solid, helpful content.
Travel sites have a wide range of topics to include in their content. Hotel reviews, airfare prices, and accommodation choices are obvious examples, but really only scratch the surface. By focusing on individual countries, travel sites can quickly build a wealth of content.
Let's say a travel site focuses on European vacations. Each European country could have its own page of basic information (languages spoken, local currency, etc), with links to content such as travel safety, cultural information, local food (possibly with recipes), and popular tourist activities. Be sure to list the bad along with the good: how well-disposed are the locals towards tourists? Is local water a health risk? Are there any local scams tourists should be aware of? By presenting the pros and cons of each country you foster trust with your site visitors.
Each city or regional area in each country can also be covered, providing specific information on where to stay and what to see. Going even deeper, content could include information on different types of vacations appropriate to each country: bus tours, walking tours, barge cruises, camping, and other specific vacation ideas. Outline what can be done in each country that cannot be done anywhere else.
Repeat that process for each and every country in Europe, and you can see how site content can grow very quickly. Instead of offering only basic information, the site now offers a comprehensive overview of where to travel, what to see, and what to avoid. New content can do double-duty. It increases the "stickiness" of the website (how long a visitor will spend on the site), and the pages of interrelated content appeals to most search engines.
If you include a sign-up newsletter on your site, you can include snippets of new site content in the newsletter with links to the full online article. Be sure to include breaking travel news, which can include anything from the launch of a new cruise line to a World Health Organization travel advisory.
Not everyone can write compelling content, of course, but the web site owner doesn't have to. There are many freelance writers and writing companies that specialize in providing web content to online businesses, many of which will also optimize the content's keywords to increase search engine rankings.
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