How to Build a Travel Website or Blog

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How To Build A Website or Blog About Travel

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If you're serious about how to build a website, and especially a travel website or blog, here's some interesting tips we can pass on from how we made Excellent Romantic Vacations.

We have recieved lots of e-mail inquiries on various aspects of building a travel website. The following 5 points will deal with the most frequently-asked questions...

1. Choose Good Web Publishing Tools

When you start out, you'll need to decide your first step: what web publishing tools or platform you'll use to build your travel website or blog. Here's a look at 2 options:

Opt for a piece-by-piece method: First, pick a reliable web publishing platform such as WordPress or Blogger. You'll also need web hosting, so check out companies like BlueHost or Host Gator. Then there's the purchase and registry of your domain name, so that means getting set up with godaddy.com or domain.com. Finally, you'll need to do plenty of keyword research - for that, we recommend the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
Or, go with an all-in-one package. Site Build It bundles up pretty much everything you'll need into one easy-to-use package so you don't have to fiddle with plug-ins, FTP and so on. SBI goes beyond just the tools though - you'll learn how to build a real online business and avoid mistakes that that can cost you time and money. It really lets you concentrate on building the core your site, which is the content.
Can't decide? Need to know more? This will help you choose between a Travel Blog or a Travel Business.

2. Pick the Right Niche

The internet is a huge place, and there are hundreds of thousands of travel websites. If you build a broad-themed site like "Best Places to Travel" or "1001 Vacation Ideas", you will have a huge challenge attracting enough search engine traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing to make it successful.

Instead, choose a particular destination or type of travel. Themes like "Texas Family Travel Spots" or "Great Girlfriend Getaways" are examples of the kinds of niches that are "winnable" in terms of your ability to rank high up on the results page for keyword searches.

We opted for our theme "Romantic Vacations" for another important reason: it's what we do and know the most about. So you'll have more success if you can write about something you love doing and enjoy telling others about.

3. Build Your Content First

Don't worry about building your shopping cart right away or installing affiliate links throughout your site. You first need to work on creating enough good content on your site so that you establish a lasting profile with your visitors and the search engines.

Why? Well, there are a lot of fly-by-night blogs and webpages that exist just for a month or two trying to make some quick cash - and they do this by using very questionable techniques.

Search engines like Google are catching on quick to this stuff. So take the high road and let them know your are trustworthy and here for the long run. And the best way to do that is to fill your pages with quality information designed for humans and built search-engine friendly.

So, we would recommend that a good travel website should have at least 50 to 75 pages of well-written, original content (100 or more is even better).

4. Link Responsibly

Your travel website should only link out to other reputable travel sites and related resources. Doing link exchanges with mortgage or mp3 or weight-loss websites is of no benefit to them or you. Worse, you risk damaging your own site's reputation by linking to sites that are nothing but link-farms or scraped content.

It's best to limit you outbound links to fewer than 50 per page. And while a few reciprocal link exchanges are desireable (preferable to include them in regular content, and not on a "Links Page"), the best links you can have are from other travel sites that choose to link to you (one-way inbound links). You can slowly collect these if you have strong, original and attractive content.

5. Be Smart with Monetizing

Only after you've accomplished all of the above should you start with monetizing your website. And when you do, you'll want to choose a small selection of programs that match very closely what you're travel website is about.

Google Adsense is an excellent program. By becoming part of their publisher network, you'll be able to include a piece of code on your webpages that will automatically produce contextual ads that are closely matched to the content of your page. Perfect!

There are also affiliate networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare, through which you can join the affiliate programs of various online travel merchants, including Priceline, Orbitz and hundreds of others. This allows you to select various links for use on your site. Typically, when someone clicks through on that link and makes a purchase, you'll recieve a commission.

But a word of caution when placing affiliate links on your site:

If, for example, you just paste Expedia or Travelocity Search boxes or banners all over your pages, the results will be disappointing.
On the other hand, if you selectively weave into your content text-links that are closely alligned with the theme of that webpage, the results improve dramatically.

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