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International Journal of Cultural and Digital Tourism
Volume x, Number x
Copyright © IACUDIT
ISSN (Online): 2241-9705
ISSN (Print): 2241-973X
1
The Importance of Search Engine Optimization for Tourism Websites
Agisilaos Konidaris1*, Erato Koustoumpardi2
1 Lecturer, Department of Digital Media and Communication, Technological Educational Institute of the
Ionian Islands
2 Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Digital Media and Communication, Technological Educational Institute
of the Ionian Islands
Abstract
In this paper we initially present the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for tourism Websites.
We present the most important metrics that affect SEO such as display speed, quality and quantity of content,
mobile responsiveness, inbound links and the technologies that they use. All these metrics greatly affect
search engine rankings and consequently online bookings. To assess how SEO is implemented on a tourism
related domain we examine a sample of almost 400 Tourism business websites on the island of Kefalonia in
Greece. We provide cumulative results for more than 20 important SEO metrics for these Websites. Our case
study shows that SEO metrics have been optimized for about 25% of these Websites and need extensive
optimization for the rest.
Τhe basic idea in this paper is to study and evaluate the state of SEO on a specific tourism destination
(Kefalonia) and provide insights for the next steps that need to be implemented in order to improve search
engine rankings. We also correlate SEO optimization to search engine position. This has been done by
introducing a general SEO grade as a combination of important SEO metrics for every Website, taking into
account their relative significance. This correlation proves that more optimized websites rank better for
generic queries in their category.
SEO is very important in Tourism since it helps search engines figure out what each page is about, and how
it may be useful to users. This paper proves that SEO plays a significant role for tourism website rankings
and that there is a lot of room for improvement for a large number of tourism websites.
Keywords: Search Engine Optimization, Web Performance, Tourism Websites, Google ranking, Tourism
destination
JEL Classification: Z33
1. Introduction
The Tourism Industry today relies heavily on search engines. The results of a Google study (Think with
Google 2015) show that online search engines continue to dominate the travel industry with 60% of leisure
travelers and 55% of business travelers using them to research and plan travel. Other studies (Chitika 2013)
show that around 92% of natural clicks come from page one of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), 4.8%
of clicks come from page two and only 1.1% come from page three. Also, 41% of unsuccessful searches
after the first SERP choose to refine their keyword/search phrase or their chosen search engine (O’Neill and
Curran, K. 2011). Finally, 80% of completely unsuccessful searches are followed by a keyword refinement
(O’Neill and Curran 2011). Users also seem to trust the first SERP results, even in cases where an unknown
brand appears before than a well-known one (Dou et al. 2010).
International Journal of Cultural and Digital Tourism
Volume x, Number x, pp. xx-xx
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Most tourist bookings today start on a search engine (Think with Google 2015). As a result, more and
more tourist businesses pursue an effective presence on search engines. The success of a website on SERPs
is a result of various coexisting factors such as: page speed, quality and quantity of content, clarity, accuracy
of page titles/descriptions and page refresh rate. Better SERP positioning leads to more website visitors
which in general leads to an increase in online sales (Heinze et al. 2010; Hsing et al. 2010). SEO is a
marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results (MOZ.com
2016-2). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be a main component of any industry’s marketing plan,
but for the travel industry it’s absolutely essential (Pan et al. 2011). Usually, an optimized Website is
rewarded by a good position on SERPs (Parkinson, G. 2016). SEO techniques require a number of constant
actions in order to improve SERP rankings. In this paper we study SEO optimization and its implications for
tourism related websites on a well known Greek destination, the island of Kefalonia. We have studied a
sample of over 400 tourism business websites belonging to businesses on the island and report on the results
concerning SEO adoption and implementation on these websites. We argue that the online visibility of a
tourism destination relies on the quality and rankings of the destination's websites. A destination doing well
in terms of tourist flows must be doing well in online visibility and tourism business websites. Furthermore,
based on the data collected from these websites, we attempt to create a new cumulative SEO metric that
relies only on technical SEO factors in order to research the correlation between technical SEO and SERP
rankings. In this paper we focus on the largest web search engine which is Google and provide a novel
methodology to evaluate tourism destination websites.
