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Client Case Study :: Travel Alberta "Excellent results; very exciting!" - Daniel Cayer, TravelAlberta.com Corporate Profile Travel Alberta is dedicated to helping tourists and citizens experience the best the province has to offer. Through its website, TravelAlberta.com, Travel Alberta aims to:
Travel Alberta is the travel marketing organization for the entire province, with a goal to increase the number of visitors to and within Alberta and to capitalize on the economic impact of tourism in Alberta. The Problem Travel Alberta is an established organization with a solid business foundation, excellent information infrastructure as well as industry and government support. Travelalberta.com is a great website but, at the time, keyword positioning from natural listings had the potential to be stronger. Anduro's Solution Our goal was to increase the website's ranking on natural search engine listings. A key aspect of the Search Engine Marketing strategy was the development of a strong Internet presence. Attaining high search engine positioning would contribute to enhanced public awareness and branding of Alberta. The ideal was that if any surfer were to use the search term "Alberta" in combination with selected travel/tourism terms (e.g. golf Alberta), they would find TravelAlberta.com listed in the first page of search engine results. To accomplish this, we implemented the following strategic elements:
Before initiating a custom Search Engine Marketing strategy, we completed a high level website audit to look for strengths and weaknesses in the organization's current website from a search engine perspective. We also conducted a brief evaluation of similar websites as a basis of comparison. The results of these audit procedures were compiled as part of Anduro's 20 Point Internet Marketing Inspection and are the foundation for the design of an effective Search Engine Marketing strategy. We made a number of recommendations for the Travel Alberta website, including keyword additions to the Title and Meta tags in the HTML coding of certain pages. This was done to improve their chances of being found and indexed by search engines, exposing the website to increased traffic.
Researching relevant and frequently used keyword phrases is the crucial first step to successfully implementing a Search Engine Marketing strategy. The aim of our High Performance Keywords service is to create a list of keyword phrases that should get high placement in search engine results pages. We performed extensive keyword research for TravelAlberta.com. Once the best keyword phrases were compiled, they were organized into a collection of themes (e.g. aboriginal tourism) which would serve as the framework for the eSignpost Marketing Pages to be created later.
For websites that are dynamically generated or use Flash or Frames technologies, eSignposts are a viable alternative for search engine acceptance. These static HTML, tailor-made pages are fully optimized with High Performance Keywords systematically placed in the written content and prominent areas of the underlying coding. Proper optimization, combined with more efficient coding, results in pages that are fully compatible with search engines. These eSignpost Marketing Pages can also provide additional content to a website. A greater amount of quality content allows for added keyword placement and a greater number of internal links, which can improve search engine ranking. eSignposts have proven to be quite effective for organizations such as Travel Alberta, who have made considerable investments in their website design. We created 25 eSignpost Marketing Pages for TravelAlberta.com. These pages are of identical design to the original website and are hosted on Travel Alberta's servers as Feature Pages. Travel Alberta 's editor provided the base content which we then fully optimized with selected High Performance Keywords. We were also able to reduce the amount of code, significantly improving search engine compatibility.
One of the best ways to ensure high search engine positioning is by increasing a website's link popularity. This is done by cultivating back-links from other websites to a particular website; the more links pointing into a website the better. Further, links from more popular sites will also contribute to improved search engine ranking. Google's PageRank feature relies on the number of internal links in a website, the number of back-links pointing into it, and the popularity of those sites containing the back-links. The most effective method of securing high ranking back-links to TravelAlberta.com was through submitting the website to major directories such as Yahoo! and Open Directory Project . This was followed by submission to any relating industry specific directories. In Travel Alberta's case, directories focused on travel and tourism (e.g. www.travel-link-directory.com) were chosen. The Results Anduro Marketing was able to significantly improve Travel Alberta's keyword rankings, as illustrated in the table above. Below is an explanation of those positive results.
1. Number One Rankings
2. Total Rankings
3. Page One Rankings
An Ongoing Comittment Thanks to a solid Search Engine Marketing strategy, Travel Alberta has seen a noticeable increase in visitor traffic and a definite improvement in overall Internet presence. While results have been very encouraging, we will continue our effort to maximize the effectiveness of TravelAlberta.com. We will monitor the website's progress and make adjustments when necessary. A 20 Point Inspection will be provided on a quarterly basis to monitor the success of Travel Alberta's Internet Marketing program.
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