Travelblather

Maybe I'm just having a bad day, but at the moment I'd like to smack a few geeky Google blokes around the head, break their designer glasses, stick their beardy heads down the loo and pull the chain a couple of times.

I'd shout 'Try being a little more HUMAN' at them in the process.

Search engine optimisation - making your website appeal to search engines* - is an ever-growing discipline that makes many people a lot of money. I'm surrounded by people who are slightly obsessed with it. And you can see why. Rank higher and you get more visitors to your website and by default that almost always leads to more bookings, more business.

But someone ought to remember it's people at the end of this process. Websites are for people not machines!

My heart sinks every time I see a super-optimised webpage stuffed with terms these days. Yes, if you ever wondered why that page on a hotel website keeps using the phrase 'golf hotel' or 'spa hotel' or whatever it's SEO. It's so that Google gets the message loud and clear that if someone is looking for a golf hotel, or spa hotel this is the place to come.

Because Google isn't really that great... its search engine algorithm is far from perfect. For Google to
work out what a page is about and rank it nice and high, keyword
repetition (and repetition of variations like say, 'spa hotels';
'hotels with spas' etc) has to be adopted. And that makes for dull, monotonous, android content that feels like it was written by a machine rather than a person... it's lifeless, moronic, soulless.

Search engines are killing the beauty of creative content... it is so SAD.

(*For search engine read: Google. Over 80% of searches are conducted using it)

PIC by Flickr user: cayusa

I read recently that the BBC is now running a Lonely Planet Travel pod on its pages outside the UK. (So unfortunately I can't take a look at it as I am in the UK at the moment.)

I've blogged quite recently about the new Lonely Planet travel magazine which I think is an unfair competitor to Wanderlust (an excellent independent travel magazine which I write for quite a bit).

Why is this unfair? Because LP is now majority-owned by the BBC.

Following on from the new LP Travel magazine (which is written almost 100% by BBC writers and presenters) here's another example of how that playing field just isn't level anymore. Any brand would kill for a tie-up with the BBC on the BBC's homepage. The value in brand terms is huge. And this will translate to more hits for the LP website, more ad revenue and more book sales for LP.

You can't blame LP for wanting to make the most of the fact that its now owned by the BBC (or to be more accurate the commerical arm of the Beeb - BBC Worldwide) and with the clout of one of the world's most influential and wealthy media brands behind it the future for LP looks rosy.

I hadn't thought too much when the deal was announced about the impact on the LP brand of being owned by the BBC, but selling out to a big corporation says heaps about a brand and its future. I can see that Tony Wheeler (LP's founder) quite possibly felt that selling to a cultural corporation like the BBC rather than to a full-on multi-national commercial publisher was a good compromise... and smart too - moving the brand on from being a traditional paper and print publisher to a forward looking media organisation.

But I think it's all wrong. He'd have been better off selling to a fully commercial publisher (or media organisation) rather than one that's subsidised by the UK taxpayer. (Non UK readers - every tax payer in the UK pays an annual TV licence that costs around £130). Whilst some would argue that BBC Worldwide is a separate entity, the reality is that you can't work out where the taxpayer funded elements of the BBC start and where the commerically funded ones take over. And the benefits of association with the BBC brand are - whilst difficult to measure - most probably huge 

I'm worried that LP
is going to turn into some awful travel publishing megabrand that's everywhere. (take Jamie bleedin
Oliver - lovely guy but do we REALLY need a Jamie magazine? For
heaven's sake!) Watch this space for LP branded TV shows, LP branded clothes and gear, LP branded areas in tour operators and a plethora or LP branded websites, blog hosting services ane more... not to mention LP guide content being sold to third party tour operators, airlines and so on to use as destination content on their websites.

This would all be well and good - innovation is a great thing and LP is doing some smart things - if the taint of taxpayer money supporting the company was not there.

But it is and always will be and there is no way of countering the accusation successfully.

Will LP become the Tescos or the McDonalds of the travel publishing world? Hugely successful but resented by many for its reach.

If it does it will be a far cry indeed from the company's worthy beginnings - Tony Wheeler and his wife sitting down at a kitchen table to self-publish a guidebook for backpackers to India.

Up to very recently newspapers seemed to be using their websites as a repositry for content and little else. Things are changing now and many allow people to post comments under all features published now - which is a great idea... after all the real power of the web is its potential for interaction.

But I've been struck by a couple of even smarter, more technical innovations on the Guardian website.

Check out this recent piece about skiing in Slovakia. You'll notice that there are links to other parts of the Guardian's travel content inside this piece. Here's the first paragraph:

My memories of my last snowboarding
trip to Eastern Europe, back in 2002, are not entirely good. In
Zakopane, Poland, we queued for hours for the lifts, and ended up
hating the place. In the Czech Republic, we discovered that
"nightclubs" are not the same as "discos" and tend to be frequented by
lonely truckers instead of dancers. In Slovakia,
we were surprised, and impressed, with the quality of the mountains -
even if we didn't have a hope of actually pronouncing the resorts
(Strbske Pleso? Liptovsky Mikulas?) - but we despairingly wondered if
they would ever put good lifts on them.

