Honestly speaking, they are, especially in travel and tourism industry as well as in hospitality and hotel industry where keywords create business even today in 2016. Think of an exclusive mountain top hotel in Switzerland whose website is crammed with keywords such as ‘Romantic place amidst Alpine Scenery’; ‘View the Alps right across your bedroom window’, ’Amazing hotel at an altitude of 3100 m, overlooking the glaciers on the border of Italy and Switzerland’ and many more endearing keyword phrases that bring guests galore all through the season. However, there are certain factors that may make or mar the success of SEO strategy in regard to hotel websites. Some of these are elaborated below.

Keyword use vis-à-vis its frequency

Keyword optimization is still very much important in regard to SEO treatment but it is also essential to know that appropriate placement of keyword is more relevant than how frequently it is used. Nevertheless, there are quite a few areas where keywords serve the purpose best such as in:

• Title and Description tags (Meta information) and headers (h1, h2, h3)
• Side bars and footers
• Body text

 

Specific keyword versus selection of keyword theme

Instead of hammering on a specific keyword phrase all along in your website, it would be more advantageous to use different keyword themes for each page of the site. The raison d’être is quite simple. First of all, focusing on a particular keyword phrase will prove repetitive, which in turn will affect badly in terms of SEO performance, while secondly it will hinder the sales potentiality of the site. So, it is better to change the theme on the different pages. For instance, while one page may target Cheap Hotel in Bronx (New York Suburb), another may  target Hotel near the World famous Zoo (Bronx Zoo) .

 

Keyword connotation vs. specific words

Google, while indexing your site reads and interprets content and then reaches its conclusion about what the site is all about. Additionally, Google looks for synonyms to your keyword and use those to match with the searcher’s query. In that case, ‘picture’ and ‘photos’ mean the same thing to Google. Similarly, itg matters little whether you use the term ‘trip’ or ‘travel’; ‘hotel’ or ‘resort’; ‘’lodging’ or ‘accommodation’. In other words, it means that it matters little whether you use the term ‘hotel’ or ‘resort’, ‘lodging’ or ‘accommodation’. In fact, no matter what you do, your hotel will show up simply as “Cheap Bronx Hotel” even if the query asks for New York suburb resort.

 

Google’s Semantic search adds new value

Instead of routine analysis, Google now uses semantic search to ascertain the root of the search. If Google had confined its search to results based only on keyword, in that case, whenever a searcher used the phrase ‘Cheap rooms in and around New York suburbs’, the search engines would have looked for any site that had the words that spelled “Cheap”, “rooms” ‘around’ ‘New York’ “suburb”.

But with semantic search,  Google will look for the purpose behind the query, while looking for other variations for the term that includes “ inexpensive places to stay in and around New York suburb”. So, as long as long as your website content shrieks that it offers inexpensive rooms and that your hotel is located in or around New York suburb, your site will show up on SERPs, even if its site content does not have the exact phrase “Cheap rooms in Bronx”.

 

Tailpiece

Search engines are now transferring their lens from focusing only on keywords to provide the best search experience for their users. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the keyword maneuverability of SEO is no longer relevant or should be ignored. Instead, you should enlarge your search engine optimization efforts to include other Internet Marketing strategies to further enhance the search ranking.