This article describes a way that you can increase bookings to your hostel by increasing the search engine rankings of the pages about your hostel on hostel booking engines' Web sites.

In other words, you can get more bookings by helping your listings on the hostel booking engines' Web sites rank higher.

Many hostels in competitive locations use Google Adwords for their online marketing. Google Adwords are a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing program where Google will list your ads on their network and you only pay when someone clicks on your ads.

Here is an example of some Google Adwords being shown in the Sponsored Results section of the Google search engine results pages, circled in red:

Search engines are investing a lot of effort into promoting their local search results. Google has recently take their local search to new levels, and this has implications for hostels with Web sites.

Google has been showing Local Results at the tops of certain location specific queries for a long time. Previously they have just shown a simple listing of a few local businesses in text format like this:

Google has recently expanded the local listings section to include a small map, and expanded listing with user reviews as shown in the image below:

Tracking your Web traffic can be highly useful in your marketing efforts. If you are using a good hosting company, they will provide server-side statistics programs like AWstats.

If your hosting company doesn't provide good server-side stats, you could use a free JavaScript-based visitor tracking system like Google Analytics. Installing Google Analytics on your Web site is relatively easy. It just involves copying and pasting a snippet of JavaScript code into the footer of your Web site template.

There are many hosting companies out there and it's hard to know which one to choose.

I've used many Web hosting companies over the years and wanted to offer a few suggestions here.

If you search Google, Yahoo and MSN for a query like "hostels in [your city]" does your hostel Web site come up on the first page?

The search engine results are often dominated by affiliate booking sites like Hostelworld.com, Hostels.com, Hostelbookers.com and others. Those sites can bring you many bookings, but you usually have to pay a commission for bookings that arrive through those systems.

There are a few simple things that you can do to increase the traffic that your hostel Web site recieves from search engines.