See them? Snowboarding and Slovakia. I've left the links in... and you find that if you click on them they take you to landing pages (as we call them in the trade) for snowboarding and Slovakia. So pages where you'll find all other content about snowboarding or about Slovakia.

Cross-linking as it's known is a powerful way to add a notch or two on your Google Search rankings. Smart. And also, good for the reader too of course. It's a win-win situation. It helps you navigate the huge quantity of content on the Guardian's website that bit quicker.

But try this...

Say you're looking for a snowboarding holiday in Slovakia. You type 'Slovakia snowboarding' into the search engine. Look what comes up on the bottom of the first page.

What we have here is a dynamic page. A page that is served up to Google automatically to correspond with the search terms someone inputs. So the page doesn't actually exist on the Guardian's website. It's automatically generated when someone types in these terms.

Relevant content is pulled in from the Guardian's database of articles where the words Slovakia and Snowboarding arise and put on a bespoke page. Very smart.

Try a few more combinations. How about 'Spain food'?

There you go... on the second page of results towards the bottom:

 Fascinating stuff... So whatever terms you type into the Google search engine (within reason) there will always be a relevant page on the Guardian website.

A clear demonstration that the Guardian is employing some SEO-experts to help it.

Continuing my quest for Inspiration Engines Sunday Times travel writer Mark Hodson dropped me a line about a project he is involved with the other day. It's also had a brief write up on Travelmole too.

I've blogged a few times before about how choice can be debilitating. Navigating the maze of different holiday deals out there on-line is just SO time consuming if you don't already have a hit-list of tour companies you're interested in going on holiday with.

And that's the thinking behind the site - 101 holidays - which, as you'd expect, has just 101 options featured on it.

A simple interface that works quickly allows you to just click on any one of 101 pics and find out more about any holiday that takes your fancy... a simple search facility allows you to filter the 101 holidays by experience, price and destination. Alex Bainbridge does a good dissection of the site on his blog.

So... a simple concept quite nicely executed... which compared with most other Inspiration Engines I've seen so far is ahead of the game... because it's clean and quick. It doesn't try to do too much. The fact that you have the up-front filter of two experienced travel writers means the number of search criteria can be reduced considerably without a sensation that you aren't casting the net wide enough. And I particularly like the fact that you can search by experience (romance, beach,culture). Expect a lot more of this kind of thing in 2009 on travel websites generally.

Oh... and no ads or other clutter to get in the way! Great.

So that's the good stuff... nitpicks:

1) It isn't actually 101 holidays. More accurately it's 101 tour operators. Sometimes the pic and comments from David and Mark do relate to a single holiday, but often it's more general - say recommending a particular region with an operator. (St Lucia, Umbria etc) So you're only halfway to finding your holiday.

(This could be because operators pay to be featured on the site...
which means that the choice isn't totally impartial. Maybe operators get some input into quite what the writers are giving their verdict
about - ie. just one tour or a region in their portfolio. Obviously the operator wants to offer choice... so they will probably tend to ask for descriptions of a region with all the accompanying parameters.)

So the choice of 101 holidays is actually probably more like a 1001.

2) I'm a bit disappointed by the comments from David and Mark - which should really seal the deal. Two top travel writers tell me why I should go for this holiday... real personal detail is what I want. These guys have seen a few sunsets in their time... so which one is the best?

This feels like brochure copy to me... I want to know that one of them sat by the pool of a particular hotel and decided that the sunset there was one of the best they'd ever seen and the Martinis were the sharpest they'd tasted in the Caribbean.

I'm a bit foxed by this... as it's that kind of stuff that professional travel writers make sure to put into their copy. So why haven't they here?

3) The impartiality test is also compromised. One (OK to be fair it IS just one) of the operators in the 101 is actually part owned by David himself. Seems a bit shaky to be recommending your own tour operator!

I'm assuming that David and Mark have had minimal funds to set this site up and by keeping it simple they've done a good job.

I think as a first stop to funneling down the choice of the plethora of operators out there it's a great first port of call during the holiday research phase. But if it were me, I'd start to make the descriptions of the holidays more personal, more specific, more quirky and interesting...

I think the endorsement of professionals could be a really important competitive advantage going forward in the context of the ever-increasing monster of UGC content out there...

But I would think that... I'm a travel writer too... and I like to think my opinion about holidays is that bit more valuable because of it.

What do you think? Does knowing that experienced travel writers have made these suggestions make you more likely to book one of these holidays?