Search engine visibility of national tourism promotion websites

Abstract

In the past, tourism has played an important role in elevating socio-economic status of least developed countries. As a result, many least developed countries have developed national tourism Web portals in order to endorse tourism sector on the Internet. Search engines have become the most preferred way of seeking information on the Internet. Therefore, national tourism portal's visibility on search engines is crucial for Nepal because tourism is the major source of foreign income earnings. The objective of this study is to evaluate search engine visibility of Nepal Government's national tourism Web portal. The study is mainly divided into three parts. The first part of the study starts with identification of keywords that were previously used by tourists to search information related to Nepal prior to their travel. The frequently occurring keywords were then used to conduct the search engine ranking analysis of the portal. The second part of the study examined the portal's home page against popular search engine optimization guidelines that are prescribed to improve Website's search engine visibility. The third part of the study investigated Nepal government's effectiveness towards utilizing the World Wide Web to market the portal. The findings showed that the portal had low search engine visibility, minimally conformed to search engine optimization guidelines, and the Web was not effectively used to market the portal.

Website Search Engine Optimization: Geographical and Cultural Point of View

“…Several optimizing SEO techniques have been researched and identified by [15]- [17]. Some of these include providing keyword rich Website content throughout all Webpages [10] [12] [18] [19], using keywords in the title and description meta tags in the Website code [9], and keeping the graphics, forms and frames to a minimum [8] [12]. According to the researchers' knowledge, there is no clear strategy for analyzing effect of the geographical area and people culture on Website ranking.…”

“…For example, they all emphasize on uniqueness of content, meta-data (title and description), navigation, and human centric Web design. Among the three search engines, Google is the dominant player of the search engine providers [10]. Moreover, it is fast and reliable, works on massive scale, and produces useful results much of the time; it searches the full texts of documents, and indexes multiple documents types including HTML, PDF, Word Documents.…”

“…Moreover, it is fast and reliable, works on massive scale, and produces useful results much of the time; it searches the full texts of documents, and indexes multiple documents types including HTML, PDF, Word Documents. Therefore, this study focuses on increasing Websites SEO in local Google search engine [10].…”

2 Metoda Signifikan Pendongkrak Posisi Domain Pada Mesin Pencari

“…SEO atau yang lebih dikenal dengan Search Engine Optimization adalah sebuah proses mendesain webpage untuk mengoptimalkan potensinya sehingga bisa mencapai ranking tertinggi dalam sebuah mesin pencari, lebih disukai jikalau masuk pada halaman pertama [1]. Mesin pencari yang dipilih sebagai acuan adalah Google.…”

“…Penelitian ini merupakan kasus lain sekaligus kelanjutan dari penelitian yang dilakukan oleh Bimal Pratap Shah pada tahun 2009 [1] dengan studi kasus pada web promosi turis di nepal. Penelitian kali ini bertujuan untuk mencari signifikansi dari metoda metoda optimasi SEO yang diberikan oleh Google terhadap hasil yang diperoleh pada page rank Google.…”