2. Related Work
The tourism industry is one of the world's largest industries (Statista 2017). In travel and tourism, search
engines have become one of the important sources for Internet users to access travel products (TIA 2008).
The essential factors for any e-business include website design as well as techniques that increase website
visitors. SEO is nowadays more important than ever and it is necessary for every webmaster to understand its
true meaning as well as its potential. Many researchers have extensively studied the effect of SEO on search
engine rankings and its influence in increasing website visitors.
An overview of search engine optimization strategies and pitfalls are described in (O’Neill and Curran
2011). Optimized websites obtain better rankings, and typically get a higher number of visitors (Yalcin and
Kose 2010).
Other authors (Wang, et al. 2011) suggest the creation of profiles for user’s behaviors while searching
information on the Internet, and then optimizing websites based upon the characteristics collected through
the profiling in order to acquire the desired results of achieving higher page rankings. This approach helps in
grabbing attention of web surfers.
In (Cui and Hu 2011) the authors highlight the specific requirements for optimizing search queries, and
present novel website building and design concepts based on empirical research. Another research study
(Zhu and Wu 2011) proposed a research analysis on SEO by using reverse engineering factors and built a
system that automatically crawled 200,000 web pages. For that the authors used five factors of SEO: URL
length, keyword that appears in URL domain, keyword density in HI, keyword density in title and URL
layers.
The use of SEO plug-ins and its positive impact on increasing the number of visitors to a website is
discussed in (Hidayanto et al. 2012). In (Rimbach et al. 2007) the authors examine various page ranking
techniques and their impact on marketing and sales. They conclude that various strategies should be used in
order to attract potential customers. The pros and cons of using SEO techniques on websites is described in
(Akram et.al 2010). The authors have concluded that they are essential to increasing profits.
The identification of the SEO techniques that have the most impact on search engine ranking has been
discussed in (Duklan 2015) with the use of k-means cluster analysis for clustering various SEO techniques.
A very interesting white paper (Tober et.al. 2014) deals with the definition and evaluation of factors that
have a high rank correlation-coefficient with organic search results, a methodology similar to ours. They
found that content is the most important factor for ranking which is the same result that we have concluded
in this paper.
International Journal of Cultural and Digital Tourism
Volume x, Number x, pp. xx-xx
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3. Methodology
In this paper we present the results that were the outcome of a study of over 400 local tourism business
websites on the island of Kefalonia in Greece. We evaluate the state of SEO on a specific tourism destination
(Kefalonia island in Greece) during the period between September 2016 and January 2017. The websites
were selected based on specific criteria (presented below) and the goal was to evaluate them in terms of
successful SEO practices and conclude on what was done right and what still needed to be implemented. We
selected the websites based on the following criteria:
1. The websites should represent individual tourism related businesses (e.g. hotels, restaurants,
villas etc) of local interest. This means that web travel portals and websites belonging to large
international brands were not included. We aimed to evaluate websites that actually belong to
local small businesses.
2. The websites should be present in the 100 first results on Google for a popular keyword in their
category. We used Google Trends to identify the most popular keywords for every tourism
business category we included in our study.
3. The tools that we used to evaluate more than 50 metrics that affect SEO were the following:
Seoptimer, Seoprofiler, Website Grader, W3techs, Builtwith and Wappalyzer.
The methodology that we followed is summarized in the following steps:
1. Identify tourism related categories. Initially we identified 24 business categories broadly related to
tourism that we aimed to include in our study. These were: Activities, Boat rentals, Yacht rentals,
Cruises, Café-bars-clubs, Civil engineers, Construction, Ferries-tickets, Hotels, Lawyers, Real estate,
Rent a car, Pastry shops, Restaurants, Shopping-gifts, Local products, Services, Suites-apartments,
Studios-rooms, Super market, Grocery stores, Travel agencies, Villas, Weddings-Catering-Flowers-
Wedding services.
2. Use Google Trends to identify the most popular keywords used in every category. This process
was not straightforward because we were studying a very niche market (tourism in Kefalonia) that
does not experience a substantial amount of web searches in many of the identified categories. Thus
it was a difficult task to identify the most popular keywords in some of the aforementioned
categories.
