Internet Marketing for Tourism

Today Google introduces a new Universal Search that will aggregate information from across all of the search giant's content sources--videos, images, news, maps, books and Web sites--into a single set of relevant results.

A user that inputs "Italian restaurant in Toronto" for example, might find local search listings complete with a Google Map, above a link to breaking news on Toronto restaurants, in addition to sponsored and organic links. Users will also be able to play embedded videos from Google Videos or YouTube directly on the page, while a thumbnail will link them to videos hosted by other sites like MetaCafe.

The new universal search model poses challenges for both tourism resource seekers and businesses. The new search model's inclusion of media such as video puts the onus on businesses to increase the breadth of their readily accessible digital content.

Advice from this corner is the same as we've been giving for the past year. Create multimedia content and tag it with keywords right away. Be sure to post the content to hosting sites like Youtube and apply the fundamentals of SEO in everything you do.

To the unknowing, this seems to be a continuation of Google's recent change to search results for travel related sites that seems to continually place Google Maps in the number one - termed "OneBox" search results for many travel related searches announced here a few months back.

Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

Labels: google universal search