This just came across my desk:

The proportion of young travellers who book online has surged from 10% to 50% in five years.

And 80% use the internet to search for information before departing on their trip.

The figures are to be released as part of a global study of young independent travellers published by the World Youth & Student Educational Travel Confederation to be released next month.

The survey of more than 8,500 young independent travellers found that the average spend per trip has increased by 40% since 2002 to 1,915 euros, of which around 1,140 euros is put aside to cover costs once in the destination.

The most popular destinations for young travellers are Australia, the US and France, while backpackers head for Thailand, Australia and New Zealand.

Almost three quarters travel to explore, learn a language, volunteering or studying abroad and 80% say they return more appreciate and tolerant of other cultures as a result.

The full findings of the survey are to be released on October 3 at the World Youth & Student Travel Conference in Istanbul.

I am so sorry that there has been no posts for some time - since we put the Bootstrap video up with have been inundating with enquiries and feedback. We are finalising the demo site and expect it any day now! Plus, I have only just graduated from the couch to the kitchen table with this broken ankle.

In the meantime, I have some cool news to report. We have been so busy here at Xebidy developing all our new stuff (Breathe website, Backpacking Queensland website, new functionality for Base Backpacker, and Wayward Bus and The Park websites getting close to going live) that we simply did not have time to do the designs for the new Oz Experience website. Anyway, a local company here in Queenstown called Fluid Designs was commissioned to do the designs - and they have come back with three awesome options. So much so in fact that we can’t decide which direction to go in next.

The solution: Bruce Thurlow at Oz Experience has asked the Oz Experience groups in Facebook for their opinion. I think this is awesome - after all these are the same customers that use and enjoy the product - they know the product better then the company themselves. Lets’ hope we get some constructive feedback.

Whats’ more, by empowering the customers he has created a bit of an aire of anticipation too. Once we get the feedback the plan is to report to the group and keep them in the loop, announce new functionality and generally spread he word. This sort of social marketing really gets me excited!!

Over the last four months our team of long-haired, pierced, low-riding, caffeine-fueled developers have created an awesome CMS that we’re ready to show you!

Branded ‘Xebidy Bootstrap’, the Xebidy team have taken the award-winning open-source CMS - Silverstripe - and added advanced functionality that provides you, as the website administrator, functionality to easily drag and drop components into a number of preset layouts to create any page you desire.

Today I’d like to show you a video created a month ago that shows what we’ve been working on.

In a few days we’ll have a demo install of Xebidy Boostrap 1.0 ready online for you to play with.

We love open-source so much that we’re releasing Xebidy Bootstrap 1.0 source code to Silverstripe and the open-source community, and hope to see our work one day integrated into Silverstripe CMS. Check back in a few days for a source code release.

Sorry for the delay in writing these posts for those that don’t know I broke my ankle on the race snowboard which has meant an operation, two pins and some heavy downtime. This has given me time, however, to work on a lot of the content that has been needed on many of our new partner sites (in particular, Breathe New Zealand, Wayward Bus and Adventure Tours Australia, and Backpacking Queensland). None of these sites are live yet, but they are all in that phase of production where we need to be getting the first round of content in.

There is that rule that 20% of the work takes 80% of the time; which in the case of creating a website is certainly the case. One of the biggest problems I seem to come up against over and over is the unpreparedness of website managers of exactly what content is to go on what page when the time comes. It seems to take an eternity to get from site designed and developed to finalising the content stage.

One of the tricks I use is to create a word document writing the first page and then creating all the hyperlinks to other pages within that first page text. By building up the headings for those other pages you very quickly build up a framework for the whole site. It is just a case then of going back and filling in the content. But, better still you can suddenly see how the content fits into the designed site and what more design and development is required. That is, assuming you did not write all the content first, before you got the website designed - which of course, you did!

I sound like a broken record as I harp on about the importance of links, but I just want to clarify some very important issues with links that have been effecting so many of your web rankings in the past few months. Many sites have seen a decline in their search engine rankings - yet they have lots and lots of links, why?

As I said in a post last month about the Importance of Links Google has long disapproved of reciprocal links and now they have pounced “bad neighbourhood” links and buying links.

A bad neighbourhood is formed when you have lots of links from sites that have nothing to do with your sites content. Links from fashion websites, car sales, even shoe websites pointing to your hotel or travel site. Google simply sees right through this and simply not counting these links. It has not been established as yet whether your site is also being penalised for actually having these links. Likewise, listing you site on link farms (sites that serve no other purpose than creating links), or the most recent fad of three-way link schemes are definitely heavy frowned upon - they are simply cheating!

