And Chute is no computer “geek,” talking about meta tags and title tags, which were originally key when it came to having search engines notice you. She’s a 16-year-industry veteran who simply practiced networking, albeit networking with online entities in addition to the people she deals with face-to-face or over the phone. And in doing so, she stumbled upon the way to higher visibility on Internet search engines.

The dynamics of SEM have changed dramatically in the past few years, and the change is working in the favor of the non-geeks. The reason lies with the grand poobah of search engines, Google. “There are other search engines, but Google is still No. 1,” says Nolan Burris, an author, speaker, and the founder and president of Vancouver-based Visionistics Enterprises.

Google is essentially a popularity-based search engine, displaying are the most frequently visited websites for that particular subject.

In short, says Burris, the secret to SEM is a little like being popular in high school. Hanging out with popular kids makes you more popular by association.

The first thing to do is get other websites to link to yours. Ideally, these websites should be more popular than yours, but even if they’re not, that link will boost your ranking in Google.  So if you work with a particular B&B a lot, offer to post a link to its website in exchange for having a link on its website to yours. And think outside the travel box—it’s fine to link with an airport parking concessionaire, but what about with the hottest Italian restaurant in town, your dry cleaner, the local fitness center or your hair salon? You don’t necessarily want the world to find you, but you want to be visible to the people in your community.

And you can expand on those links. For instance, give that great Italian restaurant a ringing endorsement, then add that your agency arranges great culinary tours to Italy. That gives your site a little more meat, and having content about Italian food can elevate your Google ranking. Just make sure that you are linking with sites that attract the same type of customers that you want to attract.

Chute visited a variety of websites that target families, mothers and home-based entrepreneurs—bluesuitmom.com, hbwom.com and babycenter.com—which had areas where she could sign up as a reference. She did that on as many websites as she could as an old-fashioned way of networking in a new channel, not realizing that it would boost her search-engine status. So now she always looks for an opportunity to get on websites that target families.

Jerry Vaughn, owner of World Voyager Vacations in Puyallup, Wash., has been practicing SEM since the days when one could pay 17 cents a click for the word cruise. Now, he estimates, that the cost has gone up, to about $3.50, which means you have got to turn a lot of those clicks into sales to make it worthwhile. Big players have gotten into the pay-per-click model, pricing smaller players out of the game. So he, too, has embraced the strategy of linking with relevant sites in order to increase his chances of achieving a higher ranking on organic searches. He recommends linking to the websites of your fellow chamber of commerce members, as well as those of your consortium or a similar travel marketing group. He also suggests linking with SitePal, a site that creates avatars (animated speaking characters). This gives him yet another way to communicate with his customers. An avatar greets visitors to the World Voyager site, telling them the variety of ways they can use the site and the agency to plan their vacations. SitePal uses Vaughn’s site as an example of how its technology works, and has linked his site to several other sites, and that has driven a lot of traffic to World Voyager.

You should also start blogging. Go to TripAdvisor, or another travel review website, and find a resort or cruise that you know a lot about and post your opinion. If you’ve had a lot of happy clients return from the cruise or hotel, include that, too. Don’t make it an ad for yourself -- make sure it’s about the travel experience, and make sure your website address is in there.

Another forum through which you can share your experiences and opinions is Travel Tribe (www.traveltribe.com), a Web 2.0 platform that connects agents and traveling consumers. Be sure to talk about your experience with that product in a way that shows your knowledge and passion. Write about places and experiences that you enjoy—you want your name associated with places where you want to send people, not those you don’t want them to visit.

Starting your own blog is easier than ever, thanks to such sites as blogger.com and Burris’ favorite, wordpress.com. And blogs are huge—that there are now 10,000 visits to blogs for every one visit to a commercial website.  If you know Ireland better than anyone else, spill your guts about what you know and how much the 20 people you just took there enjoyed themselves. Again, take care not to make it a commercial for yourself—that will turn off readers—but do include your website. You can use a light. Burris recommends something along the lines of,  “My fans find me at www.mytravelagency.com). Your blog has to be interesting, with lots of tidbits.

You should also create a Facebook page. “Facebook has become a global phenomenon,” says Burris. “I don’t know how long it will last, but right now it is unbelievably powerful in directing business.”

Because Facebook is about connecting people, it’s ideal for home-based agents, who can feature their personalities in ways that faceless corporations can’t. Burris recommends coming up with a catchy identity and tagline, such as “Tracy the Taiwanese travel agent. No one knows Taiwan like me.”

“And then just talk cool travel stuff,” Burris says. Keep it breezy and personal, and again, include your agency URL.

Only three websites are more popular than Facebook right now: Google, iTunes and Amazon.com. And though there’s nothing iTunes can do for you, you can use Amazon to help increase your online visibility. There are two ways to do this. One is to simply find a book about a destination or type of travel that you’re an expert in.  Make sure that the book and its audience are aligned with your target market. Then write a review of the book, using your own knowledge and experience to give that review credibility, including the fact that you sell a lot of travel to that destination. And, once again, include your URL.

Another way to use Amazon and Google to increase your website’s visibility to search engines is to sign up as an affiliate. That means you can sell Amazon’s books on your website. The reason to do this is not to get the commission on the book but because it links you to what is currently the second most-popular website.

Meta tags and title tags are still part of the game, but Google wised up to the ways that they could be exploited. For example, Burris says, pornography sites realized that travel is searched online more than sex is, and would include such things as “travel to Hawaii” in their tags to attract viewers. But Google makes its money on having the right ads pop up in front of the right consumers, and started relying less on meta tags, because anyone could use them to say anything—even if they were unrelated to the actual content on the website. That means that if you have a website about Hawaii and the meta tags are about Ireland, Google will ignore that site. Because of that, meta tags can be your undoing. However, says Burris, Passport Online Inc. (www.passportonlineinc.com), which provides turnkey web content and websites for travel agents, automatically keeps meta tags completely relevant to the content on the website. “But you could have a website without a single meta tag and it could be found by Google,” says Burris.

Vaughn points out another fact of life on the Internet. Relevant and fresh content reigns supreme when it comes to SEM, and Passport Online helps you automatically delivers fresh content. Newsletters also drive traffic, says Vaughn. World Voyages does an electronic newsletter—it sends two a week, provided by Passport Online—that go to thousands of customers. These include a link to World Voyages’ websites. Having a booking engine also helps drive traffic, which makes your site more popular and more desirable to search engines, says Vaughn. Few people actually do any booking on the website, but it’s still important to have that option there, he says.

Vaughn also recommends that you view your website as an extension of the Yellow Pages, an extension that can pull in people from well beyond your own geographic area.

Finally, have a well-thought-out marketing plan, says Vaughn. This can include local events, newspaper advertising and signs on your vehicle,  as well as online marketing. Without an overall plan, you could well be missing the boat, he says.

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