What makes a website land in our “top 5”? Find out!
Last Friday we wrote about why TripAdvisor is #1 on our List of Top Travel Sites – it’s called super-strong SEO and excellent community-building! But as it turns out, many of you are very interested to know more about the other 4 sites that made that list, so here are their stats, along with some analysis at the end of the article:
1. Trip Advisor
- Website: tripadvisor.com
- Keywords: 32,854
- Pages: 31.6 million
- Inbound Links from External Sites: 12.2 million
- People: 5.8M unique visitors per month
- Website: nationalgeographic.com
- Keywords: 8,010
- Pages: 959,718
- Inbound Links from External Sites: 2.7 million
- People: 3.2M unique visitors per month
- Website: virtualtourist.com
- Keywords: 4,240
- Pages: 8.9 million
- Inbound Links from External Sites: 1.9 million
- People: 776k unique visitors per month
- Website: travelchannel.com
- Keywords: 1,089
- Pages: 195, 712
- Inbound Links from External Sites: 265,420
- People: 661k unique visitors per month
- Website: lonelyplanet.com
- Keywords: 2,412
- Pages: 4.6 million
- Inbound Links from External Sites: 1.2 million
- People: 630k unique visitors per month
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You might be asking why Expedia and Orbitz don’t fit the bill. Well, Expedia and Orbitz are primarily online retailers, not publishers. It’s very clear that their intent is to sell a vacation. While our top 5 may give you the option to book your travel through their websites, the goal is to provide their audience with reviews and relevant travel information.
With that said, TripAdvisor and Virtual Tourist are operating companies of Expedia, Inc.
Now, down to the logistics of all these websites.
It’s fairly easy to see why Trip Advisor, National Geographic and Virtual Tourist make the top three. Their keywords, number of pages, inbound links and unique visitors per month all naturally progress.
What may boggle you is how TravelChannel.com gets more traffic than LonelyPlanet.com even though Lonely Planet has more keywords, pages and inbound links than Travel Channel.
The answer is simple: TV. TravelChannel.com, while producing lots of original content for their website, still has a major TV counterpart that drives traffic. Lonely Planet has a TV show on BBC Networks, but it doesn’t drive the type of traffic that an entire network does.
What do the results of this research tell us? Beef up on your keywords, attract more incoming links, and build more pages.
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