Worse, for hostels that have got themselves listed in such sites, I foresee it is going to be one hell of a battle to get yourselves removed.
Also in a post last month I introduced you to a cool tool for looking to the anchor text links of your competitors for your selected keywords. The anchor and title texts in the links to your website are very important. As part of the clampdown on rogue linking Google is placing much greater emphasis on the relationship between the content on your site and the content on the sites linking to you. One of the main methods for doing this is by looking at the title and anchor text in the links. The back link tool I gave you earlier this week is the first place to start in analysing your links and those of your competitors to establish the value of these.

Since Google has introduced these changes many established sites have seen themselves fall down the ratings. On the flip side the opportunity exists for you to improve your rankings now.

When we developed the functionality to take Hostel World reviews and ratings and display them on the Base website I believed we were working with Hostel World (rather than against them) - after all Base hostels used the Hostel World property management system - and as I said earlier today, we were in effect announcing the importance of Hostel World content.

Ironically, it was over a year ago that I first saw the aggregating functionality that the Charts property management system was promoting for populating the Hostel World inbox with availability from Charts and subsequently retrieving bookings into the property management system. It was obvious to me at the time that this would be unacceptable to Hostel World. Firstly, there is the case of controlling the hits on their server. But secondly, it is the case of controlling the data.

Hostel World are happy to share their technology (you can insert their booking engine into your website very easily) and their moves to RSS feed the reviews and ratings is evidence of their Web 2.0 attitude to sharing data within the realms of sensibility. But their wish to restrict the access to availability (their main asset) is understandably essential.

Firstly, they are in the business of providing property management systems (Backpack for Windows) and to allow other property management systems access to their online availability database is in effect cutting their own market. But the second and more understandable reason was made clear to me by Tom Kennedy in a brief discussion outside the Sheraton Hotel in Toronto in 2005. When I asked Tom what the chance of accessing the Hostel World database both for populating and getting availability for the TravelFAT system he said slim. He explained that the risk for Hostel World if everyone had access to availability would be an erosion of prices - sites cutting commissions or hostels putting lower prices on certain sites. The net effect a lower yield for everyone - obvious.

The screen scraping method that Charts was using for populating the Hostel World inbox with availability and retrieving bookings was only a short step for someone to develop a booking engine using the Hostel World availability but not their payments engine - in effect side stepping Hostel World and keeping the money for themselves.

So it came as no surprise recently that Hostel World has added a visual randomly generated code that has to be entered to their login screen to stop such practices. It is a pity for all the hostels that purchased Charts on this premise. Nonetheless, let us hope that at sometime in the near future Hostel World considers publishing their APIs for how other property management systems might send availability to, and retrieve bookings from, the Hostel World database - ignoring of course their business model of distributing their own property management system (sic).

I have written two earlier posts regarding Base Backpackers and their courageous move allowing Hostel World reviews and ratings to appear on their website unedited. But today a thought…

Clearly, the use of this independent user generated content signals a tick of recognition by Base of the dominant position of Hostel World in the online hostel booking space but does it also mean an erosion of the Base brand online? Is this in effect saying to a customer book with Hostel World and not us?

When we originally designed the Base web strategy the majority of Base hostels were using the Hostel World property management system Backpack for Windows which meant that every customer that booked online at both the Hostel World website and the Base website were sent an online survey. Unfortunately, in the last 6 months many of the hostels have switched systems and this is no longer the case. So, I guess the answer will come over the next few months. If Hostel World can maintain the necessary level of content to make this functionality work for Base then Hostel Worlds’ position as the dominant independent source for traveller reviews and ratings will be confirmed - if not, perhaps Base will be forced to look elsewhere.

As an aside, the whole displaying of these reviews and ratings on the Base website developed by Xebidy is pretty flash - well we thought so anyway! We use a variety of products to continually monitor the relevant Hostel World pages, pick up the content, strip it of any presentation and represent it on the Base website in valid HTML. Since making it public I have been advised that Hostel World are going to RSS feed that content in the next 4 to 6 weeks. This is a great move by them, firstly it stops uncontrolled hits on the server by guys like us, and secondly it will make the content widely available for use by everyone - and maybe this is the answer to the dominance of the Hostel World brand online.

Interestingly enough it also means that those wanting to display only good comments could use products such as our Xefeed RSS feed rinse to remove bad comments - not quite what everyone had in mind I am sure!

There has been a huge amount of focus lately here in the office on what we actually do as part of our SEO process as we have been putting together manuals for our clients and for ourselves internally. We know we are bloody good at it - but we are finding the exact documentation of the process about as laborious as the process itself.

