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To get familiar with the function of a search engine in general, these guidelines from moz about Search Engine Optimisation gives a good overview and do-it-yourself instructions.

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One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is empathy for your audience. Once you grasp what your target market is looking for, you can more effectively reach and keep those users.

We like to say, "Build for users, not for search engines." There are three types of search queries people generally make:

"Do" Transactional Queries: I want to do something, such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.

"Know" Informational Queries: I need information, such as the name of a band or the best restaurant in New York City.

"Go" Navigation Queries: I want to go to a particular place on the Internet, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL.

When visitors type a query into a search box and land on your site, will they be satisfied with what they find? This is the primary question that search engines try to answer billions of times each day. The search engines' primary responsibility is to serve relevant results to their users. So ask yourself what your target customers are looking for and make sure your site delivers it to them.

It all starts with words typed into a small box.

How people use search engines has evolved over the years, but the primary principles of conducting a search remain largely unchanged. Most search processes go something like this:

The True Power of Inbound Marketing with SEO

Why should you invest time, effort, and resources on SEO? When looking at the broad picture of search engine usage, fascinating data is available from several studies. We've extracted those that are recent, relevant, and valuable, not only for understanding how users search, but to help present a compelling argument about the power of SEO.

Google leads the way in an October 2011 study by comScore:

Google led the U.S. core search market in April with 65.4 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! with 17.2 percent, and Microsoft with 13.4 percent. (Microsoft powers Yahoo Search. In the real world, most webmasters see a much higher percentage of their traffic from Google than these numbers suggest.)

Americans alone conducted a staggering 20.3 billion searches in one month. Google accounted for 13.4 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! (3.3 billion), Microsoft (2.7 billion), Ask Network (518 million), and AOL LLC (277 million).

Total search powered by Google properties equaled 67.7 percent of all search queries, followed by Bing which powered 26.7 percent of all search. view

Billions spent on online marketing from an August 2011 Forrester report:

Online marketing costs will approach $77 billion in 2016.

This amount will represent 26% of all advertising budgets combined.
view

Search is the new Yellow Pages from a Burke 2011 report:

76% of respondents used search engines to find local business information, more than the number who turned to print Yellow Pages.

67% had used search engines in the past 30 days to find local information, and only 23% responded that they had used online social networks as a local media source.
view

An August 2011 Pew Internet study revealed:

The percentage of Internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of 59% of all adult Internet users.

With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 61 percent of Internet users who use e-mail, arguably the Internet's all-time killer app, on a typical day.
view

StatCounter Global Stats reports the top 5 search engines sending traffic worldwide:

Google sends 90.62% of traffic.

Yahoo! sends 3.78% of traffic.

Bing sends 3.72% of traffic.

Ask Jeeves sends .36% of traffic.

Baidu sends .35% of traffic.
view

A 2011 study by Slingshot SEO reveals click-through rates for top rankings:

A #1 position in Google's search results receives 18.2% of all click-through traffic.

The second position receives 10.1%, the third 7.2%, the fourth 4.8%, and all others under 2%.

A #1 position in Bing's search results averages a 9.66% click-through rate.

The total average click-through rate for first ten results was 52.32% for Google and 26.32% for Bing.
view

All of this impressive research data leads us to important conclusions about web search and marketing through search engines. In particular, we're able to make the following statements:

Search is very, very popular. Growing strong at nearly 20% a year, it reaches nearly every online American, and billions of people around the world.

Search drives an incredible amount of both online and offline economic activity.

Higher rankings in the first few results are critical to visibility.

Being listed at the top of the results not only provides the greatest amount of traffic, but also instills trust in consumers as to the worthiness and relative importance of the company or website.

Learning the foundations of SEO is a vital step in achieving these goals.

"For marketers, the Internet as a whole, and search in particular, are among the most important ways to reach consumers and build a business."

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SEO: The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization from Moz

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One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is empathy for your audience. Once you grasp what your target market is looking for, you can more effectively reach and keep those users. We like to say, "Build for users, not for search engines."

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This is another Website, powered by Microsoft, the guides you through the Basics of SEO.

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Who is this guide for?

If you own, manage, monetize, or promote online content via Google Search, this guide is meant for you. You might be the owner of a growing and thriving business, the webmaster of a dozen sites, the SEO specialist in a Web agency or a DIY SEO ninja passionate about the mechanics of Search : this guide is meant for you. If you're interested in having a complete overview of the basics of SEO according to our best practices, you are indeed in the right place. This guide won't provide any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!), but following the best practices outlined below will hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site's user experience and performance in organic search results. You're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they're essential ingredients for any web page, but you may not be making the most out of them.

You should optimize your site to serve your users' needs. One of those users is a search engine, which helps other users discover your content. Search Engine Optimization is about helping search engines understand and present content. Your site may be smaller or larger than our example site and offer vastly different content, but the optimization topics we discuss below should apply to sites of all sizes and types. We hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and we'd love to hear your questions, feedback, and success stories in the Google Webmaster Help Forum ¹.

We hope you will enjoy the content and we hope to hear and integrate your feedback via our Google support Forums

Feel free to save, print off the guide responsibly and re-share it: let's improve the quality of the web.

Happy reading!

Signed,
The Google Search Quality team

Getting started

Glossary

- Google stores all web pages that it knows about in its index. The index entry for each page describes the content and location (URL) of that page. To index is when Google fetches a page, reads it, and adds it to the index: Google indexed several pages on my site today.

- The process of looking for new or updated web pages. Google discovers URLs by following links, by reading sitemaps, and by many other means. Google crawls the web, looking for new pages, then indexes them (when appropriate).

Crawler - Automated software that crawls (fetches) pages from the web and indexes them.

Googlebot - The generic name of Google's crawler. Googlebot crawls the web constantly.

SEO - Search engine optimization: the process of making your site better for search engines. Also the job title of a person who does this for a living: We just hired a new SEO to improve our presence on the web.

Are you on Google?

Determine whether your site is in Google's index - Do a site: search for your site's home URL. If you see results, you're in the index. For example, a search for "site:wikipedia.org" returns these results ².

If your site isn't in Google - Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our crawlers miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons:

The site isn't well connected from other sites on the web

You've just launched a new site and Google hasn't had time to crawl it yet

The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to crawl its content effectively

Google received an error when trying to crawl your site

Your policy blocks Google from crawling the site

How do I get my site on Google?

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses web crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when we crawl the web. Learn how Google discovers, crawls, and serves web pages. ³

We offer webmaster guidelines ⁴ for building a Google-friendly website. While there's no guarantee that our crawlers will find a particular site, following these guidelines should help make your site appear in our search results.

Google Search Console provides tools to help you submit your content to Google and monitor how you're doing in Google Search. If you want, Search Console can even send you alerts on critical issues that Google encounters with your site. Sign up for Search Console ⁵.

Here are a few basic questions to ask yourself about your website when you get started.

Is my website showing up on Google?

Do I serve high-quality content to users?

Is my local business showing up on Google?

Is my content fast and easy to access on all devices?

Is my website secure?

You can find additional getting started information on http://g.co/webmasters ⁶

The rest of this document provides guidance on how to improve your site for search engines, organized by topic. You can download a short, printable checklist of tips from http://g.co/WebmasterChecklist ⁷.

Help Google find your content

The first step to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it. The best way to do that is to submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site. Learn more about how to build and submit a sitemap ¹².

Google also finds pages through links from other pages. See Promote your site later in this document to learn how to encourage people to discover your site.

Tell Google which pages shouldn't be crawled

Best Practices
For non-sensitive information, block unwanted crawling by using robots.txt
A "robots.txt" file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named "robots.txt", is placed in the root directory of your site. It is possible that pages blocked by robots.txt can still be crawled, so for sensitive pages you should use a more secure method.

You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Search Console has a friendly robots.txt generator to help you create this file. Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have certain pages not crawled on a particular subdomain, you'll have to create a separate robots.txt file for that subdomain. For more information on robots.txt, we suggest this Webmaster Help Center guide on using robots.txt files ¹³.
Read about several other ways to prevent content from appearing in search results. ¹⁴ For sensitive information, use more secure methods

Don't let your internal search result pages be crawled by Google. Users dislike clicking a search engine result only to land on another search result page on your site.

Allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled.

Robots.txt is not an appropriate or effective way of blocking sensitive or confidential material. It only instructs well-behaved crawlers that the pages are not for them, but it does not prevent your server from delivering those pages to a browser that requests them. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block (showing just the URL, no title or snippet) if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet (like referrer logs). Also, non-compliant or rogue search engines that don't acknowledge the Robots Exclusion Standard could disobey the instructions of your robots.txt. Finally, a curious user could examine the directories or subdirectories in your robots.txt file and guess the URL of the content that you don't want seen.

In these cases, use the noindex tag if you just want the page not to appear in Google, but don't mind if any user with a link can reach the page. For real security, though, you should use proper authorization methods, like requiring a user password, or taking the page off your site entirely.

Help Google (and users) understand your content

Let Google see your page the same way a user does
Recommended action:
When Googlebot crawls a page, it should see the page the same way an average user does ¹⁵. For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your website. If your site's robots.txt file disallows crawling of these assets, it directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content. This can result in suboptimal rankings.

