We look at a number of effective Travel SEO Link Building Ideas and Strategies to build great links to your site to increase your search engine rankings, reduce your PPC costs, improve brand visibility and to bring in more customers & Conversions

1. 1
November 2013
Travel SEO & LinkBuilding Strategies

2. Firstly grab the GOOD but Free links
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Step 1: Grab the FREE Low Hanging Fruit
Business Directories
Niche Travel Directories (relevance is the
new
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CSS Galleries

3. Submit your URL to Business
Directories
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Business Directories:
Free to submit to
– often with travel subsections (relevance and semantics)
Great for Local SEO
Free (generally)
Pro tip: Scrape directories from Google SERPS, filter by
PR/pages indexed/ #backlinks/# referring domains, then
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submit to the cream of the crop

4. Submit your website to Travel
Directories
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Travel Directories
Free to submit to
Can usually find sites in your specific niche (e.g. Winter travel)
Super-relevant makes links worthwhile – focus on relevancy vs
Generics
Plenty of travel directories with great domain level metrics – links
have true value
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5. Take advantage of authority CSS
Directories
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CSS / Site showcase sites & Directories for backlinks
Some showcase sites are pr6, pr7
Free to submit to
If your site is good enough you can often get featured on homepage of a
gallery site and enjoy a lot of link-equity (some sites are pr7!)
Sites have subsections for niches for relevance
Links are permanent
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6. Scaling the research, selection &
submission process
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Scrape Search engine results pages for candidate sites
(Scrapebox is good for this)
Check domain level metrics using ScrapeBox and other tools (eg
SEOGadget’s tool)
Automate part of the submission process using RoboForm Pro or
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another form-filler app (with custom fields)


7. Become a Travel News Authority
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Leverage Industry-Related News & Events
Get ‘the scoop’ and the links follow immediately
Tactical Coverage fosters links, Shares &
Relationships
Get syndicated where it gets eyeballs & Counts
(NewsNow Travel Section, Google 01/11/2013
News)


8. Do something newsworthy and tell the
world
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Do something noteworthy in your vertical
Shout about it, let everyone know [social, email.
Press-releases]
E.g. released / releasing a travel app? =>

Possible
to get coverage & links from big
newspapers, travel tech sites, general tech sites (VERY
easy to get links from tech sites)
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9. Leverage Charity Tie-ins for Links + PR
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Everyone loves ‘giving’ and getting involved with charity and
other good causes
No shortage of big travel brands getting involved in charity

http://www.disabilitysnowsport.org.uk/Sponsors.aspx
http://interactiveresorts.co.uk/fete
Easy way to get links that cannot be bought or traded – e.g.
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from travel forums, news sections on even your competitors’
sites

10. Use Celebrities in Your Content
Marketing
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Tapping into the fan-bases of celebrities can be great for
attracting site visitors
Increase brand-awareness and credibility, and of course
garnering links from relevant sites and related sites
E.g ski companies can garner links from winter
snowsports sites/forums/blogs

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11. Know Your Customer & Write Great Content
For Them
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Use Personas for site visitor modelling
Use internal search data to fill in blank
spots in your own content
Use personas for Q&A Type content
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

12. Leverage events + structured data
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People attending events need to get there and often need to
stay there
Event names are low competition search-terms – easy to rank
for
Microformats like hEvent make your data easily understood (vs
read) by Search Engines
Search Engines <3 structured Data

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13. Affiliate program => Links
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As well as bringing in business, affiliate
programs can be a smart way to build links
too.
It’s possible to get SEO value from affiliate
links (if done in a smart way) 01/11/2013


14. Use Infographics & Novel Data Visualization to
Share Data
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Leverage your own internal data => give insights +
share
People like to share ‘good looking data’
Plenty of free data visualization tools to package your
data in a nice way
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Make it sharable => get links


15. Use Reviews For huge SEO Benefits
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Rich Snippets to ‘Outclick’ Competitors in SERPs
PPC - use trustpilot to get critical mass of good
reviews for review stars in your PPC listing – increased
CTR benefits
 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6%
increase in conversion rates:
User-Generated Content & long-tail targeting

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16. Tactical Content-Marketing Partnerships
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Partner with companies which offer related services
that your customers can use without causing negative
ROI for you
E.g ski holiday company + ski apparel providers
Mountain holdiday company + Walking boots
companies
Tactical partnership => blogging => links =>cross01/11/2013
brand endorsements


17. DDM - Travel SEO + Link-building Agency
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Read more Travel SEO Linkbuilding strategy advice and
ideas on our Marketing blog
Travel SEO and link development is what
we do

Get in touch to discuss your specific Travel SEO requirements.
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