Evaluation, Synthesis and Formulation of Proposals for the Use of ...

«Evaluation, Synthesis and Formulation of Proposals for the Use of ICTin the Tourism Sector»Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)The fact that the vast majority of the internet users begins searching for a product or service with thefamiliar search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), implies the severity of search engine optimization foreach site.Two are the main categories under the term search engine, meaning human-powered directorieswhere one can record the web site, describe it, classify it etc and crawler-based search engines thatare based on search engine results on the web site. The latter are the dominant engines, with Googlebeing the most prominent. Crawler-based search engines have three basic features. The crawler orspider visits and reads web pages and follows links to other web pages within the web site. Thisprocess is repeated for each web site once or twice a month thus recording changes. The findings ofthe crawlers or spiders are recorded in the index that constitutes the second feature. The indexcontains a copy of each web page recorded by the crawlers or spiders. The third feature of crawler –based search engines is their software that explores thoroughly all the pages recorded in the index inorder to identify their data with the data of a search. After this check, the software presents theresults in a hierarchy selected (via specialised algorithms) as the most relative to the search criteria.A web site should fulfil the following prerequisites in order to achieve a high position in the results of asearch engine:• To optimize accessibility for the crawlers of the search engines.It is critical for a web site to have search engine friendly architecture and content. Features such assplash pages with limited or no content usually used in tourist we sites for language selection orrelative splash pages using flash technology, as well as the use of frames for independent use ofdifferent web sites’ parts, may become obstacles for the crawlers to read properly the pages and thusshould be avoided.• To optimize the metadata and the content in accordance with key words and phrases.Crawler-based search engines use information from the metadata to classify web page content.Metadata are part of a page’s scripting and proper format and adjustment to each page enhancestracking and high positioning. Such important metadata is the web site title on top of each page, in allbrowsers and should contain key words aimed by the site and in the same time make sense. Inaddition to that, the description is an important metadata and should be realistic and supported bykey words and text used in the homepage. Finally, the key words corresponding to the importantVersion 1Month: December Year: 200759