Use the URL Inspection tool ¹⁶. It will allow you to see exactly how Googlebot sees and renders your content, and it will help you identify and fix a number of indexing issues on your site.

Create unique, accurate page titles

A <title> tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> element of the HTML document. You should create a unique title for each page on your site.

Create good titles and snippets in search results

If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag may appear in the first line of the results (if you're unfamiliar with the different parts of a Google search result, you might want to check out the anatomy of a search result video ¹⁷).

The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business and could include other bits of important information like the physical location of the business or maybe a few of its main focuses or offerings.
Accurately describe the page's content
Best Practices

Choose a title that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page's content.
Create unique titles for each page

Choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page.

Using default or vague titles like "Untitled" or "New Page 1".

Each page on your site should ideally have a unique title, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site. If your site uses separate mobile pages, remember to use good titles on the mobile versions too.
Use brief, but descriptive titles

Using a single title across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages.

Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long or otherwise deemed less relevant, Google may show only a portion of it or one that's automatically generated in the search result. Google may also show different titles depending on the user's query or device used for searching.

Using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users.

Stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags.

Use the "description" meta tag

A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page's title may be a few words or a phrase, whereas a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or even a short paragraph. Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed within the <head> element of your HTML document.

What are the merits of description meta tags?

Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. The Webmaster Central Blog has informative posts on improving snippets with better description meta tags ¹⁸ and better snippets for your users ¹⁹. We also have a handy Help Center article on how to create good titles and snippets ²⁰.
Accurately summarize the page content
Best Practices

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result. While there's no minimal or maximal length for the text in a description meta tag, we recommend making sure that it's long enough to be fully shown in Search (note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search), and contains all the relevant information users would need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.
Use unique descriptions for each page

Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page.

Using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball cards".

Filling the description with only keywords.

Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag.

Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (for example, searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page's content.

Using a single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages.

Use heading tags to emphasize important text

Since heading tags typically make text contained in them larger than normal text on the page, this is a visual cue to users that this text is important and could help them understand something about the type of content underneath the heading text. Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.
Imagine you're writing an outline
Best Practices

Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.
Use headings sparingly across the page

Placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of the page.

Using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more appropriate.

Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another.

Use heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a page can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins.

Add structured data markup

Structured data ²¹ is code that you can add to your sites' pages to describe your content to search engines, so they can better understand what's on your pages. Search engines can use this understanding to display your content in useful (and eye-catching!) ways in search results. That, in turn, can help you attract just the right kind of customers for your business.

For example, if you've got an online store and mark up an individual product page, this helps us understand that the page features a bike, its price, and customer reviews. We may display that information in the snippet for search results for relevant queries. We call these "rich results."

In addition to using structured data markup for rich results, we may use it to serve relevant results in other formats. For instance, if you've got a brick-and-mortar store, marking up the opening hours allows your potential customers to find you exactly when they need you, and inform them if your store is open/closed at the time of searching.

You can mark up many business-relevant entities:

Products you're selling

Business location

Videos about your products or business

Opening hours

Events listings

Recipes

Your company logo, and many more!

See a full list of supported content types in our developer site ²².

We recommend that you use structured data with any of the supported notations markup to describe your content. You can add the markup to the HTML code to your pages, or use tools like Data Highlighter ²³ and Markup Helper ²⁴ (see the Best Practices section for more information about them).
Check your markup using the Rich Results test
Best Practices
Use Data Highlighter
Once you've marked up your content, you can use the Google Rich Results test ²⁵ to make sure that there are no mistakes in the implementation. You can either enter the URL where the content is, or copy the actual HTML which includes the markup.

If you want to give structured markup a try without changing the source code of your site, you can use Data Highlighter which is a free tool integrated in Search Console that supports a subset of content types.

If you'd like to get the markup code ready to copy and paste to your page, try the Markup Helper tool.
Keep track of how your marked up pages are doing

Changing the source code of your site when you are unsure about implementing markup.

The various Enhancement reports ²⁶ in Search Console shows you how many pages on your site we've detected with a specific type of markup, how many times they appeared in search results, and how many times people clicked on them over the past 90 days. It also shows any errors we've detected.

Adding markup data which is not visible to users.

Creating fake reviews or adding irrelevant markups.

Manage your appearance in Google Search results

Correct structured data on your pages also makes your page eligible for many special features in Search results, including review stars, fancy decorated results, and more. See the gallery of search result types that your page can be eligible for. ²⁷

Organize your site hierarchy

Understand how search engines use URLs

Search engines need a unique URL per piece of content to be able to crawl and index that content, and to refer users to it. Different content - for example, different products in a shop - as well as modified content - for example, translations or regional variations - need to use separate URLs in order to be shown in search appropriately.
protocol://hostname/path/filename?querystring#fragment
URLs are generally split into multiple distinct sections:
https://www.example.com/RunningShoes/Womens.htm?size=8#info
For example:

Google recommends that all websites use https:// when possible. The hostname is where your website is hosted, commonly using the same domain name that you'd use for email. Google differentiates between the "www" and "non-www" version (for example, "www.example.com" or just "example.com"). When adding your website to Search Console, we recommend adding both http:// and https:// versions, as well as the "www" and "non-www" versions.

Path, filename, and query string determine which content from your server is accessed. These three parts are case-sensitive, so "FILE" would result in a different URL than "file". The hostname and protocol are case-insensitive; upper or lower case wouldn't play a role there.

A fragment (in this case, "#info") generally identifies which part of the page the browser scrolls to. Because the content itself is usually the same regardless of the fragment, search engines commonly ignore any fragment used.

When referring to the homepage, a trailing slash after the hostname is optional since it leads to the same content ("https://example.com/" is the same as "https://example.com"). For the path and filename, a trailing slash would be seen as a different URL (signaling either a file or a directory), for example, "https://example.com/fish" is not the same as "https://example.com/fish/".

Navigation is important for search engines

The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.

Plan your navigation based on your homepage

All sites have a home or "root" page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has only a handful of pages, you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content. Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (for example, root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages?

Using 'breadcrumb lists'

A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as the first, leftmost link and list the more specific sections out to the right. We recommend using breadcrumb structured data markup ²⁸ when showing breadcrumbs.

Create a simple navigational page for users

A navigational page is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors.
Create a naturally flowing hierarchy
Best Practices
Avoid:
Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure. Make sure all of the pages on your site are reachable through links, and that they don't require an internal "search" functionality to be found. Link to related pages, where appropriate, to allow users to discover similar content.
Use text for navigation

Creating complex webs of navigation links, for example, linking every page on your site to every other page.

Going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (so that it takes twenty clicks to reach from the homepage).

Avoid: Create a navigational page for users, a sitemap for search engines
Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. When using JavaScript to create a page, use "a" elements with URLs as "href" attribute values, and generate all menu items on page-load, instead of waiting for a user interaction.
Avoid:
Include a simple navigational page for your entire site (or the most important pages, if you have hundreds or thousands) for users. Create an XML sitemap file to ensure that search engines discover the new and updated pages on your site, listing all relevant URLs together with their primary content's last modified dates.
Show useful 404 pages

Letting your navigational page become out of date with broken links.

Creating a navigational page that simply lists pages without organizing them, for example by subject.

Avoid:
Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom 404 page ³⁰ that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user's experience. Your 404 page should probably have a link back to your root page and could also provide links to popular or related content on your site. You can use Google Search Console to find the sources of URLs causing "not found" errors ³¹.

Allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your web server is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code or - in the case of JavaScript-based sites - include a noindex robots meta-tag when non-existent pages are requested).

Blocking 404 pages from being crawled through the robots.txt file.

Providing only a vague message like "Not found", "404", or no 404 page at all.

Using a design for your 404 pages that isn't consistent with the rest of your site.

Simple URLs convey content information

Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website not only helps you keep your site better organized, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

URLs like the one shown in the following image can be confusing and unfriendly.

If your URL is meaningful, it can be more useful and easily understandable in different contexts.

URLs are displayed in search results

Lastly, remember that the URL to a document is usually displayed in a search result in Google below the document title.

Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they're quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible is a good practice.
Use words in URLs
Best Practices
Avoid: Create a simple directory structure
URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site.
Avoid:
Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.
Provide one version of a URL to reach a document

Having deep nesting of subdirectories like ".../dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html".

Using directory names that have no relation to the content in them.

Avoid:
To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect ³² from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this. You may also use canonical URL or use the rel="canonical"³³ link element if you cannot redirect.

Having pages from subdomains and the root directory access the same content, for example, "domain.com/page.html" and "sub.domain.com/page.html".

Optimize your content

Make your site interesting and useful

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.

Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.

Know what your readers want (and give it to them)

Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a long-time football fan might search for [fifa], an acronym for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, while a new fan might use a more general query like [football playoffs]. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results. Google Ads provides a handy Keyword Planner ³⁴ that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword. Also, Google Search Console provides you with the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site in the Performance Report ³⁵.

Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things.
Write easy-to-read text
Best Practices
Avoid: Organize your topics clearly
Users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow.
Avoid:
It's always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster.
Create fresh, unique content

Dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation.
Avoid:
New content will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back, but also bring in new visitors.
Learn more about duplicate content Optimize content for your users, not search engines ³⁶ Avoid:

Rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to users.

Having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site.

Designing your site around your visitors' needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.

Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users.

Having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" that add little value for users.

Deceptively hiding text from users ³⁷, but displaying it to search engines.

Use links wisely

Write good link text

Link text is the visible text inside a link. This text tells users and Google something about the page you're linking to. Links on your page may be internal-pointing to other pages on your site-or external-leading to content on other sites. In either of these cases, the better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for Google to understand what the page you're linking to is about.
Choose descriptive text
With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily understand what the linked pages contain.
Avoid: Write concise text
Best Practices
Avoid:
The anchor text you use for a link should provide at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about.
Format links so they're easy to spot
Aim for short but descriptive text-usually a few words or a short phrase.
Avoid:

Writing long anchor text, such as a lengthy sentence or short paragraph of text.
Think about anchor text for internal links too
Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links. Your content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them.
Avoid:

Using CSS or text styling that make links look just like regular text.

You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help users and Google navigate your site better.

Using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines.

Creating unnecessary links that don't help with the user's navigation of the site.

Be careful who you link to

You can confer some of your site's reputation to another site when your site links to it. Sometimes users can take advantage of this by adding links to their own site in your comment sections or message boards. Or sometimes you might mention a site in a negative way and don't want to confer any of your reputation upon it. For example, imagine that you're writing a blog post on the topic of comment spamming and you want to call out a site that recently comment spammed your blog. You want to warn others of the site, so you include the link to it in your content; however, you certainly don't want to give the site some of your reputation from your link. This would be a good time to use nofollow.

Another example when the "nofollow" attribute can come handy are widget links. If you are using a third party's widget to enrich the experience of your site and engage users, check if it contains any links that you did not intend to place on your site along with the widget. Some widgets may add links to your site which are not your editorial choice and contain anchor text that you as a webmaster may not control. If removing such unwanted links from the widget is not possible, you can always disable them with "nofollow" attribute. If you create a widget for functionality or content that you provide, make sure to include the nofollow on links in the default code snippet.

Lastly, if you're interested in nofollowing all of the links on a page, you can add the tag <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> inside the <head> tag for the page. You can find more details about robots meta tag on the Webmaster Blog ³⁸.

Combat comment spam with "nofollow"

Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to. Nofollowing a link means adding rel="nofollow" inside of the link's anchor tag, as shown here:

When would this be useful? If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam. Nofollowing these user-added links ensures that you're not giving your page's hard-earned reputation to a spammy site.

Automatically add "nofollow" to comment columns and message boards

Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to do this. This advice also goes for other areas of your site that may involve user-generated content, such as guest books, forums, shout-boards, referrer listings, etc. If you're willing to vouch for links added by third parties (for example, if a commenter is trusted on your site), then there's no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site. The Webmaster Help Center has more tips on avoiding comment spam ³⁹, for example by using CAPTCHAs and turning on comment moderation.

Optimize your images

Use the "alt" attribute

Provide a descriptive filename and alt attribute description for images. The "alt" attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason.

Why use this attribute? If a user is viewing your site using assistive technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture.
Use brief but descriptive filenames and alt text
Another reason is that if you're using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, we don't recommend using too many images for links in your site's navigation when text links could serve the same purpose. Lastly, optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes it easier for image search projects like Google Image Search to better understand your images.
Supply alt text when using images as links
Best Practices

Like many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text are best when they're short, but descriptive.

If you do decide to use an image as a link, filling out its alt text helps Google understand more about the page you're linking to. Imagine that you're writing anchor text for a text link.

Writing excessively long alt text that would be considered spammy.

Using only image links for your site's navigation.

Help search engines find your images

An Image sitemap ⁴⁰ can provide Googlebot with more information about the images found on your site. This increase the likelihood that your images can be found in Image Search results. The structure of this file is similar to the XML sitemap file for your web pages.

Use standard image formats

Use commonly supported filetypes - Most browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and WebP image formats. It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.

Make your site mobile-friendly

The world is mobile today. Most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. As a result, having a mobile ready site is critical to your online presence. In fact, starting in late 2016, Google has begun experiments to primarily use the mobile version of a site's content ⁴¹ for ranking, parsing structured data, and generating snippets.

Choose a mobile strategy

There are multiple ways of making your website mobile ready and Google supports different implementation methods :

After you have created a mobile-ready site, you can use Google's Mobile-friendly test ⁴⁵ to check if pages on your site meet the criteria for being labeled "Mobile-friendly" on Google Search result pages. You can also check out the Search Console Mobile Usability report ⁴⁶ to fix mobile usability issues affecting your site.

If your site serves lots of static content (like blog posts or product landing pages) across multiple pages, consider implementing it using AMP ⁴⁷ (Accelerated Mobile Pages). It's a special flavor of HTML that ensures your site stays fast and user friendly, and can be further accelerated by various platforms, including Google Search.

Configure mobile sites so that they can be indexed accurately

Regardless of which configuration you choose to set up your mobile site, there are key points that you should take note of:

1. If you use Dynamic Serving or have a separate mobile site, signal to Google when a page is formatted for mobile (or has an equivalent page that's formatted for mobile). This helps Google accurately serve mobile searchers your content in search results.

2. If you are using Responsive Web Design, use meta name="viewport" tag to tell the browser how to adjust the content. If you use Dynamic Serving, use the Vary HTTP header to signal your changes depending on the user-agent. If you are using separate URLs, signal the relationship between two URLs by <link> tag with rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" elements.

3. Keep resources crawlable. Blocking page resources can give Google an incomplete picture of your website. This often happens when your robots.txt file is blocking access to some or all of your page resources. If Googlebot doesn't have access to a page's resources, such as CSS, JavaScript, or images, we may not detect that it's built to display and work well on a mobile browser. In other words, we may not detect that the page is "mobile-friendly," and therefore not properly serve it to mobile searchers.

4. Avoid common mistakes that frustrate mobile visitors, such as featuring unplayable videos (for example,, Flash video as the page's significant content).

5. Mobile pages that provide a poor searcher experience can be demoted in rankings or displayed with a warning in mobile search results. This includes but is not limited to full page interstitials ⁴⁸ on mobile that hinder user experience.

6. Provide full functionality on all devices. Mobile users expect the same functionality - such as commenting and check-out - and content on mobile as well as on all other devices that your website supports. In addition to textual content, make sure that all important images and videos are embedded and accessible on mobile devices. For search engines, provide all structured data and other metadata - such as titles, descriptions, link-elements, and other meta-tags - on all versions of the pages.

7. Make sure that the structured data, images, videos, and metadata you have on your desktop site are also included on the mobile site.

For more information, see Google's mobile-friendly guide. ⁵⁰
Best Practices

Test your mobile pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test ⁴⁹ to see if Google thinks your website works well on mobile devices.

If you use separate URLs for your mobile pages, make sure to test both the mobile and the desktop URLs, so you can confirm that the redirect is recognized and crawlable.

Promote your website

While most of the links to your site will be added gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you'd like to let others know about the hard work you've put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject. As with most points covered in this document, taking these recommendations to an extreme could actually harm the reputation of your site.

A blog post on your own site letting your visitor base know that you added something new is a great way to get the word out about new content or services. Other webmasters who follow your site or RSS feed could pick the story up as well.
Know about social media sites
Putting effort into the offline promotion of your company or site can also be rewarding. For example, if you have a business site, make sure its URL is listed on your business cards, letterhead, posters, etc. You could also send out recurring newsletters to clients through the mail letting them know about new content on the company's website.

If you run a local business, adding its information to Google My Business ⁵¹ will help you reach customers on Google Maps and web search.
Reach out to those in your site's related community
Best Practices

Sites built around user interaction and sharing have made it easier to match interested groups of people up with relevant content.

Attempting to promote each new, small piece of content you create; go for big, interesting items.

Involving your site in schemes ⁵² where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services.

Chances are, there are a number of sites that cover topic areas similar to yours. Opening up communication with these sites is usually beneficial. Hot topics in your niche or community could spark additional ideas for content or building a good community resource.

Spamming link requests out to all sites related to your topic area.

Purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank.

Analyze your search performance and user behavior

Analyzing your search performance

Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters to analyze their performance in their search engine. For Google, that tool is Search Console ⁵³.

Search Console provides two important categories of information: Can Google find my content? How am I performing in Google Search results?

Using Search Console won't help your site get preferential treatment; however, it can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results.

With the service, webmasters can:

See which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling

Test and submit sitemaps

Analyze or generate robots.txt files

Remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot

Specify your preferred domain

Identify issues with title and description meta tags

Understand the top searches used to reach a site

Get a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages

Receive notifications of quality guidelines violations and request a site reconsideration

Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools ⁵⁴ also offers free tools for webmasters.

Analyzing user behavior on your site

If you've improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Search Console or other services, you're probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this. You can use these to:

For advanced users, the information an analytics package provides, combined with data from your server log files, can provide even more comprehensive information about how visitors are interacting with your documents (such as additional keywords that searchers might use to find your site).