3. Use Google Search to research the identified most popular keywords in every category. During
this step we were cautious so that personal browsing preferences would not interfere in the SERP
rankings. To ensure that browsing preferences would not interfere in the ranking process we always
used anonymous browsing. Our research was conducted on google.co.uk because the basic travel
market of Kefalonia island is the UK.
4. Analyze every identified Website URL homepage. We used Seoptimer, Seoprofiler, Website
Grader, W3techs, Builtwith, Wappalyzer to analyze the identified domains for more than 50 SEO
metrics.
3. SEO Metrics
In the following paragraphs we present and analyze the most important metrics that were documented and
then summarize our key findings for every metric in Table 1. The key SEO metrics that we evaluated for the
400 websites that were in our sample were the following:
Top Level Domain (TLD). The TLD selection should rely on the website target audience and the type of
business. For example a ".gr" TLD gives a signal to a search engine that the websites content is targeted
towards users in Greece. This is not true for a tourism related business. Every domain name has a suffix that
indicates which top level domain (TLD) it belongs to. Nowadays there are many TLD options. It can be a
country suffix or ccTLD (such as .gr, it, .zm, .de), a generic suffix or gTLD, indicating a business or
organization category (such as .com, .net, .org) or even one of the new TLDs (.holiday, .villas, .apartments,
.blog etc).
Second-level domain (SLD). The SLD is the portion of the domain name that is located immediately to
the left of the dot of the domain name suffix (TLD). Research has shown that the average SLD characters for
International Journal of Cultural and Digital Tourism
Volume x, Number x, pp. xx-xx
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the 100,000 top domains worldwide are 9 and domains with up to 10 character SLDs are considered easy to
memorize (Gaebler.com 2009; Search Engine Journal 2013). Also we study the use of dashes in the SLD
which has proved not to be necessary for word separation in search engines.
Page title tag and the meta-description. These are some of the most important factors when it comes to
On Page optimization. These elements work together and can influence a Web page's CTR (Click Through
Rate) on a SERP since this is the information about a page that search engine users first see when searching.
The content of the title and description tags is very important as is their length, since Google has a uniform
SERP structure providing a very specific space for every result. This space is about 60 characters for the title
and about 155 characters for the description. This space should be fully taken into advantage and used in the
best way as to get users to click on it.
The content of the title. This is another important SEO metric. The title summarizes what a user will
expect to find on a website and must be completely relevant to the content. In our case we have researched
the presence of the toponym "kefalonia" which is the name of the island all of the websites in our study refer
to. It is a good practice to include the toponym in the title of a tourist business website because the toponym
is almost always among the most popular keywords that a user searches for according to our Google Trends
research.
Use of Heading tags. The existence of heading tags in website pages provides a visible structure to a
page. It is extremely useful to have heading tags on a page since they make the content stand out and more
legible. For search engines, headings provide a good signal about the quality of a page. They also use them
to "understand" what the webmaster thinks is important on that page.
Multiple occurrences of a key term in page text. The multiple occurrence of a key term implies that a
page is related to this term. In the case of this study it seems logical for a website to include several
occurrences of the term Kefalonia. The occurrence of a term (not the abuse) is an important SEO factor.
Availability of a Sitemap. The availability of a sitemap helps search engines determine the structure of a
website and visit its pages.
Hosting. Every website is hosted on a Web server. There are many companies that provide hosting
around the world. Depending on the technologies used by a Website and their requirements, an appropriate
hosting package must be selected. In terms of SEO, hosting is mostly related to page load speed. The hosting
country of a Website is generally suggested to be as close as possible geographically to the target group of
the Website because this increases their access speed. The geographic location of a company's servers
hosting, interconnection speeds and other factors affect the speed of serving requests to sites which they host.
Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is online software that can be used for website
management. It is usually available for free and removes much of the technical details when implementing
and managing a website. Two of the most popular CMS are Wordpress and Joomla. The use of a CMS
nowadays is suggested in order to reduce website design, implementation and management cost and time. At
the same time the use of a CMS provides expandability with the use of plug-ins and security through
constant updates.
