HIGHER hotel prices, airline capacity cuts and rising travel demand mean travelers will have to work harder to find a good deal in 2012. But there are plenty of online tools to help keep your vacation expenses in check. Here are 19 go-to Web sites to help you save money this year.

FLIGHTS

Looking for sales on a specific route, or just want to go somewhere cheap? AirfareWatchdog.com hunts down deals computers tend to miss, like promo codes airlines include in e-mail newsletters. It also finds sales from Allegiant and Southwest, which typically aren’t listed on major airfare search engines. You can sign up for specific fare alerts or a list of all the cheap round-trip fares from your local airport.

Where can you go for $500 or less? Kayak.com/explore will show you where you can vacation for a particular price and display the results on a map. You can narrow your search by month, region, flight length, weather or activity. Clicking on a price reveals dates the fare is available.

If you already know where you want to go, use Itasoftware.com to find the cheapest dates to fly. Click on “airfare search” in the middle of the home page, then enter your departure date and destination and select “see calendar of lowest fares.” To purchase, you must go to the airline’s Web site or online agencies like Travelocity.

To figure out whether to buy that plane ticket now or wait, go to Bing.com/travel. Its Price Predictor can determine how likely a fare is to rise or fall during the next seven days from more than 250 cities in the United States to top domestic destinations and major hubs in Europe. The site claims that its predictions are about 75 percent accurate and save customers more than $50 on average for a round trip.

After you’ve booked your tickets at an airline site, enter your flight information at Yapta.com to track the price so you don’t miss out on savings if the price drops. If the difference in price exceeds the rebooking fee (typically $75 to $150), Yapta will send you, without charge, an e-mail or tweet so you can call the airline to claim the credit.

HOTELS

To get the best deal on Priceline.com, where travelers name their own price and pay before learning the hotel’s name, sites like Biddingfortravel.com and Betterbidding.com have long offered strategic advice on how to game the system. Now, a new site, Biddingtraveler.com, goes a step further. Enter the city, dates, neighborhood and star ratings for the hotel you want. Then, after reviewing the site’s recommendations, enter a “lowball” bid and “final offer.” The Bidding Traveler then calculates and helps you execute the optimal bidding strategy on Priceline.

Not willing to gamble? Hotels.com offers nearly 145,000 properties in more than 60 countries from national chain hotels and all-inclusive resorts to bed-and-breakfasts. You can find particularly good last-minute deals on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And the site has a loyalty program through which members earn a free-night voucher after they book 10 nights.

 For hotel fanciers, Luxurylink.com, offers discounts on high-end hotels and villas through online auctions and deals. Just last month the site was auctioning off a five-night package at La Samanna on St. Martin in the Caribbean that included a deluxe ocean-view room with a private terrace, airport transfers, a bottle of rum upon arrival, two 45-minute massages and a one-day car rental with a minimum starting bid of $2,475. The package normally costs $6,171.

VACATION RENTALS

As hotel prices rise, vacation rentals can be the better deal. HomeAway.com offers more than 290,000 listings in 145 countries, including rentals by owners that cut out the middleman.

Airbnb.com connects travelers with locals who are offering a place to stay, whether it is a couch, a private apartment or a castle. It currently has about 100,000 listings in 19,000 cities and towns in 192 countries, and charges booking fees from 6 to 12 percent. Wimdu.com offers a similar service focused mostly on places in Europe with 35,000 listings across 100 countries. Do as much due diligence as you can when using such sites; some hosts have been known to cancel confirmed reservations at the last minute.

For luxury seekers, Jetsetter.com/homes, a members-only site, offers discounts of up to 50 percent on 5 to 10 carefully selected vacation rentals. Membership is free and by invitation only. You can also request a free membership on Jetsetter.com.  

EVERYTHING ELSE

Tired of sifting through daily-deal or group-shopping sites like Groupon and LivingSocial for local bargains? YipIt.com, collects those deals from 787 services in 118 North American cities. Travelers who sign up with an e-mail can filter results by checking categories like wine tasting, museum, golf or other activities. A recent search for restaurant and spa deals in New York turned up a $60 three-course dinner for two with wine (worth $136) at Tenpenny, the Gotham Hotel’s restaurant, and a $199 Moroccan Spa treatment at the Trump SoHo, worth $339. Pay close attention to expiration dates to be sure the deals will be good for your travel plans.

Autoslash.com searches the Web for discount coupons on car rentals and applies them after you book. It then continually checks for lower rates and coupons until your trip date and automatically applies any discounts it finds.

