05.31.07
Local SEO - Comparing Hotel Sites
 By
Kevin Gibbons
I've been doing a few local searches recently to find some examples of well-optimised Abingdon websites, I found a Google search for "Abingdon hotels" brought up an excellent example of both good and bad SEO for various local accommodation websites.
Just to make it clear I have nothing to do with any of these websites and I'm unsure if they have received any SEO advice, I just find local search engine optimisation quite interesting so chose these sites to take a deeper look into how they're ranking
Here's a quick look at how some of the basic SEO factors compare for the top four hotels in Abingdon:
Upper Reaches
Page Title: "The Upper Reaches Hotel - one of the finest hotels on the Thames"
This certainly needs the keyword Abingdon in there somewhere.
On-Page SEO: Not sure about the breakline within the H2 tag, needs a bit of a tidy up to target the Abingdon hotels searches better.
Internal Linking: Most links are within the navigation, some cross-links to further hotel information would definitely help.
URL Structure: http://www.upperreaches-abingdon.co.uk
The homepage is used and contains the keyword Abingdon which is good, just a shame there's no mention of it in the title tag.
Inbound Links: 17
Premier Travel Inn
Page Title: "Abingdon | Hotel information - Premier Travel Inn"
Improvement on the first two but again not perfect, Premier Travel Inn are a very large hotel chain in the UK and so personally I would use the brand name at the beginning of the title tag to get more clicks, also not separating the words Abingdon and the hotel with a pipe character. Perhaps "Premier Travel Inn - Abingdon Hotel Information" would be more suitable?
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On-Page SEO: Average at best, includes the keywords Abingdon and hotels but not together and doesn't really look to be targeting any keywords for the search engines.
Internal Linking: I'm still not quite sure how you find the Abingdon hotel listing page without using the search function, the hotel directory takes you to pdf downloads rather than the list of hotel weblinks I expected to see.
URL Structure: http://www.premiertravelinn.com/pti/
hotelInformation.do?hotelId=24028
- Needs to lose the hotel ID and get a descriptive URL instead.
Inbound Links: 12,020
Four Pillars
Page Title: "Four Pillars Abingdon - Home"
Not sure why "home" is used, surely replacing this with "hotel" would be far more benefictal.
On-page SEO: Headings within an image rather than text, the description within the facilities page is better optimised for Abingdon hotel searches as this page doesn't include the keyword hotel.
Internal linking: The main Abingdon hotel page is being linked to from the homepage map image and within a dropdown menu on all pages, not ideal but easy to use.
URL Structure: http://www.four-pillars.co.uk/Abingdon/home.html
- Not bad, but is actually outranked by the hotel facilites page which uses hotel.html, combining the best factors from both pages to consolidate into the hotel information page would make more sense.
Inbound Links: 839
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About the Author:
Kevin Gibbons is the search engine marketing consultant based in the UK.
http://blog.seoptimise.com
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