Google to launch 'Troogle'?
There are rumors that Google is set to enter the lucrative online travel market themselves with their own travel portal dubbed 'Troogle'. etravel.success will cover this development in more detail once a formal announcement has been made by Google.

Surge in traffic to travel websites in January.
Internet measurement firm comScore Networks are reporting a huge spike in traffic to travel websites in January. Many of the top travel and holiday properties more than doubled their December visitor totals. Top gainers include MyTravel up 169%, Thomas Cook up 153%, First Choice and Travelsupermarket both up by 145%.

Many travel and holiday websites are now utilising AJAX. AJAX is not new, but it is developing into a major buzzword in IT departments and at web developers. It's also a potential source of friction between IT/development and marketing.

AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a development technique designed to create interactive web applications. AJAX makes web pages faster loading and more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server so that the whole page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability. One of the "classic" AJAX applications that most people are familiar with is Google Maps.

There are some major benefits to implementing AJAX on a travel or holiday websites. It can assist in delivering an improved user experience through faster loading, improved page interactivity and enhanced visual presentation. There is also the benefit of reduced bandwidth usage as smaller packets of data are downloaded rather than whole web pages.

However, there is a price to pay for delivering this enhanced user experience. The problem is that search engines can't see your AJAX delivered content or navigation as they are unable to run the javascript code necessary to generate the html content. If the search engines cannot access your content or follow your navigational links you could be seriously restricting your site's exposure in the search engines.

There is no doubt that AJAX is here to stay, at least until something better comes along. It's also likely that the major search engines will become more adept at spidering and indexing AJAX generated content. However, until they do, the simple solution is to avoid using AJAX where it is not needed on your site. If you do intend to use AJAX make sure that your IT department or web developer create real links and html content to feed the spiders with.

If you are involved in the marketing of your company website then you may well have received a call at some point from businesses offering to create and submit a Google site map on your behalf.

The caller stresses the importance of a Google site map and the positive benefit to your site's positioning in Google. But just how necessary is it for your website to have a Google site map? The answer is "it depends".

A Google site map is a highly useful tool as it allows a website owner to 'tell' Google which pages it should index, and in which order of priority. However, if your site is already well positioned in Google then there may be little if any benefit to submitting a Google Site Map, and it is unlikely to have any impact on your existing rankings.

The real value of a Google Site Map is if your site uses complex technology, has poor internal navigation or delivers dynamic content and you are having problems in getting your content successfully spidered. On bigger and more complex sites using a Site Map could help encourage a deeper crawl and ensure that constantly changing URL's are indexed. It's also a useful exercise when you launch a new website as it puts it firmly on Google's radar.

If your site would benefit from a Google Site Map it's relatively simple and quick to put in place. If you have a small and uncomplicated site then you can do it yourself using one of the many third party site map generator tools that are now available(http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html). For larger and more complex sites this is something that your IT or development department should already have put in place. More information on Google Site Maps can be found here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html

Every month we will take a question from a reader relating to the marketing of their travel website in the search engines, and we will publish an answer from an expert in the appropriate field. This week the answer has been supplied by Mark Scriven, the MD of Turismotec Ltd, a search marketing firm that specialises in the travel business sector. Mark has been successfully marketing travel and holiday websites for over 7 years.

This month we have a question from Peter Thomson, President of Thomson Bike Tours (www.thomsonbiketours.com).

Peter asks "Our company website is well ranked in Google.com and much of our business is from the US, however, we would now like to increase our focus on the UK market. My question is how do we get our site listed on Google UK?"

Mark Scriven replies "First of all we need to distinguish between Google UK and Google's UK index. If you go to Google.co.uk you will see that the default search setting is 'the web'. This is basically Google's main global index and usually returns the same results as Google.com. Your site does appear in this index.

However, if I make the same search again, but this time select 'pages from the UK', your site does not appear. This is a problem for you because a relatively significant percentage of UK consumers use the 'pages from the UK' option to narrow their search. As it stands, these potential customers will not find your website in the natural search results.

To get your site in the Google UK sites only index you must have one of two things; either a .co.uk domain, or a site hosted within the UK with a UK I.P. address. A word of warning though, just because you use a UK based hosting company does not guarantee that your site is physically hosted in the UK. This is because some hosting companies use offshore servers. It's definitely worth getting assurances on this before committing to new hosting services. "

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