Cayole.com lets you search cruises by price, destination, room type or cruise line, then offers price predictions to give cruisers an idea of whether they should buy now or wait for a possible price drop. For example, by clicking “get more details” for a five-night Western Mediterranean cruise in September, the site recommended that travelers booking balcony cabins buy “as soon as possible, because prices are likely to increase.” For interior ocean-view rooms or suites it suggested waiting.

If you’re willing to swap places with a stranger, list your home and find travelers willing to trade on Homeexchange.com, which facilitates about 60,000 swaps a year. Recent listings included a two-bedroom apartment on Lake Como in Italy and a six-bedroom oceanfront lodge in Cape Town with a resident game ranger. Members pay $119.40 to list their home for a year or $47.85 for three months.

For many prolific real estate agents, SEO has become an essential facet of their lead generation, surpassing printed media, direct marketing, etc. And although algorithms used by search engines continue to evolve and place weight on different metrics, links remain a constant factor having a big impact on SERP’s. Up until Yahoo Site Explorer perished, it was a favorite tool among SEO’s for link analysis – particularly when researching competitor’s link profiles. Yahoo Site Explorer continues under Bings Webmaster Tools, but as it only provides data for a webmaster’s own sites, it has left many SEO-savvy agents looking for alternatives to YSE – particularly if the cost (if any) is minimal. With that said, here are a few options for those searching for a link-analysis tool:

LinkDiagnosis

The first thing you will notice about LinkDiagnosis is the amount of information provided:. linking url and its PageRank/Page Authority (and added bonus, Domain Authority), number of outbound links, landing page, link’s anchor text, and other data that was simply above my level of understanding. As comprehensive as the data is, it requires quite a bit of time to run full reports, even under the fastest setting. Also, a Firefox extension must be downloaded in order to view full reports, which can then be exported as CSV files for further analysis.

OpenSiteExplorer

Powered by the SEO geniuses at SEOMoz, OpenSiteExplorer is an excellent tool . Data is broken down summarily, such as Title and Url of linking page, Anchor Text, Page Authority (which some argue is a better metric than PageRank when gauging a page’s value/trust), Domain Authority, and nofollow attribute. With a free account, information is limited to only the top 5 links. For those who are willing to shell out the money, sign up for a free 30 day free trial and memberships start at $99 thereafter. Use in conjunction with the popular SEOmoz toolbar and link analysis becomes as efficient as it gets.

Majestic SEO

Very well known among professional SEO’s, the Majestic SEO Site Explorer and Backlink History tools provide useful information in a very user-friendly format. Choose between the Historic Index and the Fresh Index (from the past 30 days). With over 20 Billion pages in their database, it is comprehensive and link data includes top backlinks (including anchor text), top pages, number of linking domains, referring IP addresses, etc. Paid subscriptions start at £29.99 but with the amount of information provided, it is worth it for those who are serious about planning and executing link strategies.

Blekko

Blekko is a search engine and signing up for a free account is required in order to access SEO information. Upon searching a url on Blekko, there is a ‘SEO’ link below each individual result, which provides a fair amount of information – including inbound links, crawl data, and duplicate content. Link information is broken down by State and Country of origin, linking domain (not specific url though), number of links from linking domain, and host rank. Upon clicking on the number of links from a specific linking domain, the results show the linking page, the anchor text, and the landing page. Although not the most efficient of set ups, the sheer amount of information is worth the time and effort. A caveat, their database is much smaller than those of Google or Bing and the SEO information provided is reflective of such, particularly for non-US based websites.

This is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of ALL available link-analysis tools, just a brief review of ones that have been used by the author since the demise of YSE. Comment away and share your favorites.

THE only area of business that seems to be recession-proof is social media. Industrial firms are battening down the hatches. Banks are tossing thousands of workers overboard. But Facebook is looking to raise $10 billion for a small fraction of its shares when it goes public in 2012.

A recent conference in Madrid, put on by the Bankinter Foundation of Innovation, captured the enthusiasm. The assembled cyber-gurus argued that “social technologies” that allow people to broadcast their ideas (eg, Twitter), or form connections (eg, LinkedIn), are some of the most powerful ever devised. They can be supersized quickly, linked together easily and spread by customers. And they can be accessed from almost anywhere. Two billion people are already online. E-commerce sales are $8 trillion a year. So, the argument goes, this more “social” element to the internet is the next great revolution. Over-caffeinated cyber-champions talk of “empowerment” and “transparency”. But is all this as wonderful as it sounds? Or is it a new bubble in the making?

The great virtue of social technologies, say their boosters, is that they break down the barriers between companies and their customers. They allow firms to gather oodles of information: big companies now obsessively monitor social media to find out what their customers really think about them. Social media also allow companies to respond to complaints more quickly: firms as different as Chrysler and Best Buy employ “Twitter teams” to reply to whinging tweets.