Webpage loading speed and overall performance. The loading speed of a Webpage is the time it takes
for a page to fully load in a browser after a user request is initiated. Studies have estimated that if a page
takes longer than 3 secs to load the user is more likely to bounce (Schwartz 2016). Webpage overall
performance takes into account several performance factors such as the volume of data, the number of
additional files required by a page, loading speed and others.
Mobile optimization. Nowadays more than half of Internet users access the web through a mobile
device. Mobile optimization of Web pages is the process of ensuring that users will have the optimal mobile
experience when accessing a Webpage. This is many times referred to as responsiveness, meaning that a
Website should be able to respond and transform its design features according to the user's device
specifications. Google is obviously interested in improving user experience and that is why mobile
optimization is considered a major factor for SEO.
SSL and data security. Data security is one of the most important parameters for internet users,
especially when personal data or credit card data are exchanged. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a standard
security protocol for establishing encrypted links between a web server and a browser in an online
communication. A website may use an SSL certificate to encrypt the data it exchanges with its users
something that is considered essential by search engines today (Murray 2017)
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Volume x, Number x, pp. xx-xx
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Analytics tool availability. Even though this is not considered to be SEO metric we have measured it in
our sample of websites to get an idea on how many of the websites are really providing useful feedback to
their owners. If a website uses a traffic analytics tool the webmaster can find out how many users visit the
website, which country they came from, what pages are visited frequently and a lot of other useful
information. The most popular traffic measurement tool is Google Analytics which is free to use.
Social Media connectivity. Social Media connectivity is the link between a website and its social media
profiles. Since social media is a great way to refer traffic to a website, social media connectivity is
considered a SEO factor. In our study we measured the connectivity of Websites to the largest social media
network which is Facebook.
Availability of a SEO plugin. The most popular CMS software can take advantage of guided SEO
software that enables website owners to easily optimize pages. This software is available in the form of plug-
ins. The most popular SEO plug-in for Wordpress is Yoast SEO.
Inbound Links. Inbound links are considered to be the epitome of Off Page website optimization going
back to the Pagerank Algorithm days of Google. More incoming links to a page are a good indication of the
value of its content. To evaluate this SEO metric we initially examined the number οf links to the homepage
of the websites in our sample.
4. SEO Results
There are several challenges that websites face in order to improve their SERP presence and position. As
far as Kefalonia is concerned, in our sample we observe that there is a group of Web sites (about 25%) that
are quite good at SEO. The rest of the websites (about 75%) have many problems in terms of SEO. In Table
1 we present our results in detail and also propose best practices that websites should follow.
Metric
Result
Best practice proposed
Top Level Domain
(TLD)
57% of Websites use the .gr suffix
39% use the .com suffix
4% use the other ending
Use of .com domain
Second-level domain
(SLD).
18% 3-10 char
69% 11-20 char
13% 21-34 char
9 characters max
Use of Dashes in SLDs
73% of websites do not use dashes in
SLD
27% of websites use dashes in SLD
Dashes are not necessary
for word separation
Generic Keyword
(toponym) in SLD
(Study toponym:
kefalonia)
31% of SLDs contained the term
kefalonia in some spelling variation
97% of those using the term used the
exact spelling (kefalonia)
Google prefers branded
domains
Title tag
64% of the websites had up to 60
characters in their title
36% of the websites had more than 60
characters
60 characters max
Meta description
40% had descriptions up to 155
characters
60% had descriptions longer than 155
characters
150-160 characters max
Toponym in Title
65% had the term "kefalonia" in the title
35% did not have the term "kefalonia" in
title
Use toponym
Toponym in
description tag
52% use the term "kefalonia"
48% of the websites do not use the term
"kefalonia"
Use toponym
International Journal of Cultural and Digital Tourism
Volume x, Number x, pp. xx-xx
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Use of Heading tags
29% of the websites do not use any
headings
8% of use the H1 heading
Use headings
Multiple occurrences of
a key term
Kefalonia (1264 occurrences)
villas (606 occurrences)
hotel, studio, apartments (220-250
occurrences)
Use important keywords
with caution not to
overuse (write for users
not search engines)
Hosting
35% were hosted in Greece
25% hosted in Germany
18% hosted in the US
22% hosted in other countries.