Anyway, this explains the more than normal amount of SEO posts in the last few weeks or so. Today’s post again covers on-site optimisation relative to your competitors. Here’s 12 steps I think are imperative in checking out your competitors.

1. Establish the top 10 sites in the search engine results for your keywords;
2. Compare the web page titles of these sites relative to your own for the quantity, density, position, number of words and number of characters.
3. And then compare the meta data (keywords and description) for the same features - quantity, density, position, number of characters and words
4. Look at the body text of your site against you main competitors. Analyse the first 50 words once again for quantity, density, position, number of words and characters. Also, look at the first and last sentence of the body texts. Look for words that are bold or underlined.
5. Look at in-site links, the URLs they go to, and the anchor text used in the links. Also look for keywords in the alt text and title text of the links. Check the number of times that the title text link tag is used over the plain link ref - we believe it should be no more than 6 times - but check what your competitors are doing.
6. Compare outbound links; the content of the link and where they are going.
7. Compare the physical URLs you are competing with
8. Compare the heading tags throughout the sites using the same categories of density, position, number of words and characters
9. Look at all the alt text on the images on each site
10. Count the number of words on each page (in an earlier post I discussed that top ranked sites seem to have been 500 and 700 words)
11. Establish the theme of yours and your competitors websites, that is, consider all your web page titles together to see which keywords make up the majority of your text
12. And, finally look at the general page properties. These are the HTML size, look for same colour text and background, tiny text, immediate keyword repeats, whether the sites use controls or frames, and the use of internal and external javascript. Here you are looking more that your site is doing the right things.

We have said it many times, no one really knows the construct of search engine algorithms in terms of the weighting given to links, heading tags etc. One of the axioms of on-site optimisation relative to your competitors is that if you at least equal your competitors (for search engine rankings) in terms of all the above then you are at least competing on an even playing field in terms of onsite optimisation.

I spent the day yesterday with my mates at Base Backpackers finalising the go-live beta version of their new website as well as looking to the next few months advancement of the site. Xebidy did not design the site but we developed it onto our Bootstrap content management server which is based on the Open Source Silver Stripe CMS. The most exciting is probably the next 12 months however when Xebidy will be working with the guys at Base to develop the functionality into a new world with lots of great Web 2.0 features planned - I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag just yet; and also the implementation of an extensive Internet marketing plan that was authored by Jonathan Dixon at Xebidy.

One of the cool things about this project is the courageousness of management and foresight with respect to this project. A few weeks ago I posted about a real world web 2.0 dilemma we were facing on the project; in which we are taking automatic feeds of reviews and ratings from the independent Hostel World website and displaying them directly on the Base website. As I said while the reviews were not really that bad - there were reviews that you might not want to display on your home page necessarily. Nonetheless, it was decided that these reviews would be displayed regardless, unedited.

Base understands the importance of word of mouth and that in order to compete and achieve their objectives of being the best hostel/budget accommodation in Australia and New Zealand they simply have to provide the best possible product. A message has been sent out from head office to all hostel managers that the reviews and ratings will be considered as a measurement of success and that managers should strive to improve their ratings and address reviews head-on. Further a policy has been put in place to address any negative comments head on so that they are either turned into a positive or more importantly that the issue is taken on board, that if possible they are rectified and that the users are communicated that this has been done.

It will be great to monitor the reviews and ratings over the next 12 months and see what impact this positive attitude has. I am easily betting that all the Base hostels ratings will improve by at least 5 -10% (which is a lot when you consider they are already consistently the top rating hostels in their cities) over the next 12 months through both a positive influence on the ratings and review medium and also through increased focus of the manager directly on the feedback from their customers.

It’s going to be a great 12 months and I will keep you informed as we introduce some of the new functionality and rework the site - taking it from the soft beta launch it is today to the full functionality user-centric site that is planned.

Competitor analysis for any chosen set of keywords is important for a number of reasons, firstly, to know who you are up are up against and secondly to know whether it targetting those keywords really is achievable. In doing this keyword analysis firstly look at the search engine results for your chosen keyword phrase and see how many competitors there are with page rank higher than 4 (this is at least what I would expect you to need to beat for a good quality keyword). Secondly look at the number of inbound links those competitors have - these are the number of links you are going to need. And thirdly, find out the quality of those links - how many of them have your keywords in the link anchor text. (See my post last month on the Importance of Links for more information)

A short cut for the last step is to type the following into Google: intitle:”keyword” inanchor:”keyword” OR you could use this cool tool I discovered - www.startlaunch.com/research/. It allows you to analyse multiple keywords at once quickly and efficiently.

Nice!