LDN Hotels: An SEO experiment

Part SEO experiment, part cool domain name, part money making scheme.

If you've had to look for a domain name lately you'll know that there aren't many cool names left, so imagine our suprise when we discovered that www.ldnhotels.com was available!

Being that the domain name is the most important factor in search engine rankings, how well can an abbreviation do against the full word?

We decided to run a little experiment. Set up a site, populate it with information about hotels in London, see how it does in both search engine rankings and number of visits and aim to get higher placements than not only www.londonhotels.com, our full-worded friend, but also all the other hotel sites and portals out there.

Site structure

First up, how to lay out the site in terms of URL structure.

We decided that we'd drop the file extension from all URLs in the site. There's something nice and clean about www.domain.com/hotels/hilton/, with an alternative being www.domain.com/hotels.cfm?hid=101.

Not only does it look better, it also has more meaning to the user of the site. Does your average website user care about the file extension? Probably not.

Hotel listings

Next we look at the way we list the hotels.

This is a bit of a no-brainer. A-to-Z, star rating and search. Three great ways to find the hotel of your choice.

A-to-Z listings are about as intuiative as it gets for the user. You know what the name of the hotel starts with, click, and away you go!

Or do you? What about London Elizabeth Hotel? Do you click on L or E?

Now for the search. What is a user likely to search on? The name of the hotel, the road or street of the hotel, maybe even the postcode.

Like www.ldnhotels.com, this article is a work in progress, check back soon to see how we get on.