Before spring break I attended a presentation for HEI hospitality, a company which buys and sells hotel properties. During the presentation we were addressed by one employee whose job requirements included not simply web design, but web page modification. The purpose of her modifications is to increase the rankings of the web pages for their hotels so they come up high on web based searches. She brought up a few web pages of real estate properties she has done work on as examples. We were shown the page before and after work was done. Part of the business is making sure that the company’s web pages are easily accessible by basic web searches via google, yahoo and other readily used search engines and that they come up above competing hotel sites. Some methods by which this is done is by adding links to the pages so they come up higher on searches. Links from their corporate site to their specific hotel web sites and other various links are added based on rank. As learned in class this is a commonly employed method of raising web page rankings.

Another even more basic method by which the ranking of a web page can be increased is by enlarging the font size of commonly searched phrases. For example if someone were to search a hotel brand such as Sheraton and a city name, several hits will come up. By enlarging the font of “Sheraton” and raising the geographic location of the name of the hotel on the site, it may come up higher in searches. Just by increasing the font or placing the name higher on the page the rank of a page increases, and this means increased traffic and increased room bookings for the hotel.

Her job includes searching these pages regularly to see how high they come up in both general and advanced searches and making the changes necessary to improve their rankings. Just as the structure of the financial market dictates job availability, the nature of the internet creates jobs within certain web based industries and this is a perfect example.

Link: To the HEI hospitality web site http://www.heihotels.com/

To the site for Sheraton, Music City http://www.sheratonmusiccity.com/