Little Keywords Modification, Impacts Your Search Results

Couple months back I experimented on our company website, moving around keywords in the web page title, meta description and body tags to include consistent keywords related to our business. The results was quite surprising, if you go on Google and search on "PR Agency in... Beijing or Shanghai" we'll come up in the first page, while our Hong Kong and Singapore office comes up in second page results which is still not bad considering we didn't have any SEO/SEM Agency to help us.

My message for today's PR fellows, is that your press release should not only contain the "pretty words". But also the keywords that is trending or the keyword where you can excel in. You can use Google's keyword research tool to do this or you can also look at your website analytics to determine how people found your website, you can then take the rest from there by just doing tiny modification and including your keyword into your press release. This is an even greater value, especially when your press release is picked up by an online media. But keep on top of this, as keyword is a competitive market and you'll never know when your competition start coming in. You can use this tool to check your page rank on Google, there is also this to check on multiple search engines.

(download)

 

Google Approach Travel Industry, Reshaping the Landscape

After reading this article by Daniel A. Crane - "Let’s Calm Down On The Google-ITA Deal", I started to look again on Google move onto the travel market. Last year Google Map launched an upgrade in UK, which enables people to search hotel booking date directly on the map website, it also compares several sites at once per hotel listing. It looks like the service now have started to expand to other regions, for Bali and KL. The map results also displays the hotel reviews from multiple sites, which is useful. Although I did several search for China and it didn't show the hotel, probably due to Google still having inconsistent performance in China. I'm sure you've heard on Google's recent approach on the travel industry case such as - ITA and TripAdvisor. 

Google's mission is for sure to enable access of information to anyone publicly, whilst the travel industry is based upon a very old system - GDS which originated from airlines. But it's funny how the industry revolves, hotels and airlines rely on GDS or Online Travel Agent (OTA) such as Expedia, Orbitz, CTRIP, etc. But OTA relies on public, in order to reach the public it of course relies on buying keywords on search engines as one of their key marketing activities - namely the major search engines player such as Google, Yahoo! (although now Yahoo pulls search results from Bing), Bing (currently accused copying search results from Google) and Baidu.

Hotel of course in the recent years have tried to gain market share and tries to route booking directly, as this will lower their commission cost per booking, with Google on the verge of making a deal with ITA and enabling people to search directly from the search engines will definitely change the whole game plan. It will for sure draw or rather reduce traffic to OTAs website. Currently I haven't seen any room rate comparison coming from the hotel directly, but I see that more hotel groups will definitely race for including their hotel rates search results on Google Map. Although a lot of companies are against Google ITA buyout, but this will be a very interesting time as it will/might give the hotels a fighting chance.

(download)

URL Shortener

I love it when everything gets simple and easy to remember, especially on web address. I mean wouldn't you hate it when you see that long URL address. I often use a combination between Bit.ly (but sometimes it's blocked in China, so far it's back and you can use it smoothly), as well as Ow.ly (up until China started busting down several Twitter service sites like Hoot Suite.

So far Google URL Shortener is quite promising, probably due to the fact they have multiple server location. Either Goo.gl or Bit.Ly performance are pretty competitive from global perspective, coming to China is a different story (hopefully Google has stabilize China relationship).

Click here to read more on the performance analysis by Pingdom.

Top10urlshortenerperformance