So how do you get on the first page of search results?
One word: links.
As more and more other websites link to your website, you move up the search results. Web rankings are like high school. The most popular people in high school always had a lot of friends. The top websites on the web have a lot of links pointing to them.
Search engines determine how to rank people by the number and quality of the links that point to you. You can use the metaphor of academic papers. If everyone is citing “Mary’s Book on History” in their reference section, Mary’s Books must be the authoritative source on history.
If only 99% of people cite John’s Book on History, it must be the 2nd most authoritative source, and so forth down the line. This is the guiding principle behind search engine rankings.
In the travel world, it’s quite easy to find links to your blog or website. Travelers are friendly. We like talking to other people and meeting new people. We love reading about other people’s travel stories as well as sharing our own. So we are always willing to help other people and spread the love. Just ask most travel website owners and you’ll get a positive response.
When you get a link, you want the anchor text (the words of the link) to be the words you want to come up for in search results. In SEO terms, this is called a keyword.
If your website is about New Zealand or Backpacking, you want those words to be in the link text. The more of those links you get with those words, the more you move up in the search engines.
There is also an added bonus to this. Not only will you get links to help you in search engines but you will also build a relationship with other travel owners and gain new readers as well as finding new websites to read. The more people who read the more links you build! It’s a like a giant snowball but one you need to give a big push to in the beginning.
Once you have regular traffic you can begin to think about monetization. The easiest way to do that is to get traffic from search engines to click on ads. The people out there are looking for something and if clicking on an ad gets them what they want, they will do it.
For more information, please check out Matt Kepnes’s complete ebook on Monetization and SEO.
And if you’re just getting started and want to know how to set up a travel blog, Craig Martin gives you a complete step by step guide.
Sign up for Matador’s new Travel Writing School and get the skills you need.