RM Magazine issue 8 RM MAGAZINE issue 8 | Page 6

F E AT U R E A R T I C L E How Search works Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial to your hotel’s online visibility on search engines. It’s also a vast topic that is constantly in a flux and often misinterpreted. Starting with this post, we’ll break down the basics for you and get you started on making the most of this channel. What Are Search Engines? What Do They Do? Think of search engines as answer machines. A user types in a query (called keyword). The search engine scours its data of billions of documents (web pages, images, etc) and in less than a second serves up what it thinks is the most relevant response to the user’s query. Relevance and popularity along 6 Better Revenue I Better Industry I APAC I www.revenuemanagement.com.au with hundreds of other factors influence the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The search engine spits of hundreds and thousands of pages in results, but it’s really the first page that matters. 92% of search traffic comes from page one of the search results, 4.8% from page two and 1.1% from page three. What Is SEO? It is the strategy, comprised of both creative and technical elements, used to increase the authority, visibility and presence of a website organically