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Website Assessment and Recommendations for Tripadvisor.com

A brief analysis of Tripadvisor.com's website and recommendations for search engine optimization best practices, including search engine visibility, presence, brand experience, and user experience.

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Website Assessment and Recommendations for Tripadvisor.com

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  1. “Website Assessment and Recommendations for Tripadvisor.com” By Everett C. Whitehead, III

  2. Table of Contents • Objective • Methodology • Search Engine Visibility • Search Engine Presence • Search Engine Brand Experience • On-page User Experience • Conclusion • Questions

  3. Objective

  4. Objective • The objective of this presentation is to: • provide a brief analysis of the Tripadvisor.com website as it relates to search engine optimization best practices • To provide brief recommendations to bring Tripadvisor.com into greater search compliance • To make brief suggestions to create a robust search engine experience for potential visitors to the Tripadvisor.com website

  5. Methodology

  6. Methodology • The methodology of this document reviews the Tripadvisor.com website for specific criteria related to search engine visibility, search engine presence, search branding experience, and on-page user experience by identifying strengths and opportunities along each dimension.

  7. Methodology Limitations • Other than those which can be reasonably inferred from observing the TripAdvisor.com website, the creator of this document has very little knowledge of the business requirements, marketing goals, revenue generation strategy, and CMS/IT limitations of TripAdvisor.com

  8. Search Engine Visibility Factors affecting a search engine spider’s ability to find content on your site

  9. Strengths - Search Engine Visibility • No major barriers to search engine presence detected • No noindex, nofollow meta tag • No major Robots.txt prohibitions • HTML code is generally well-formed • HTTP 404 code returned properly for non-existent pages on the website • Images contain ALT attributes • Low occurrences of graphical copy on the site • Comprehensive HTML sitemap • Good linking structure • No Frames detected • No to minimal use of Flash

  10. Canonicalization - Search Engine Visibility Opportunities • Observation – http://tripadvisor.com correctly 301 Redirects to http://www.tripadvisor.com; however http://www.tripadvisor.com/index.html and http://tripadvisor.com/index.html redirect to http://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g58525-Index_Washington-Vacations.html. • This means webmasters who intend to link to the homepage of Tripadvisor.com may inadvertently link to the “Index, Washington” page on TripAdvisor. • Recommendation – Create 301 Redirects from http://www.tripadvisor.com/index.html and http://tripadvisor.com/index.html to http://www.tripadvisor.com

  11. JavaScript - Search Engine Visibility Opportunities • Observation – unreferenced JavaScript is prolific throughout source code. • Recommendation - Externally reference JavaScript from a .js file

  12. XML Sitemap - Search Engine Visibility Opportunities • Observation – could not confirm the existence of an XML sitemap at http://www.tripadvisor.com/sitemap.xml • The XML sitemap can be placed in any location, but http://www.tripadvisor.com is the most common. • Recommendations – Create a search compliant .90 protocol XML sitemap and upload it to the website if one does not already exist • Inform all major search engines of the XML sitemap’s location using their respective webmaster consoles (for example, Google Webmaster Tools) • Visit http://www.sitemaps.org/ for more information

  13. Robots.txt File - Search Engine Visibility Opportunities • Observation - The Robots.txt file contains a high amount of restrictions • Recommendation - Review the content in the Robots.txt file to ensure content rich pages are not mistakenly excluded from the search engines • Also, a Robots.txt file with this many exclusions may represent a security risk as it gives hackers a detailed view of the site’s directory structure

  14. Other – Search Engine Visibility Opportunities • 302 Redirects detected. • Replace with 301 Redirects unless the redirection is truly temporary • Multiple broken links detected • Repair or delete broken links • Shorten URLs schema when possible to under 100 characters

  15. Search Engine Presence Factors Affecting Search Engine Rankings on Your Website

  16. Strengths - Search Engine Presence • Evidence of a keyword strategy in use • Unique Title Tags with relevant keywords for main pages • Unique, well-written Meta Description tags with keywords for main pages • A wealth of great content (over 25 million pages as reported by Google) • Well optimized PDF documents • Press releases issued regularly • Many inbound links to the site. PageRank of 7 • Text based navigation