Additional Resources

Webmaster Central Blog ⁵⁵
Get the latest information from our Webmaster Central blog. You can find information about updates to Google Search, new Search Console features, and much more.

Webmaster Help Forum ⁵⁶
Post questions about your site's issues and find tips to create high quality sites from the product forum for webmasters. There are many experienced contributors in the forum, including Top Contributors ⁵⁷ and occasionally Googlers.

Google Webmasters Google+⁵⁸
Join the webmaster community and stay up-to-date with our announcements, events, tips, and resources.

Google Webmasters Twitter ⁵⁹
Follow us for news and resources to help you make a great site.

Google Webmasters YouTube Channel ⁶⁰
Watch hundreds of helpful videos created for the webmaster community and get your questions answered by Googlers.

How Search Works ⁶¹
See what happens behind the scenes as you search for something in Google Search. You'll learn some really cool facts!

Get Your Business Online ⁶²
Register a free website if you have a small business in the US. GYBO is a partnership between Google and Homestead to help small businesses register a free website for one year.

Appendix: Link URLs used in this paper

The following URLs are referenced in this paper:

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide

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If you own, manage, monetize, or promote online content via Google Search, this guide is meant for you. You might be the owner of a growing and thriving business, the webmaster of a dozen sites, the SEO specialist in a Web agency or a DIY SEO ninja passionate about the mechanics of Search : this guide is meant for you.

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Here you find some more detailed information about SEO especially in the sector of tourism.

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Visibility in the search engines (SEO) remains a top priority for the travel sector. The evolving search landscape demands new SEO tactics and new ways to integrate SEO with other channels. Learn how you can improve your own search visibility... and give less commission to the OTAs!

The Current State of the Travel SEO Sector: OTAs

It is worthwhile to start with a few key concepts and key drivers in the travel sector. A good starting point is the relationship between Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), and the suppliers of services like accommodation providers and travel providers.

OTAs are the well-known providers of package holidays such as Expedia and Tripadvisor, as well as tour operators like TUI. They are third-party agencies that enable users to book directly by reselling a combination of hotel rooms, car hire, flights and more. Within this group, large companies like Expedia can be found, that comprises not just the Expedia.com brand, but also Hotels.com, Trivago and Hotwire.

Also within this group, you can find the rapid growth of specialised providers of hotels and private accommodation like Airbnb.

For many businesses in the travel sector, a top priority is the disintermediation of the OTAs. The suppliers of services are fighting back against the power of the OTAs, and we are witnessing the drive towards direct sales like Hilton's Stop Clicking Around campaign and British Airways Book Direct for a Better Deal campaign. From best price promises to loyalty schemes, suppliers are looking to reduce commission fees, as well as maintain a close relationship with their clients.

Central to this shift is an increase in visibility of brands; whether via SEO, PPC, social or any of the other channels.

Inevitable Growth of Digital in the Travel and Hospitality Sector

Global travel industry gross bookings reached $1.6 trillion in 201 7, making it one of the largest and fastest growing sectors in the world. We are seeing a marked change in behaviour in how customers are searching for and booking their travel arrangements.

First, we are seeing an increase in non-branded searches in what are called "category searches"; which are prime opportunities for an SEO campaign. Data from Google shows strong trends for category searches as part of the research phase in the buying process.

Mobile searching is a high growth opportunity, and SEO campaigns can be specifically designed to raise visibility in the mobile search results.

Understanding Travel SEO

SEO is the process of proving the relevance and value of our product/service/website for a particular search term, with a view to moving up the search engine rankings. With an online focus being so prevalent in the travel industry, travel SEO should be of high priority for any travel business seeking to succeed online.

But its value runs far deeper than simply being found on Google at the point of booking. Rather, the travel customer's journey to conversion is hinged on the ability to research, discuss and share information, recommendations and reviews.

Google has defined four "micro-moments" that define four key opportunities for your travel business to be discovered in the search engine results. At each of these moments, you need to have an SEO strategy that will ensure your visibility for the specific intention or needs of your customer.

This includes the start of the process when a customer is seeking inspiration and ideas, through to the actual planning of the trip, making the booking, and then finally doing more research.

This is where the challenges and opportunities lie for travel SEO. With search rankings so vital across such a broad range of moments in the customer journey, ranking well for a small number of phrases just isn't going to be good enough.

In the dreaming moments, I am starting to think about getting away. I may have taken inspiration from a film I saw, a display advertisement I saw on a webpage, or perhaps an advert in a magazine I read. My search behaviour will lead me to start the general research process, and the corresponding SEO strategy is to generate rich content that resembles those dreams. Your site needs to be found at this early dreaming phase in order to move onto the next critical stages. At this stage, a long tail SEO strategy can be highly effective, targeting highly specific phrases that show an intention to buy into your offering. For example:

Family-friendly trip to London

Luxury short break with Michelin star restaurant nearby

Dog-friendly hotels in the Lake District

In the planning moments, your leisure visitors are going to use the internet intensely. But we also know that whilst visitors formerly visited on average 38 websites in the planning phase, we also know expectations for instant gratification is rising. As a result, some reports are indicating those planning their travel are visiting as few as four sites during the planning process.

Google has created its own "planning moments" portal called Google Destinations.

At the booking moments, it is all about your user experience. Visitors have no problems with online reservations, but everything has to work correctly and in a way that they can trust. In terms of disintermediation, your SEO strategy has to be about your brand. If you are a smaller brand then you need to be muscling aside the OTAs. If you're a less well-known brand, then you need to make sure that all the variations of your brand name and spellings can be discovered. In terms of long tail searching, if I'm looking for something very specific, then you need to be sure that you are going to be ranking well.

Finally, in the experiencing moments when your guests are at your venue, your SEO strategy is all about ensuring guests can find the exact information about the surrounding countryside, things to do, and having a wonderful experience. It's all about reviews, sharing experiences, and connecting with other people. This is the perfect moment of the integration of your social media and search visibility strategies.

Link Building and Digital PR as Part of Your Travel SEO Strategy

Travel SEO is also very much dependent on high-quality link building. During the research and sharing stages, it is likely that potential customers will look off-site for what they perceive to be "unbiased" information, and a link from a well-trusted advice site would put you in good stead.

To give a real-life example, independent eco-tourism resort in Tobago, Castara Retreats will have benefited enormously from this review and link in The Guardian as well as a link from sites like Moneyweek.

A robust digital PR campaign is essential for a number of reasons, including getting visibility in trusted and high traffic sites. There are a wide range of highly trusted, highly relevant sites that could play an invaluable role in your SEO campaign:

All of these links would be valuable to a travel business because they all have good domain authority, and they are all respected sources of travel information. This list would be hugely expanded based on customer understanding, further research and digging into the specifics of the brand. The challenge for the travel sector is understanding the value each business within it adds to the websites from which they desire links; and being able to speak to potential customers in a way that is relevant to the stage of the customer journey they are at - not simply placing sales messages across the web.

User Experience and SEO

As the search engines get more sophisticated and seek to provide users with the best possible set of search results, the role of user experience is playing a key role in influencing a website's rankings in the search results.

In other words, the way in which users engage with your website and give signals that demonstrate their satisfaction with your site, could well be an important search ranking factor.

One important factor in website user satisfaction is the speed with which the page loads, and this is now a web ranking signal. You can read more about page speed and SEO here.

Another key influencer in SEO is dwell time: the amount of time spent on a page before returning back to the original search engine results page. It's a very interesting concept, and this article gives a useful overview.

Your Comprehensive Travel SEO Strategy

Creating a comprehensive travel SEO strategy will touch on a wide range of different tactics and strategies.

The advent of ridiculously fast mobile internet connections, the explosion of voice search, the growth of personalisation and one-to-one search results all are reshaping how SEO works in not just the travel industry, but every industry.

We have written a number of articles addressing some of these specific aspects of SEO that may also be of interest to you:

Travel SEO: A Summary

The travel industry in the UK is huge, and its move towards an online focus is a smart one. Whilst travel agents still have their place, more and more we see travel consumers taking their customer journey online - from research of the holiday, right through to sharing their holiday snaps on their return home.

With this broad customer journey comes a world of possibility from an SEO point of view. By understanding the customer journey, exploring new and longer keywords that are relevant to every step of the journey, creating a high-quality link profile based on adding value, and engaging users through social media; the travel industry has the opportunity to excel online. It is for this reason that the travel industry cannot and must not ignore the value of travel SEO.

To find out more about the SEO services offered by Hallam, take a look at our SEO and Digital Strategy pages or contact us to find out more. Our team of expert consultants have a wide range of experience, including working in and for the travel industry.

Are you a travel business or working in travel SEO? What is your experience of SEO in the travel industry? Share your comments below.

If you need help with your Travel and Tourism Sector don't hesitate to contact us.

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Travel SEO | The Importance of SEO in the Travel Industry

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Visibility in the search engines remains a top priority for businesses in the travel and hospitality sector. Find out these top tips for travel SEO that will help you to increase your search engine rankings; capturing customers at their key moments, and giving less commission to OTAs!

