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Richard Baxter from SEOGadget – Travel SEO
How people search for flights in the UK
There are 6 main categories of keywords in terms of flights:
- generic (flights, cheap flights)
- destination (eg “flights to new york”)
- routes – v important (eg “flights from london to new york”) look at all the different variations eg “london to paris” is different to “paris to london”. Less competitive route based keywords are of course easier to target, mainly because not many people optimise for them.
- Brand (”easyjet flights”)
- Departure (eg “flights from manchester”)
Take your keyword lists and put all variations into Google Keyword tool – over a large scale of iterations you end up with a huge target long tail graph.
Then you can play around with new longtail variations of different types of keywords eg “cheap easyjet flights from Gatwick to Malaga”
How this translates into site architecture
You can map each ‘type’ of keyword against different levels of your sitemap architecture – eg hompage -> generic,
Site indexation issues
The problem with mapping out this kind of country based architecture is that you end up siloing pagerank down through your main destinations but there are ‘neighbour’ countries/categories that dont have much juice. The way around this is by using crosslinking (similar/most popular/nearby/recently reviewed suggestions) and use the trick of flattening your site design. Also, take tips from experienced bloggers – a great technique is tagging to spread internal juice to pages that aren’t that often visited.
Analysing competitiveness and competitor linkbuilding strategies
Richard pimped out Open Site Explorer to show how you can look at competitor backlinks. As a great example Kayak tools such as Top Pages on Domain are really useful for finding out about things they have had success with.
Phew! That was furious – years of experience at CheapFlights cut down into a crazy quarter of an hour!
Make sure your Search Engine Optimisation is set up correctly. Any Web Design company worth their salt will advise you on the best methods
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