  17. Header Tags – Search Engine Presence Opportunity • Observation - Most pages contain more than one <h1> tag and empty header tags • Recommendation – Ensure only one <h1> tag appears per page and remove instances of unpopulated header tags. User lower level headings (<h2> - <h6>) as necessary

  18. User Profile Information – Search Engine Presence Opportunity • Observation – TripAdvisor has approximately 6 million registered users • Recommendation – Greater leveraging of user profiles in search results • More unique Meta Description tags for users who have completed their profiles and written reviews • Encourage users to post a TripAdvisor badge to their website • Create multiple badges with a variety of keywords that link back to TripAdvisor.com in a search engine readable manner

  19. PageRank Sculpting – Search Engine Presence Opportunity • Observation - TripAdvisor uses a practice called “Page Rank Sculpting” • The Red lines in the screenshot, represent links with the “nofollow” attribute: • Recommendation - Reconsider the practice of PageRank sculpting on the site • Google has modified the flow of “link juice” in a way that makes Page Rank Sculpting potentially harmful to the flow of link equity throughout the site. • Please read http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ • Consider removing extraneous links from pages

  20. Other – Search Engine Presence Opportunity • Consider linking to dynamically created search result pages. This technique can quickly generate unique content for specific keywords quickly • Recommend ongoing process of identifying new keywords and integrating them into all TripAdvisor.com web properties • Create keyword rich content pages designed to target specific terms • Link keywords in press releases to appropriate pages on TripAdvisor.com • Review links on pages and remove extraneous links as necessary • Register with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer if not currently

  21. Search Engine Brand Experience What a searchers sees from your website properties in the search engine results (SERP)

  22. Strengths - Search Engine Brand Experience • Excellent Search Engine Descriptions for main pages. • Search Engine Listing has Google SiteLinks. • Search engine results for review pages generate rich snippets • Evidence of programmatic generation of Meta Description tag for review pages • TripAdvisor.coms’s User reviews appear for Google local searches

  23. “By City Pages” - Search Engine Brand Experience Opportunity • Observation - “By City Pages” do not have meaningful search listing titles and descriptions • Recommendation - Create unique, meaningful title tags and Meta Description tags on “By City” pages, including keywords appropriate keywords.

  24. Universal Search - Search Engine Brand Experience Opportunity • Observation – no search queries conducted for this assessment triggered images or videos owned by TripAdvisor.com • Google reports only 345 images detected on the site. • This may indicate a search visibility issue for images • Recommendation – investigate ways to trigger multimedia assets in search results • Generate more videos for TripAdvisor’s YouTube Channel • Encourage/allow users to write longer descriptions of the photos they submit • Check for issues preventing user submitted photos from being indexed by search engines

  25. Google Subscribed Links - Search Engine Brand Experience Opportunity • Observation – TripAdvisor does not appear to be using Google Subscribed Links • Recommendation - Google Subscribed Links provides website marketers with a way to create custom search listings for opt-in users to view • Review the following: • http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/ • http://www.ovrdrv.com/blog/2008/03/google-subscribed-links-offers-powerful.asp • Yahoo has a similar feature

  26. On-page User Experience Examines the post-click experience for search engine users and how to encourage desirable behavior once on site.

  27. Strengths - On-page User Experience • Plenty of well-written content and user engagement mechanisms • Well placed call-to-actions • A Custom 404 page is returned when a non-existent page is requested

  28. List of On-page User Experience Opportunities • A/B and multi-variant testing could uncover page layouts which would yield higher revenue generating behavior from site visitors • Consider adding a side-by-side comparison view which to help users quickly compare reviews for two or more hotels and restaurants at once • Consider adding more apparent social networking features to encourage user engagement and retention • Identify messaging, landing pages, and conversion paths that lead to ideal user behavior in paid search programs and consider leverage it in other areas of the website

  29. Conclusion • TripAdvisor.com is generally search compliant; however, this document contains several recommendations to improve TripAdvisor.com along each of the four dimensions of search engine optimization

  30. Questions? • For questions and comments relating to this document, please contact: Everett Whitehead, III http://everettwhitehead.com/contact 443-221-4639 www.everettwhitehead.com

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