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One special sector of digital marketing is text message marketing. This article enables you to understand more about the potential of this kind of advertisement.

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The device that is practically in your target customers' hands is their Mobile Devices. With the world becoming more and more dependent on their cellular device every passing second, it is unquestionable that you should make a strategy around it.

Now when it comes to mobile advertising, the number one mode that presents itself to be used for floating that message across is text message. SMS Marketing has been growing its potential with every single increase in mobile devices. However in today's scenario when we have so many mode of communication and promotional platforms around us, naysayers have started questioning the power of SMS Marketing. So let us settle this once and for all.

Here I am going to answer all those questions which have been taking attention away from our old friend text messages.
Question 1: What role does SMS marketing portrays in today's technology friendly online market?
There is a class of people who believe that social media's or emailers reach is much more than what SMS Marketing can ever offer. But while it might be true in a generic way, when you think about the mix of people who use the social media, the chances of your messages not reaching the right set is very high.

Next, with every marketer across the world working their way around the social platform and emailers, the chance of your message vanishing in the flood of brands that are out there is very high.
Question 2: Is SMS Marketing for everyone or is industry specific?
Your mobile device will answer this question for you, mine does. From investment and banking to ecommerce and from travel to electricity and water bill reminder, almost every industry that is out there uses SMS Marketing. If you are from India, I am sure you must have noticed how one of the most traditional Railway industry also advertises on text messages, promoting their IRCTC Card and have promoted it to such an extent that the ticket they are sending through SMS are also being accepted as valid.
Question 3: How effective is SMS Marketing for your business?
Businesses belonging to all industries, irrespective of their market sizes are noticing that they can efficiently integrate SMS marketing in a larger marketing plan. With the help of a planned SMS marketing mechanisation, brands can make, schedule, and then automate their smart text message campaigns.

Ken Rhie, CEO of Trumpia says "SMS marketing is a proven channel that allows marketers to effectively reach consumers. Email and direct mail are just too slow, and social media is too inundated with spam. With a 90 percent open rate, SMS gets your messages read faster than any other channel."

Now that you have all your questions answered, let us look at some of the benefits you can derive by incorporating SMS Marketing in your promotional plan ...

With the time it takes for a message to reach your target customer's device from yours, being under two seconds, nothing comes first of SMS Marketing when it comes to getting your product reach millions.

The chance of customizing your promotional message reaching people according to their likes and preferences becomes very easy with the right SMS Marketing plan in place.

Unlike various other marketing methods where your users need to fill in a series of information just to be eligible to get updates on products, they just need to enter their number to receive text messages from your company. So, it is very point on when it comes to saving time.

It is much easier to check multiple mails and delete them in one click, but the second your phone beeps to notify them of a new message, the chances are very high that they will open it. In a number of cases, the text message automatically opens in the display.

SMS Marketing doesn't have to dodge and tackle the many email filters and spam that have their own set of criteria, which can prevent your message from reaching the right users. With just a press of a key on your computer, the brand reaches its customers, directly.

You know how many devices are there in the world? In three digit zillions, now out of so many devices, what do you think would be the amount of devices that you will need to send your message across to most people? Probably in millions. So the right SMS Marketing strategy can take you to millions in seconds.

With most phones having 160 characters limit, you don't have to play around words and worry what word or sentence would go with what message. It gives you the chance to not beat around the bush and draft your advertisement in a clear concise note.

Can be the center of all promotional channels

For a business that is out to reach the masses, it is no viable for you to stick with just one mode of promotion, you might be active on social media and emails as well. But how do you make the users aware of your presence in various platforms or how do you remind them of some campaign that you have started in some platform? By dropping a single message on their device!

With a series of advancement in the marketing world, a number of platforms have emerged posing to be beneficial for your business, and this has shadowed SMS Marketing to some extent. This occurrence works for the businesses who are looking to utilize text messages to make their brand reach on users' fingertips.

The best of SMS Marketing is that it is not dependent on a working internet connection. With the growing network charges, the medium comes around as the best option to save users' incurred cost while making them aware or engaged with the brand.

Although most people think SMS as a marketing tool solely, but it actually has a lot to do as a customer service resource. If you aren't currently using short message service for customer service along with your marketing mix, then you're failing to take full advantage of this powerful mode of communication.

According to eMarketer.com report: many users in the US, as well as Germany, prefer to text for customer service. 44% of respondents said that one of the reasons they preferred to send a text to a company's customer service department was because it was less time-consuming. 42% said they preferred to do so because it was more convenient than using the telephone." 30% say SMS-based customer service is less frustrating.

Over to you...

Have you incorporated SMS Marketing in your marketing and customer service strategy yet? How was the experience? Please share them in the comment section below.

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SMS Marketing Essentials - 10 Proven Reasons To Incorporate Text Messaging in Your Marketing Mix

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The device that is practically in your target customers' hands is their Mobile Devices. With the world becoming more and more dependent on their cellular device every passing second, it is unquestionable that you should make a strategy around it.

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To know more about Customer Relation Management and CRM systems, you can find information here.

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The better a business can manage the relationships it has with its customers the more successful it will become. Therefore IT systems that specifically address the problems of dealing with customers on a day-to-day basis are growing in popularity.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is not just the application of technology, but is a strategy to learn more about customers' needs and behaviours in order to develop stronger relationships with them. As such it is more of a business philosophy than a technical solution to assist in dealing with customers effectively and efficiently. Nevertheless, successful CRM relies on the use of technology.

This guide outlines the business benefits and the potential drawbacks of implementing CRM. It also offers help on the types of solution you could choose and how to implement them.

Why CRM?

In the commercial world the importance of retaining existing customers and expanding business is paramount. The costs associated with finding new customers mean that every existing customer could be important.

The more opportunities that a customer has to conduct business with your company the better, and one way of achieving this is by opening up channels such as direct sales, online sales, franchises, use of agents, etc. However, the more channels you have, the greater the need to manage your interaction with your customer base.

Customer relationship management (CRM) helps businesses to gain an insight into the behaviour of their customers and modify their business operations to ensure that customers are served in the best possible way. In essence, CRM helps a business to recognise the value of its customers and to capitalise on improved customer relations. The better you understand your customers, the more responsive you can be to their needs.

CRM can be achieved by:

finding out about your customers' purchasing habits, opinions and preferences

profiling individuals and groups to market more effectively and increase sales

changing the way you operate to improve customer service and marketing

Benefiting from CRM is not just a question of buying the right software. You must also adapt your business to the needs of your customers.

Business benefits of CRM

Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution might involve considerable time and expense. However, there are many potential benefits.

A major benefit can be the development of better relations with your existing customers, which can lead to:

increased sales through better timing due to anticipating needs based on historic trends

identifying needs more effectively by understanding specific customer requirements

cross-selling of other products by highlighting and suggesting alternatives or enhancements

identifying which of your customers are profitable and which are not

This can lead to better marketing of your products or services by focusing on:

effective targeted marketing communications aimed specifically at customer needs

a more personal approach and the development of new or improved products and services in order to win more business in the future

Ultimately this could lead to:

enhanced customer satisfaction and retention, ensuring that your good reputation in the marketplace continues to grow

increased value from your existing customers and reduced cost associated with supporting and servicing them, increasing your overall efficiency and reducing total cost of sales

improved profitability by focusing on the most profitable customers and dealing with the unprofitable in more cost effective ways

Once your business starts to look after its existing customers effectively, efforts can be concentrated on finding new customers and expanding your market. The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to identify new prospects and increase your customer base.

Even with years of accumulated knowledge, there's always room for improvement. Customer needs change over time, and technology can make it easier to find out more about customers and ensure that everyone in an organisation can exploit this information.

Types of CRM solution

Customer relationship management (CRM) is important in running a successful business. The better the relationship, the easier it is to conduct business and generate revenue. Therefore using technology to improve CRM makes good business sense.

CRM solutions fall into the following four broad categories.

Outsourced solutions

Application service providers can provide web-based CRM solutions for your business. This approach is ideal if you need to implement a solution quickly and your company does not have the in-house skills necessary to tackle the job from scratch. It is also a good solution if you are already geared towards online e-commerce.

Off-the-shelf solutions

Several software companies offer CRM applications that integrate with existing packages. Cut-down versions of such software may be suitable for smaller businesses. This approach is generally the cheapest option as you are investing in standard software components. The downside is that the software may not always do precisely what you want and you may have to trade off functionality for convenience and price. The key to success is to be flexible without compromising too much.

Custom software

For the ultimate in tailored CRM solutions, consultants and software engineers will customise or create a CRM system and integrate it with your existing software.

However, this can be expensive and time consuming. If you choose this option, make sure you carefully specify exactly what you want. This will usually be the most expensive option and costs will vary depending on what your software designer quotes.

Managed solutions

A half-way house between custom and outsourced solutions, this involves renting a customised suite of CRM applications as a tailored package. This can be cost effective but it may mean that you have to compromise in terms of functionality.

How to implement CRM

The implementation of a customer relationship management (CRM) solution is best treated as a six-stage process, moving from collecting information about your customers and processing it to using that information to improve your marketing and the customer experience.