More information ought to be useful, but only if companies can interpret it. And workers are already overloaded: 62% of them say that the quality of what they do is hampered because they cannot make sense of the data they already have, according to Capgemini, a consultancy. This will only get worse: the data deluge is expected to grow more than 40 times by 2020.

Responding quickly to bitter tweets sounds like a nifty way to soothe angry customers. But there is a risk that companies will concentrate on a handful of activists (who tweet a lot), while neglecting average customers (who don’t). They may also ignore non-customers (who are the biggest potential source of growth) and the elderly (who seldom tweet). Many firms think that they can improve customer service by using social media to respond to complaints quickly. Really? It is already virtually impossible to talk to a real person on the telephone. Will it be any easier online?

Undaunted, cyber-enthusiasts maintain that social technologies are shifting power from a few Goliaths to many Davids. Ordinary people can easily broadcast their opinions and extend their networks. Big firms have to adjust to this new reality or go under. (As the digerati put it: “All businesses will end up looking like the internet.”) But big firms can use social data to add to their already formidable influence over the consumer: Ford, PepsiCo and Southwest Airlines monitor postings on social-media sites to gauge the impact of their marketing campaigns and then adjust their pitch accordingly. And some of the most successful internet-savvy companies, such as Google and Microsoft, are as secretive about what they do as any old-line company.

The “Army of Davids” argument—to borrow a phrase from Glenn Reynolds, an American blogger—is often applied to politics. For example, Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the Russian Duma, argues that social media make it easier for protesters in Russia to organise. (Russians spend more time on the internet than western Europeans, not least because they have no faith in state television.) This is true, but the secret police in many countries are equally excited about technology. New tools allow them to eavesdrop retrospectively, and to trace networks of dissidents. During the Egyptian uprising the advantage was clearly on the side of the dissidents, since the Egyptian secret police were digital dullards. But this may not be the case in China, where the regime’s online snoops are highly sophisticated.

Cyber-enthusiasts gush about the way social media help entrepreneurs. They have a point: disruptive technologies reconfigure old businesses and create new ones. Facebook could let companies aim their ads more accurately. Firms are starting to use internal social-networking tools, such as Yammer and Chatter, to encourage collaboration, discover talent and cut down on pointless e-mails. Youngsters are happy to embrace it, but older managers may be less keen. The use of social media within companies could be quite disruptive to traditional management techniques, particularly in strongly hierarchical firms.

Dreaming up new companies is not terribly difficult: at the conference Andreas Weigend, the founder of Social Data Lab, came up with the idea of “another person’s hat”; a product that allows you to don the digital identity of, say, an Islamic fundamentalist and see what the world looks like through his eyes. This sounds neat, but some of the new social-media technologies have a clown-suit quality to them. They are amusing the first time, but rapidly become tedious.

A new medium: neither rare nor well-done

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

I call it spidey-sense. It's the feeling that people might want to read about something, even though I have no evidence that I'm right. The New York Times' media reporter, David Carr, thinks picking up on these faint scents is a key to using Twitter effectively. Here's what he told Terry Gross on Fresh Air:

Sometimes you want to grab what is in the air, so to speak, and just put it out there... One time after [the Winter Olympics ended], I just said, 'I miss the Olympics.' That got re-tweeted almost more than anything I've ever written about ... it's just something that's in the air.

In the olden days, this might have been "news sense" or something, but that implies a consciousness of the importance of an item, idea, or story. I think what Carr is talking about is a little different. Spidey-sense isn't having well-regulated civic priorities. Rather, it's possessing a compass that points toward "interesting" for any possible reason. The feeling Carr's describing is almost a presentiment of a story, a magnetization.

To overthink it a little: there's a network of people who are interested in almost any topic. That network is dynamic. It spikes around obvious events (football, Super Bowl) but sometimes, for almost no good reason, it balloons without anybody noticing it (football, some random day in July). And it's at those moments when just putting it out there activates that whole network, and suddenly your media allows them to talk about something that had hovered just outside their consciousness.

For mediamakers, this must have always been the case, but what's interesting is that the signals we're reading today aren't exclusively those of our neighbors or coworkers, but come from our online social worlds. The air is bigger now.

Called "Address Is Approximate." This reminds me of Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation," based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges (which in turn inspired Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York")

Before I dive into predictions for 2012, let’s take a look back at where I’ve been wrong and right over the years. I have a fairly good track record, and I like to take a few chances with these, rather than taking the easy way out with predictions like “links will still matter”.

