TRAVELtech: Hotelscombined - bringing meta-search and affiliate marketing together

TRAVELtech continued. Yury Shar gave a little more insight into meta-search and his company Hotelscombined. My earlier profile of them is here.

The interesting point from his speech today is not that he is generating good traffic - though he is with 450,000 visits per month. The interesting story is that his number one source of traffic is affiliate program. He shared that 38% of traffic is coming from a network of 1,500 affiliates (here is an example bellhop.com.au). Search is still critical with SEM ranking number two at 34% and SEO third at 20%.

I was working on the assumption that paid search and to a lesser extent SEO would dominate the traffic feed for meta-search. With no data backing it up was assuming that these would be responsible for 80% of traffic for a meta-search provider, not the less than 65% that Hotelscombined generates. Congrats to Yury of building this great affiliate network.

Yury also passed on this four tips for search engine optimisation marketing efforts:

1. Give yourself time - it takes 18-24 months for a start up to "prove" itself to Google as a legitimate content provider;
2. Design the site - design the site for both consumers and search engines. The site needs to be specifically designed to be shopped and indexed by Google. As he puts it - it is easy to design a site with great content that Google cannot be "seen" by Google;
3. Register and open a Google Webmaster account; and
   
4. Design a long term link strategy - Does not mean building fake links or becoming a hard core "black hatter" but working on links and traffic generation through content optimisation has to be part of marketing plans. For example making sharing of and imbedding of links by customers and easy thing to do.