Stage 1 - Collecting information

The priority should be to capture the information you need to identify your customers and categorise their behaviour. Those businesses with a website and online customer service have an advantage as customers can enter and maintain their own details when they buy.

Stage 2 - Storing information

The most effective way to store and manage your customer information is in a relational database - a centralised customer database that will allow you to run all your systems from the same source, ensuring that everyone uses up-to-date information.

Stage 3 - Accessing information

With information collected and stored centrally, the next stage is to make this information available to staff in the most useful format.

Stage 4 - Analysing customer behaviour

Using data mining tools in spreadsheet programs, which analyse data to identify patterns or relationships, you can begin to profile customers and develop sales strategies.

Stage 5 - Marketing more effectively

Many businesses find that a small percentage of their customers generate a high percentage of their profits. Using CRM to gain a better understanding of your customers' needs, desires and self-perception, you can reward and target your most valuable customers.

Stage 6 - Enhancing the customer experience

Just as a small group of customers are the most profitable, a small number of complaining customers often take up a disproportionate amount of staff time. If their problems can be identified and resolved quickly, your staff will have more time for other customers.

Potential drawbacks of CRM

There are several reasons why implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution might not have the desired results.

There could be a lack of commitment from people within the company to the implementation of a CRM solution. Adapting to a customer-focused approach may require a cultural change. There is a danger that relationships with customers will break down somewhere along the line, unless everyone in the business is committed to viewing their operations from the customers' perspective. The result is customer dissatisfaction and eventual loss of revenue.

Poor communication can prevent buy-in. In order to make CRM work, all the relevant people in your business must know what information you need and how to use it.

Weak leadership could cause problems for any CRM implementation plan. The onus is on management to lead by example and push for a customer focus on every project. If a proposed plan isn't right for your customers, don't do it. Send your teams back to the drawing board to come up with a solution that will work.

Trying to implement CRM as a complete solution in one go is a tempting but risky strategy. It is better to break your CRM project down into manageable pieces by setting up pilot programs and short-term milestones. Consider starting with a pilot project that incorporates all the necessary departments and groups but is small and flexible enough to allow adjustments along the way.

Don't underestimate how much data you will require, and make sure that you can expand your systems if necessary. You need to carefully consider what data is collected and stored to ensure that only useful data is kept.

You must also ensure you comply with Québec's An Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector.

Avoid adopting rigid rules which cannot be changed. Rules should be flexible to allow the needs of individual customers to be met.

Questions for CRM suppliers

For many businesses customer relationship management (CRM) can be a large investment. Therefore it is vital to choose your supplier carefully. Making the wrong choice could be expensive and even jeopardise your business. Before implementing a solution based on CRM technology, you might want to ask any potential suppliers the following questions:

How long has the supplier been established?

What are the specific costs associated with the product, i.e. a one-off purchase price, an annual renewable license, a charge per user etc?

Does the supplier offer any form of evaluation software so that you can try before you buy?

How much is charged for technical support?

Does the supplier provide consultancy and, if so, at what rates?

Is the system scalable? If your customer base grows will the system expand to cope?

Can the supplier recommend any third-party developers that make use of their core CRM products?

Is there an active independent user group where experience and ideas can be freely exchanged?

Can the supplier provide references for businesses in your industry sector using their software?

Does it offer training in the CRM solution and, if so, at what typical cost?

Original document, Customer relationship management, © Crown copyright 2009
Source: Business Link UK (now GOV.UK/Business)
Adapted for Québec by Info entrepreneurs

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The better a business can manage the relationships it has with its customers the more successful it will become. Therefore IT systems that specifically address the problems of dealing with customers on a day-to-day basis are growing in popularity.

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After knowing about CRM basics, you can compare different systems by checking out this article about the advantages and disadvantages of leading CMS products.

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CRM-Systeme vorgestellt. (Foto: Sellf)

| Hinweis: Artikel enthält Provisions-Links - Was ist das?

CRM-Systeme sind für den Aufbau eines erfolgreichen Unternehmens essentiell. Doch was sind die Anforderungen? Und welche Lösungen gibt es am Markt? Eine Übersicht.

Egal, ob frisch gegründetes Startup oder Freelancer mit explodierender Auftragslage: Irgendwann wachsen einem die Kunden sprichwörtlich über den Kopf. E-Mails müssen organisiert, Termine vereinbart, Angebote und Rechnungen erstellt, Zahlungseingänge überwacht sowie Support geleistet werden. So entstehen riesige Datenmengen, die einerseits wertvoll sind, andererseits aber auch eine große Last darstellen.

Denn sobald die täglich anfallenden Aufgaben nicht mehr aus dem Gedächtnis bewältigt oder auf einen Notizblock festgehalten werden können, kommt es zu großen Kontrollverlusten. Dinge werden vergessen sowie wichtige Absprachen und Termine nicht eingehalten. Dies schadet auf Dauer nicht nur dem Kunden, sondern auch dem eigenen Unternehmen. Spätestens jetzt sollte der Einsatz eines Customer-Relationship-Management-Systems (CRM) in Betracht gezogen werden.

Was CRM-Systeme leisten müssen

Mit einem CRM-System lassen sich Kundenbeziehungen einfach verwalten und pflegen, sodass auch in Zeiten starken Wachstums nichts verloren geht. Einmal getätigte Anrufe, gesendete E-Mails, stattgefundene Besprechungen oder erhaltene Anfragen - alles lässt sich zurückverfolgen und bei Bedarf abrufen.

Aber CRM-Systeme sind doch nur was für Mittelständler und Großkonzerne? Dieses Vorurteil stimmt nur zur Hälfte. Zwar richten sich viele Lösungen tatsächlich an Unternehmen mit drei- oder vierstelliger Mitarbeiterzahl. Jedoch gibt es inzwischen einige CRM-Systeme auf dem Markt, die auf die Anforderungen von kleinen bis mittleren Unternehmen zugeschnitten sind.

Zu den Anforderungen eines modernen CRM-Systems gehören etwa eine einfache Bedienbarkeit, die Verfügbarkeit auch für Smartphone und Tablet, ein ansprechendes Design sowie die Anbindung an zahlreiche Online-Dienste. Und nicht zuletzt: Ein fairer Preis. Schließlich ist das Budget gerade bei Startups und Freelancern begrenzt. Die folgenden CRM-Systeme wollen diesen Ansprüchen gerecht werden. Ein Check.

20 CRM-Systeme im Überblick

Zoho

Das webbasierte Zoho-CRM wird angeblich von mehr als 20 Millionen Menschen genutzt. Beliebt ist die Software auch wegen ihrer Funktionsvielfalt: So lassen sich Leads und Opportunities dokumentieren, E-Mails versenden, Kontakte verwalten und dazugehörige Aufgaben planen. Zudem stehen Plugins für die Anbindung an eigene MS-Office-, Google-, Facebook- oder Twitter-Konten zur Verfügung.

Das Preismodel ist flexibel gehalten. Los geht's ab 12 US-Dollar pro Nutzer und Monat mit steigendem Funktionsumfang. Die Enterprise-Version schlägt mit 100 US-Dollar pro Nutzer und Monat zu Buche. Wer Zoho als Freelancer oder im Team mit bis zu zehn Mitarbeitern nutzen will, zahlt allerdings nichts.

Salesforce

Salesforce gilt als Marktführer unter den CRM-Systemen und wegen der mächtigen Funktionen als entsprechend kostspielig. Teams mit bis zu fünf Mitgliedern zahlen zwar nur 27 Euro im Monat pro Benutzer, ein wirklich vollwertiges CRM gibt es aber erst ab 135 Euro monatlich. Für den Preis bekommt man einen riesigen Funktionsumfang. Dafür sorgt der hauseigene App-Exchange-Market mit über 2.500 Plugins.

Base

Das modularen Base-CRM-System (Provisions-Link) richtet sich vor allem an Sales-Spezialisten. Die Anwendung erlaubt mithilfe des „Lead Trackings" die Erfassung und Verfolgung anstehender Verkäufe. Zudem können mehrere Firmen und Kontakte mit einem Projekt oder Auftrag verknüpft werden. Nutzer wählen aus drei Abo-Paketen, die sich im Leistungsumfang voneinander unterscheiden. Los geht's mit der Einsteiger-Version ab 45 US-Dollar pro Nutzer und Monat.

Highrise

Die gleichnamigen Projektmanagement-Software hat das Unternehmen Basecamp bekannt gemacht, doch mit Highrise hat man auch ein CRM-System in petto. Für bis zu 30.000 Kundenkontakte können E-Mails erfasst, Notizen gespeichert sowie Angebote und Rechnungen erstellt und dokumentiert werden. 100 Add-Ons machen das CRM außerdem individuell an die eigenen Bedürfnisse anpassbar. Unternehmen bis sechs Personen zahlen 24 US-Dollar im Monat, größere Teams rund 50 US-Dollar.

Batchbook

￼Neben der üblichen Einbindung von Kundenkontakten und E-Mail-Konversationen setzt Batchbook auf die Kompatibilität zu externen Webdiensten. Von Mailchimp über Freshbooks bis hin zu Disqus führt Batchbook eine große Palette an Plugins aus den Bereichen Marketing, Accounting und Kundenkommunikation im Sortiment. Eine Besonderheit liegt im Preis: Der ist mit 39 US-Dollar im Monat oberklassig, gilt aber für alle Teams egal welcher Größe.

CentralStationCRM

￼Aus Deutschland stammt CentralstationCRM (Provisions-Link). Kleine Unternehmen können mit dem Tool alle Adressen, E-Mails, Termine und Umsatzaktivitäten ihrer Kunden an einem zentralen Ort zusammenführen und steuern. Offene Angebote können ebenso im Blick behalten werden wie wichtige Kennzahlen und Aufgaben. Und Preislich? Dauerhaft kostenlos für Freelancer und kleine Teams bis drei Mitarbeiter. Wer etwa bis zu 1.000 Kunden verwaltet, zahlt 19 Euro pro Monat.

SugarCRM

￼Ein CRM-System auf Open-Source-Basis? Das gibt es mit SugarCRM. Die webbasierte CRM-Software kann auf PHP- und MySQL- beziehungsweise Oracle-Basis getrimmt werden. E-Mails lassen sich aus Outlook, Gmail, IBM Lotus Notes und Yahoo heraus integrieren, zudem ist eine Anbindung von Apps aus dem Google-Fundus (Kalender, Kontakte, Dokumente) möglich. SugarCRM sieht schick aus und bereitet die wichtigsten Daten grafisch auf. Los geht's ab 40 US-Dollar im Monat.

Hinweis: Wir haben in diesem Artikel Provisions-Links - auch Affiliate-Links genannt - verwendet und sie durch „(Provisions-Link)" gekennzeichnet. Erfolgt über diese Links eine Bestellung, erhält t3n.de eine Provision vom Verkäufer, für den Besteller entstehen keine Mehrkosten.

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CRM-Systeme: 20 Tools zur Kundenverwaltung im Check

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Hinweis: Artikel enthält Provisions-Links - Was ist das? CRM-Systeme sind für den Aufbau eines erfolgreichen Unternehmens essentiell. Doch was sind die Anforderungen? Und welche Lösungen gibt es am Markt? Eine Übersicht. Egal, ob frisch gegründetes Startup oder Freelancer mit explodierender Auftragslage: Irgendwann wachsen einem die Kunden sprichwörtlich über den Kopf.

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This homepage about a global program to develop online tourism in emerging markets around the world can give you some interesting information about new projects and ideas.

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Practical and Affordable Online Tourism Conferences and Training for Emerging Markets.

Welcome to the official website for E-Tourism Frontiers, an initiative to develop a sustainable and equitable online tourism sector in emerging markets in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Our events feature some of the world's leading Online Tourism Experts and service providers- and sessions on e-marketing, travel distribution and sales, social networking and New Media. We are not an agency and do not sell services on behalf of others and offer independent and practical advice and training.

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Welcome to E-Tourism Frontiers Practical and Affordable Online Tourism Conferences and Training for Emerging Markets. Welcome to the official website for E-Tourism Frontiers, an initiative to develop a sustainable and equitable online tourism sector in emerging markets in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

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International Tourism and Hospitality ind the digital Age

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International Tourism and Hospitality ind the digital Age

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For further and more detailed information about content management in the sector of tourism, there is an informative book that can be bought following this link.

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International Tourism and Hospitality in the Digital Age

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Tourism is one of the most rapidly evolving industries of the twenty-first century. The economy of many countries all over the world depends on their ability to attract visitors and maintain a distinct edge in a highly competitive market.

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Database Marketing in the Tourism Industry

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Database Marketing in the Tourism Industry

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To get a detailed view about the development of the use of database information in the sector of tourism, read this article  from the UK that discusses database marketing in the travel and tourism industry.

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For some advanced students, here you have a more complex tutorial about databases.

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DBMS Tutorial for Beginners - Learn DBMS in simple and easy steps starting from basic to advanced concepts with examples including overview, Architecture, data models, data schemas, data independence, ED Diagram, Generalization, Aggregation, Codd's Rules, Relational Data Model, Relational Algebra, Database Design, Normalization, Database Joins, Database Storage, Database File System, Indexing, Hashing, Transaction, Concurrency Control, Deadlock, Backup and Recovery.

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The world tourism organisation systematically gathers tourism statistics around the world and provides these in various data sets.

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Compendium of Tourism Statistics Statistical information on tourism's multiple facets is pivotal in advancing knowledge of the sector, monitoring progress, promoting results-focused management, and highlighting strategic issues for policy decisions. The Compendium provides statistical data and indicators on inbound, outbound and domestic tourism, as well as on the number and types of tourism industries, the number of employees by tourism industries, and macroeconomic indicators related to international tourism.

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If you want to know more about how newsletter commerce works and what its advantages are, take a look into the following link.

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What is newsletter marketing and why it's important for ecommerce

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Newsletters give online businesses an opportunity to demonstrate authority and expertise on the subject of their products.

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To get a first idea about the contents of digital marketing, this free guide might help you get in touch with the subject. It provides information about different aspects of digital marketing including developments and job profiles.

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The Who, What, Why, & How of Digital Marketing

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Find out what digital marketing is today, the tactics involved, the types of content you can create, and the purpose digital marketing serves.

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The European commission offers this digital toolbox to learn how to use the power of social media and other digital tools (for touristic enterprises).

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An introduction of digital pricing strategies is provided by the New Zealand's independent tourism industry community.

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Setting pricing for tourism businesses is a strong mix of marketing strategy and financial analysis. Is there a formula for developing pricing for tourism businesses?

Not really - tourism products are very rarely identical, often because of location, but also because of the people and the components that make up the experience you provide a traveller. It can be incredibly diverse and pricing strategies can evolve as a tourism business develops it's brand and market share. Even star ratings for accommodation only give a general guide for travellers on what the pricing will be - there are not set criteria.

So the purpose of this article is not about helping you with a formula to devise your pricing, but more of an outline of the things you should consider, components of your pricing strategy, different pricing types and ways to stimulate demand.

Things to consider when setting your pricing strategy

How unique is your business? The more unique your tourism product the more flexibility you will have to decide your pricing.

What value added services do you provide inclusive of the experience?

What market do you want to attract and what positioning in the market do you want to establish?

What are your operating costs (fixed and variable)? Using your costs, get your accountant to help you calculate your break-even point and therefore what your minimum pricing should be for profit goals (estimates of revenue, occupancy rates etc will be needed).

For most tourism businesses setting prices will be more market based - that is, what do competitors with similar products and services charge within your market? Be careful however, you must be aware of your own financial position (debt levels, cash flow etc) before you can decide whether you should compete in this way. Ideally being competitive is not price driven, it's product driven.

Where to start

Knowledge of your break-even point is an important place to start, but on launch of a new tourism business it may be that pricing is set lower than your longer term pricing expectations in order to attract volume, credibility and establish your brand. Then as you become more established with a regular booking base you can consider increasing prices.

Of course this is wholly dependent on your overall marketing strategy. For tourism businesses that cater to the exclusive/luxury traveller pricing may not fluctuate much at all. While those targeting the budget travel market may not have too much room to move on pricing and they will rely on volumes of bookings.

Pricing Components

Your pricing strategy may be made up of the following components:
Rack Rates
All tourism businesses should have a rack rate - this is your "full rate" before any discounts are applied and typically is what is provided to wholesalers and printed on brochures for the season ahead. For activity and attraction operators their full rate is more likely to be charged all the time without any day to day discounting, however accommodation operators - particularly those in the middle of the market will be changing pricing almost daily for the month or 2 months ahead to fill gaps.
Seasonal Pricing
Using a mix of pricing throughout the year to cover low, high, and shoulder seasons is a standard way for tourism businesses to cater for differing levels of demand due to the time of year. Typically these will be the same date periods each year but may also apply for school holiday dates and for local events where the dates vary each year.
Last Minute Pricing
A common method for accommodation suppliers to fill those last minute gaps in inventory availability, last minute pricing is basically discounting daily prices according to forward bookings and promoted on last minute booking websites.

Common Pricing Types

Per Person pricing: A set price per person e.g Adult and Children prices. Commonly used by activity/attraction and transport operators or backpacker accommodation and camp sites. Options may include an adult, child and senior citizen price.

Per Unit pricing: - A set price for 1 unit of the product e.g. Price per night, this is the standard way to price accommodation, usually the advertised price is for 2 people so if the accommodation fits more than 2 guests it can have a mix of the per person pricing with extra adult and extra child rates.

Single or double occupancy - common for B&B's there is a single rate and a double rate (which is not double that of the single rate).

Discounting

While discounting has it's place, and often unavoidable in a competitive market such as tourism, be very wary about continually discounting your prices to stimulate demand - it can become a rocky road to reducing profitability or even missing that vital break-even point. Be selective with last minute pricing deals - don't make every day reduced, just select those where you really do need extra bookings. Consider adding conditions to a discounted price like a minimum stay or number of travellers in the booking. While a booking is better than no booking at all, customers do become used to a certain price level and you therefore run the risk of not only making it hard for you to charge your normal rack rates, but it will also devalue your product - remember perception is everything in tourism!