Host your website in a
country or as close to a
country where your target
audience resides
Content Management
System (CMS).
23% of the Websites use Wordpress
20% Joomla
51% did not use a CMS or a CMS could
not be detected
6% use another CMS
Use a CMS
Page speed
25% had a loading speed between 0.5
and 3 sec
40% had a loading speed between 3.1
and 6 sec
35% had a loading speed greater than 6
sec
3 sec max loading speed
Overall Performance
grade
28% of the Websites scored between 0.1
and 0.49
35% scored between 0.5 and 0.69
37% scored between 0.7 and 0.96
Scale of 0 (worst) to 1
(best)
Mobile optimization
45% scored an overall mobile grade
between 0 and 0.59
0.5 scored an overall mobile grade
between 0.6 and 0.79
54.5% scored an overall mobile grade
between 0.81 έως 1
Scale of 0 (worst) to 1
(best)
SSL and data security
79% do not have an SSL certificate
21% have an SSL certificate.
Add an SSL certificate to
every website
Wordpress version
96% of Websites using Wordpress were not
running the latest version of the CMS
Always update to latest
version of CMS
Analytics tool
availability
52% of the websites were not connected
to any traffic measurement tool
48% used Google Analytics
Connect your site to an
Analytics tool
Social Media
connectivity
24% of websites linked to Facebook
page
76% did not link to Facebook
Create a Facebook
business page and link to
it from Website
SEO plugin
96% of websites didn't use a SEO plugin
4% used Yoast SEO
Use a SEO plugin
Inbound Links
1% had over 70 inbound links
4% had inbound links between 41 and 70
7% had inbound links between 21 and 40
88% had inbound links between 0 and 20
Increase quality (high
MDA) links
Moz Domain Authority
(MDA)
All websites had an MDA lower than 40
The vast majority had an MDA ranging
from 10 to 15
Scale of 0 (worst) to 100
(best). Higher MDA is
better (MOZ.com 2016-1)
Table 1. SEO results and best practices
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Volume x, Number x, pp. xx-xx
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The Table above shows that most of the websites in our sample need a lot of work in order to optimize
their pages in terms of SEO. The most important factors that they need to look into are:
1. Increasing inbound links
2. Adding SSL certificate
3. Constant renewal of CMS versions (Wordpress or Joomla)
4. Loading time performance
5. Mobile optimization
6. Using the correct keywords in titles and descriptions of Websites as well as keeping title and meta
description length within proposed character limits
7. Using headers in text
5. SEO and Search Engine Rankings
After presenting the results in our website sample, in this paper we also investigate the correlation of
technical SEO factors to Google rankings. There have been other studies that correlate Google rankings to
various factors as the number of referring domains , the domain link authority or the length of content (Dean
2016-2). This study was conducted on a large website sample of 1 million websites. In our case we wanted to
study the correlation of technical SEO parameters to the rankings of Tourism related websites in a much
smaller domain. The basic question that we wanted to answer is whether there can be a correlation between
specific technical SEO factors and Google rankings for travel related websites and if by looking at these
technical SEO factors one can have a good idea of where a website will rank compared to another website.
Of course this is not an easy task because there are so many factors that play a role in Google rankings. In the
context of this paper we narrowed down our travel website sample that we had collected data for to the hotel
industry. This is because hotel websites showed a better overall score compared to other categories. Our
methodology was the following:
1. We initially collected Google rankings for hotels in Kefalonia by using the most popular search
term: "kefalonia hotels". This search term was the result of Google Trends research.
2. We narrowed the research to the 100 first results in Google search and included only the hotel
websites that ranked on Google for the selected search term.
3. We then selected 3 key technical SEO metrics based on (Dean 2016-1) and the knowledge that 3 of
the most important ranking factors in Google are Content length, Inbound Links and technical SEO
factors. The only metric that we had to depict content length was Text to HTML ratio. Of course this
is not a metric of content quality which plays a significant role in rankings. It is just an indication
that there is significant content on a web page. The second metric selected was Moz Domain
authority which is a metric that depicts the probability of a web page to rank well on search engines.
