How do professional hotel reservation companies promote their websites

do they have an army of seo's hacking away to glory ?

[theposter]

Any hotel reservation company worth its name, does maintain its own websites (many) to get more entry points into its system.

How do these companies operate their webpromotion strategies ?. Do they maintain a huge staff of web designers/promoters who hack away making good sites that eventually rank well and get the moolah in ?

OR do they sell their idea to potential affiliates ?.

I am basically curious about the strategy that such companies employ.

[theposter]

plz plz plz help me out on this one !

[martinibuster]

Do you know any hotel reservation companies? How did you hear of them? Online advertising? Offline advertising?

This is the thought process I start with, by investigating the competition.

[DrCool]

I can tell you for a fact that at least one of the larger hotel reservation companies has, in the past, hired an outside agencey for SEO. This was about two years ago. I would assume that they moved everything in-house now. They are also utilizing affilites to promote their site as well.

[theposter]

I guess you have completely misunderstood my question. I know that these companies make a lot of websites to get more entry points into their system.

Thats logical too. I need to know the process that they follow to get such websites made. Do they depend on external affiliates or do they have so caled SEO sweat shops ?? ;)

[rcjordan]

> larger hotel reservation companies has, in the past, hired an outside agencey for SEO.

...while most of the hotel chains couldn't get it right if someone gave them a map! It looks like at least one has decided to buy their way in [webmasterworld.com].

[DrCool]

From most of what I have seen it appears to be more affiliates than a SEO sweatshop. If you do some searches for hotels nearly all the top ranking sites are affiliates.... Not that that is a bad thing:)

[rcjordan]

Some of the booking services got raked over the coals a year or more ago about competing head-to-head with their affiliates. I got the impression that several of them decided that they had better support their affiliate networks, as there were a lot of soothing/reassuring newsletters sent out.

I don't know of any seo sweatshops working in this field, either.

[Marcia]

>I need to know the process that they follow

theposter, SEO companies and even individual practitioners won't generally reveal their process, and neither would a large hotel company be likely to, whether they do it in-house or contract it out.

Different ones would use different methodologies, just as with any industry. With anything, it pretty much takes digging in at the search engines and examining code, backtracking for links, looking for where the company name is mentioned - all the things that go into doing the research of the competition.

If you're specifically talking about the process they might use to crank out multiple doorway pages, it's not hard to find a lot out there that were obviously generated by software using templates, and there are plenty of those types of scripts to be found by doing a little searching. Maybe even some that use MySQL and PHP, which is supposed to be very simple to implement.

There are undoubtedly other ways also, but anyone who's using them is highly unlikely to be sharing how they do it with the competition.

[theposter]

thanks everyone for the replies. I now realise that english is my weak point ??.

I see a model in place where multiple teams (say 2-3) in size crank out good websites that rank well on search engines. Is this a model that has succeded in the past ?

Yes, I thought of such companies gaining a lot from having affiliates...but isn't it feasible to have more psuedo-affiliates where you don't need to payout commisions ?.

Especially when these seo 'sweat shops' are offshore ?..the costs come down dramatically.... ;)...

If only someone could say YES...THATS what expedia, HRN etc etc do :D

[theposter]

"I can tell you for a fact that at least one of the larger hotel reservation companies has, in the past, hired an outside agencey for SEO. This was about two years ago. I would assume that they moved everything in-house now. They are also utilizing affilites to promote their site as well."

Thanks DrCool...i guess that answers my question....if only you could drop a hint as to who these chaps might be ;)...

I am new to these forums, I used to hang out a lot at SEF..still hang out there :)..but the depth of this forum is truly stupendous :)