Web pages with a low weight have more possibilities to rank higher, it is as simple as that.

The search engines want to make their visitors happy, the highest possible amount of visitors, also those with slow or bad connections or working from old equipment. And how to make online visitors more happy than NOT pointing them to websites that take forever to load or load in bits and pieces?

SEO Specials
Or read about Bernardus

So, luxury hotels...
Can not achieve high rankings?

Far from! They too just have to be more creative. Their question will be: how to transmit the right feel of luxury while keeping the page weight as low as possible?

It is no miracle, the success of the ultra light and bright hotel websites. Especially the IDS are doing it very cleverly, by just highlighting the high level of style in one, two or three small targeted details.

Location, location
The adagio used to be "location, location, location".

Nowadays there is not a single doubt that it should be: "website, website, website".

Done very well, a hotel website can be its ideal and less costly sales representaive, road sign and classic publicity at the same time, replacing all other marketing strategies.

But mind. There are 400 million active websites online. Just "having a website" does not mean anything any longer. It has to be smart. Very, very smart.

WHAT WEIGHT FOR A HOTEL WEBSITE?

If you do not know how to weigh a page in your website, try this page weight tool. Do not weigh your website, but one URL (one page).

A popular convention in SEO says that pages should be under 60 KB to be attractive enough for the search engines to consider a higher ranking.

However, then you are still just 'into consideration'. And the more hotels start noticing there is such a thing as SEO, the more all of them try to make their pages lighter. Our advice is to stay under 20 KB.

Obviously, low page weight is just one of the 10 important seo techniques. If you score 6 out of 10, and your competitors for example only 2 out of 10, then it does not matter if your page is over 20K or even 30. Ask for your review.

THE PROBLEM WITH BRANDING
So there you go. A top of the line luxury hotel just has to transmit the right feel of luxury in its hotel website. It just has to make its website glamorous, in order to speak to the right market.

In many cases that will come with Flash elements, big photos, highly decorative buttons, titles in an artistic font and that there fore have to be created within a photo, and a never ending range of small touches and glossy details. All things that add weight.

Plus that the spiders of search engines simply can not read such graphic material. Search Engines read text.

The more humble the hotel, the less its need for right those elements that are search engine unfriendly.

LOW BUDGETS=MORE THINKING
Sometimes when turning to a search engine, searching for a hotel and again finding a small hotel in the first pages, it is easy to see why that hotel is there. "If we do not have the budget, well, then we just have to be smarter".

That is the whole advantage of the Internet as a marketing tool. It is no longer a matter of who has the biggest marketing budget, but who is the smartest.

Look at us and our websites. All of them are kept very simple. Because they are not meant to impress. They are meant to achieve high rankings, and in such a way that they convert visitors into clients.