The third metric selected was a cumulative SEO grade provided by Hubspot's Website Grader.
First we analyzed each factor independently in order to find the correlation between Google rankings
and each of the selected metrics. In order to do this we created the scatter plots of Google ranking vs each
selected metric and found the correlation coefficient R for each metric.
International Journal of Cultural and Digital Tourism
Volume x, Number x, pp. xx-xx
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Figure 1. Scatter plots of selected SEO metrics vs. Google rank
The results for the correlation coefficient are shown in the following table (Table 2).
Metric
Text to HTML ratio vs
Google Rank (THTML)
Moz Domain authority
vs Google rank (MOZ)
Cumulative SEO grade
vs Google rank (CSEO)
Correlation
coefficient (R)
0,488
0,241
0,126
Table 2. Correlation coefficient of selected metrics to Google rankings
The results above show that the most correlated technical SEO metric to Google rankings is Text to
HTML ratio. We found a moderate relationship between Text to HTML ratio and Google rankings. Moz
Domain authority and Cumulative SEO grade show a very weak relationship to Google rankings.
Even though the three metrics show moderate to weak correlation to Google rankings for hotel websites
for our sample we then try to create a cumulative weighed new metric. We call this metric TMS and
calculate its value through the following formula:
TMS = a1*THTML + a2*MOZ + a3*CSEO
The idea behind this formula is that we can create a new technical SEO metric which is the product of
three other SEO metrics but each does not hold the same weight in its calculation. We include a1, a2 and a3
as weighing constant values which are proportional to the correlation coefficient that was calculated for each
of these factors and normalized. This means that a more correlated value to Google rankings should hold
more weight in the calculation of the new TMS metric. By normalizing the correlation coefficients shown in
Table 2 and then normalizing them we calculated a1, a2 and a3 as follows:
y = -0,204x + 21,813
R² = 0,2385
0
10
20
30
40
50
0 20 40 60 80 100
Text to HTML ratio vs Google rank
y = -0,0652x + 22,277
R² = 0,058
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
0 20 40 60 80 100
Moz Domain Authority vs Google rank
y = -0,0551x + 19,062
R² = 0,0158
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
0 20 40 60 80 100
Cumulative SEO grade vs Google rank
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Volume x, Number x, pp. xx-xx
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a1=0,5713
a2=0,2818
a3=0,1469
After the definition of a1, a2 and a3 we went on to calculate the new TMS values for all the websites in
our sample and created the scatter plot for TMS vs Google rankings shown below.
Figure 2. Scatter plot of TMS vs. Google rank
The scatter plot above shows that the correlation coefficient for the TMS to Google Rank (R) is 0.622
which proves a strong relationship between the new TMS cumulative metric to Google rankings. This
technique was then used for all other website categories in our sample and showed that TMS improved the
actual correlation between technical SEO and Google rankings.
The calculation of the TMS metric relies on the concept that content is the most important factor for
improving Google rankings. This seems logical and has been the result of numerous other studies. In this
paper though we correlate pure technical SEO factors that can be easily be extracted with the use of free
tools with Google rankings. Even though the actual position on Google cannot be calculated this concept can
have very positive results in comparing websites and concluding on how they would rank comparatively on
Google.
6. Conclusion
In this paper we analyzed over 400 travel related business websites on a well known Greek travel
destination which is the island of Kefalonia. Our analysis has shown that these websites need more work on
SEO and that they need to especially improve specific SEO factors. Correlating SEO to Google rankings is
not easy because it is well known that Google ranking takes into account more that 200 parameters.
Furthermore quality content is a major factor for better Google rankings and this is not a technical SEO
issue. In this paper we have attempted to correlate Google ranking to 3 key technical SEO metrics through
the creation of a new cumulative and weighed metric called TMS. We have shown that Text to HTML ratio
is a significant factor in Google rankings and TMS has a strong relationship to Google rankings. Of course
our research can be extended much further to other website categories besides travel and it would be
interesting to compare Website TMS between samples of different travel destinations to conclude on
destination online reputation based on Google rankings.
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