Footer Links Get The Boot?

I was quite wrong about search engines devaluing all footer link networks. As easy as these are to spot, it baffles me that some sites can achieve high rankings via this spammy tactic. Check out this amazing expose blog post from Joost de Valk.

Prediction for 2012: This will be the year the footer link truly hits the ignore bucket. This tactic has been around since the early 90s with “free web counters” that sneakily linked to other sites. Then came WordPress themes, then site-wides, blogroll spam, footer links and many other tricks. Key word: tricks.

I am frankly amazed footer links have not been blown up. Like they should have been way back when school newspapers first used them like this below.  Sorry, I’m not telling you the school.

Paid links on a school newspaper web site

Directory Links Take A Dive

I was both right and wrong about general (non vertical) directory links losing all value. While some of the worst directories have finally died a welcome death, I have still witnessed sites improve rankings via submissions to weak no-name directories. It will stop someday, it just didn’t in 2011.

Hopefully, 2012 is the year the generic link directory to nowhere and everywhere stops having any effect at all. How can any algorithm take seriously a directory that nobody uses other than the people submitting links to them?

Sorry, Link-o-Matic is ficticious

The name of the game here is curated verticality. And it’s what I’ve been going after since the day I started in 1994.

Name me one single mass general directory that comes anywhere close to truly organizing and cataloging the Web. None of them can. Yahoo! couldn’t. DMOZ couldn’t. The Web’s very nature is distributed links pointing at expert content. Single source directories are antithetical to the nature of the web’s design.

Prediction for 2012: Watch for hundreds if not thousands of small highly curated and vetted resource lists to appear. In fact, they already do, and have for years.

I’m not going to give away the farm here, but for a recent project I gathered over 80 veterinary resource collections based at .orgs, coms, and .edus. These are small curated lists. And they matter. They matter more that you’d ever imagine.

Notice the link on the bottom right: Veterinary Product Vendor Sites. 

Which of the two directories would you rather be in?  Link-O-Matic above or this one below?

Facebook Brand Pages Build Likes & Links

I was wrong thinking any company with an existing and well trafficked website could forgo having a Facebook page.

While not an absolute necessity for every site, (are enough people really going to become fans of the Preperation H Hemmoroid Treatment Facebook page to matter?) the sheer mass and potential matriculation across the Facebook links space make it a worthwhile alternative mode to reach customers.  At least for most brands it does.

Prediction for 2012:  Dare I say it, every brand not currently on Facebook will be by the end of 2012.

Please Like Us - We Stop Itching!

Twitter Link Cred

I was right about Twitter having a far smaller effect on organic search rank that most claimed it would. Tweeted links have yet prove to me that their rank has improved due to being tweeted. Tweets are good for quick drive by traffic and that’s about it.

The only Twitter impact I see in organic results is people with Twitter credibility will see their twitter profile rank quite high. I was a reluctant Twitter user several years ago, but I can’t argue with the fact that my Twitter profile ranks at position 4 for a search on my name, and I’ve done nothing other than be cautous about who I follow and what I tweet.

My Twitter profile Ranks #4

Prediction for 2012: People will stop chasing followers and work on sculpting a more authoritative Twitter profile. What this means is instead of following 17,000 people and having 17,000 followers, people will realize that to have any influence at all, you need have more followers than you follow, and you need to tweet about things other than how wonderful your most recent column was. Share the good, curate the helpful, and the followers will come.

Anchor Text Gets Devalued

I was right about anchor text being devalued. This was never a reliable signal, because it was too SEO centric a signal and too easily gamed. You’ve heard me say before, in 17+ years of requesting links, I’ve never once asked for anchor text.

The most trustworthy content on the Web is not going to give over editorial rights to you so you can anchor your way up the Google ladder. We are all the Hemingway’s of our own content, so don’t tell me how to link to you.

The engines more than likely did not realize just how far people would go to try and manipulate anchor text, but the ironic thing about this is the more you try to manipulate your anchor text, the more you create a backlink profile that looks suspicious when compared to the mass of historical anchor text data the engines have to study.

Prediction for 2012: Services like these below slowly but surely start to vanish.

Two Final Predictions

First, people will discover the fantastic and free linking data available from blekko. It’s incredible.

Second, people will realize the futility of relying on search engines for all their traffic, and put more effort into link marketing tactics and strategies that have nothing to do with search results, like this.

Don’t laugh, their last client’s QR code baked cookies resulted in a 40% scan and install rate for a mobile app. Forty percent. Via an edible baked cookie with a QR code on the icing.  And yes, it was my idea and it had nothing to do with search engines. Here’s one they baked for me: