Travel Web Sites

Finding cheap airfares is easy to do if you follow some basic guidelines and use the best travel sites. With the internet anyone can be their own travel agent and save themselves a lot of money in the process. Before I touch on the best websites to use I will first go over the most important guidelines to be thinking about before you start doing your online searches for the cheapest airfares.

The first thing to think about is how far in advance should you try to book your ticket. If you will be flying in high season then the earlier the better, probably at least three or four months in advance if at all possible. If it will not be high season then typically you can get your best deals somewhere between six to eight weeks in advance. At a minimum you should try to buy your ticket at least three weeks in advance, because this is often a requirement by the airlines to get their best fares.

The next thing to be aware of is that you should be as flexible as you possibly can. Do searches for different dates if your schedule allows it, and know that it generally tends to be more expensive to fly on Mondays, Fridays, or Sundays which are typically heavily traveled days for business people. Likewise try to be open to different departure times. And if possible be open to flying from and/or to different airports, especially those that are served by budget airlines.

The last thing to keep in mind is what day of the week you make your purchase. Several experts believe that on average you get the best prices right after midnight on Tuesday nights. The reasoning is that this is when the airlines put back on the market all of the un-purchased reservations for sale priced tickets from the previous weekend.

Armed with these basic guidelines you can now start using the best travel sites to find the best fares. First try searching the best aggregator sites which are search engines that search multiple travel websites at the same time. The best aggregators for airfares as of now are Kayak.com, Mobissimo.com and Momondo.com.

After you have found a great fare with an aggregator you should also check directly with the airline's website to see if you can get it even cheaper there. And you could also do a search on Google for 'promotion codes' along with the name of the airline. Sometimes you can find a special running for the itinerary that you want, and you can only use this code on the airline's website.

Now it is time to check to see if the aggregator sites missed a budget airline due to the fact that many budget airlines do not allow themselves to be searched by the aggregators. Southwest Airlines is a prime example. You can do this by using Whichbudget.com. If you discover that a budget airline that wasn't covered by the aggregator sites flies the route you need, then go to that airline's website and get a price. Sometimes it will be lower than anything that you found in your other searches.

If you follow these simple steps and use the recommended best travel sites you can easily save yourself a lot of money booking your own airline tickets. And in these difficult economic times, who doesn't want to save money whenever they can? Good luck!

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Author, Keith Hajovsky, has traveled throughout much of the United States and to forty different countries within five continents for both business and pleasure, and he always looks for ways to stretch his travel dollars by using the best travel websites he can find. If you would like to learn about additional websites and tips for finding cheap airfares as well as learn about websites and tips for finding cheap hotels, rental cars and cruises, then please visit http://www.TheBestTravelWebsites.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Keith_Hajovsky

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If you have a travel website or blog then you know how difficult it can be to rank in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing in this incredibly competitive market. Huge authority sites like Expedia and Trip Advisor naturally dominate the rankings, and at this point there is probably very little one can do to outrank these industry leaders. However, with some diligence you can get your website to outrank many other smaller players in the industry, which will bring you more traffic, and ultimately more customers and more money to your business. How can you do this? You need to build backlinks to your travel website.

One of the main components Google and other search engines use to determine the importance and thus the ranking of websites is how many other websites are linking to their content. The more sites that are linking to your site, the more important your site will be in the eyes of the search engines. Now in a perfect world your content would be so exemplary that thousands of sites would link to it automatically. However, this is far easier said than done, and ultimately most webmasters will need to do their backlinking manually.

So what are some of the best ways to get travel backlinks to your website? I've outlined some strategies below to guide you through this tedious but necessary process of building authority for your travel site:

Social Bookmarking - With the advent of Web 2.0 the net has become an increasingly socially interactive place. Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and others have tens of millions of users, and an interesting article or story can spread like wildfire. By submitting your site to these social networking sites you will not only gain a direct high page rank backlink, but you may receive hundreds or even thousands of other links from fellow webmasters who found your story interesting enough to link to.

Blog Commenting - Careful with this one. I'm not suggesting you start spamming every site in the blogosphere. Writing nothing more than "nice post" or "thanks" with a link to your site will more than likely get your comment deleted. Take the time to actually read the article you are commenting on and then leave a respectful, relevant comment with a link to your site. Blog commenting can be a great way of networking, and is also one of the easiest ways to target backlinks in your particular niche.

Write Guest Posts - If you have some writing ability then you might want to consider doing some guest posts on travel blogs. Bloggers are always hungry for fresh, unique content for their website and will often be more than willing to allow you to tuck in a backlink to your site (with relevant anchor text) in exchange for a guest post.

Submit to Video Sharing Sites - When it comes to the travel niche people often want more than just words to help them plan their trip. They want to see pictures, and especially video of destination spots they are considering to help them make up their minds. If you have some video footage of a recent vacation to a popular holiday destination throw it up on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Add a link back to your travel site in the description so visitors can click to see more. If you have a bit of technical know-how (and a relatively short URL) you can also watermark the video with your URL to drive traffic to your site.

These are just a few ways to build backlinks to your travel website. It may sound tedious, but trust me when I say this process is absolutely necessary if you want to increase your search engine rankings, website traffic and ultimately make your business a success.

Want to start building travel backlinks immediately? Submit your travel stories to our website at http://www.GlobeTales.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dennis_Lindsay

Labels: how to build backlinks to your travel website

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