Package Deals

Developing packages with complimentary tourism partners in your area or with value added components is a good way to stimulate demand without having to discount. Strike up deals with local businesses to provide a full package and share business with each other - you should be able to get their products or services at a "net" rate so the package pricing is better than if they had purchased each component separately. Packaging can also be used to target niche markets effectively e.g golf weekend, food and wine tours, pampering packages etc.

Commissions

Many bookings will come via some sort of third party who will charge you a commission such as a retail travel agent, wholesaler, inbound tour operator or online travel agent (OTA). Many tourism operators are tempted to add the value of the commission on to the pricing for these providers but this should actually be considered in the setting of your rack rates anyway - if you have different pricing across different distribution channels it just confuses both travellers and can jeopardise industry relationships, so keep it simple.

Got any additional advice or alternative views? Feel free to add your comment.

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Setting pricing for tourism businesses is a strong mix of marketing strategy and financial analysis. Is there a formula for developing pricing for tourism businesses? Not really - tourism products are very rarely identical, often because of location, but also because of the people and the components that make up the experience you provide a traveller.

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To get more into detail with the pricing tactics, you can read this pdf file about the tactics of pricing, using a research span of 30 years.

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A little introduction into the topic of IoT with explanatory videos and links for further reading can be found here.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects, devices, vehicles, buildings and other items - embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.

The tourism industry is often viewed as a slower adopter of technology, but still continuously looks for the latest innovations, which would enable them to improve operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction.
How does IoT affect the tourism industry?
The adoption of IoT creates great opportunities and challenges. With a continuous stream of information, people can know more about the world, and of course, companies can know more about people.

In 2016, it's no longer a discussion about what is IoT but rather about how to implement it because it's already here. According to Gartner and Cisco 99% of physical objects that may one day join the network are still unconnected, 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016 and nearly 21 billion devices on the Internet of Things by 2020.
How is IoT used in Hospitality and Tourism?
Mobile Keys were already introduced this year by some hoteliers like Starwood and Hilton. Guests no longer need to wait in line at the front desk. Through a mobile app, guests are notified when their room is ready. Once at the room, guests simply wave their phone in front of the lock to open the door. Mobile keys increase guest satisfaction and the likelihood of a customer booking a room through the hotel's app or website. Starwood is using the SPG keyless entry phone app so that guests book through Starwood's own properties rather than Expedia, Hotels.com, etc.

The next step is to collect data from each room using a unique digital identity. Each room can be booked, rated and reviewed individually. In addition, each guest can be monitored by room identity. This allows hotels to collect data about a guest's preferences in order to offer them a more customized experience during their next stay:

perfectly regulated room temperature, suggested playlists based on favourite artists, selection of TV channels based on viewing habits, ideal assortment of mini bar items, etc.

loT also makes it possible to perform preventive maintenance remotely. Malfunctioning equipment can be detected and analyzed long before it becomes a major issue - meaning maintenance can be planned for a convenient time and rooms do not unexpectedly need to closed off for repairs.
Smart Luggage
It has already been introduced by a few manufacturers as a prototype. One such manufacturer is Trunkster: A Kickstarter project that raised $1,395,370 to bring their luggage idea to production. Trunkster offers zipperless luggage equipped with GPS + Battery + Scale.
The Challenges
The main challenge that organizations trying to implement IoT face today are that this new technology involves sensors and a new kind of data produced by machines. This data needs to be collected, stored and analyzed so it is really an IT challenge that requires using new tools and methods. Even if we collect a lot of data we still have the challenge of what "wisdom" can we produce from this data to benefit our business goals in a profitable manner.

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_Pyramid http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3165317 http://www.cio.com/article/2842680/smartphones/hilton-and-starwood-hotel-guests-can-soon-unlock-rooms-with-smartphones.html http://news.hiltonworldwide.com/index.cfm/news/hilton-introduces-digital-key-further-enhancing-industryleading-hhonors-app- http://www.trunkster.co/

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Tourism and The Internet of Things - IoT - Tourism Networking - Medium

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects, devices, vehicles, buildings and other items - embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data. The tourism industry is often viewed as a slower adopter of technology, but still continuously looks for the latest innovations, which would enable them to improve operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction.

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Impact of digitalisation on Workers Autonomy

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Impact of digitalisation on Workers Autonomy

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This detailed 40 pages article discusses the impact of digitalisation on the workers autonomy regarding their hierarchical level.

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Here you can find some information about smart luggage� as an example of IoT and a cross section between digital and analogue world

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Öffnen per Fingerabdruck, GPS-Tracking, mobile Powerbank: Seit der Koffer das Rollen gelernt hat, gab es beim Reisegepäck kaum Innovationen. Dafür können neuartige Trolleys nun umso mehr - sogar selbst fahren oder sich wiegen. Müssen wir uns bald daran gewöhnen, dass Flugpassagiere sich auf ihr motorisiertes Handgepäck setzen und vom Schalter zum Gate brausen? Als der vielreisende Unternehmer Kevin O'Donnell aus Chicago seine Kinder mal wieder auf dem Rollkoffer hinter sich her zog, kam ihm die Idee: "Warum eigentlich können wir auf unserem Gepäck nicht selber fahren?" Er setzte sie um.

Gemeinsam mit einem Bekannten konstruierte O'Donnell die bis zu 13 km/h schnelle Modobag - mit Fußrasten, Teleskoplenkstange und Bremshebel. Über die Crowdfunding-Plattform Indiegogo kann der Trolley vorbestellt werden. Mit der ganzen Technik an Bord bleiben immerhin noch 85 Prozent des ursprünglichen Volumens für die eigenen sieben Sachen.

Die Möglichkeit, über das Internet Geld für seine Ideen einzusammeln, hat Bewegung in die Gepäckbranche gebracht, in der große Weiterentwicklungen lange Zeit Mangelware waren. "Innovationen sind sehr überschaubar, seit es Koffer gibt", sagt Ulrich Reinhardt von der BAT-Stiftung für Zukunftsfragen. Die wortwörtlich umwälzendste Idee der vergangenen Jahrzehnte waren seiner Ansicht nach die Rollen unterm Koffer, die das Schleppen des Gepäcks weitgehend überflüssig machen.

Doch jetzt erobert Smart Luggage die Lounges und Terminals - Gepäckstücke mit erweitertem Funktionsumfang dank Digitaltechnik. Das Spektrum an Fähigkeiten ist breit und reicht von der Lademöglichkeit fürs Handy über GPS-Tracking bei Verlust bis zum Entfernungsalarm, den zum Beispiel das Berliner Start-up Horizn Studios für seinen Cabin Trolley als Extra anbietet.

Kunden können eine scheckkartengroße Guard Card erwerben, die mit dem Smartphone über Bluetooth in Verbindung steht. Es schlägt Alarm, wenn die Karte im Koffer steckt und dieser sich mehr als 30 Meter vom Träger des Handys entfernt - etwa wenn ein Diebstahl im Gange ist. "Unser Anliegen ist es, Reisen komfortabler und sorgenfreier zu gestalten", sagt Horizn-Studios-Gründer Stefan Holwe.

Auch andere denken so und gehen in dem Versuch, ihren Produkten möglichst viel digitale Intelligenz einzuhauchen, noch weiter - etwa das US-Unternehmen BlueSmart aus San Francisco. Ab einem gewissen Abstand zum Besitzer schließt sich der BlueSmart Trolley von selbst. Im Griff ist eine Zugwaage eingebaut. Wer den Koffer hochhebt, bekommt das Gewicht auf dem Handy angezeigt.

Die Powerbank zum Laden elektronischer Geräte an USB-Ports kann anders als beim Konkurrenzprodukt von Horizn Studios allerdings nicht entnommen werden. Will man seinen Trolley als Aufgabegepäck abgeben, geht das dann laut den Sicherheitsbestimmungen vieler Airlines nicht.

© manager magazin 2017
Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung

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Smart Luggage: Intelligentes Gepäck macht Reisen leichter - manager magazin

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Öffnen per Fingerabdruck, GPS-Tracking, mobile Powerbank: Seit der Koffer das Rollen gelernt hat, gab es beim Reisegepäck kaum Innovationen. Dafür können neuartige Trolleys nun umso mehr - sogar selbst fahren oder sich wiegen. Müssen wir uns bald daran gewöhnen, dass Flugpassagiere sich auf ihr motorisiertes Handgepäck setzen und vom Schalter zum Gate brausen?

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The German government (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) is leading a research program about the ongoing digitalisation in our society.

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Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung - BMBF Digitale Zukunft

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Besser leben durch Digitalisierung - BMBF Digitale Zukunft

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Die Digitalisierung entlastet die Menschen in ihrem Alltag spürbar. Innovative Lösungen machen das Leben sicherer und komfortabler: Sie fördern die Gesundheit, unterstützen zuhause oder unterwegs im Straßenverkehr.

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The university of Ulm provides a short article about sematic technologies and its use.

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If not stated otherwise this document is for free use under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike: distribute of derivative works only under a license identical ("not more restrictive") to the license that governs the original work (CC BY-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Logos are excluded from free licensing.

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This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. The present presentation reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.