Owning a Tourism Business is awesome

31 Dec 2007

Add yourself to Wikipedia Business Pages

Something you will notice if you search for the big corporate brands in Google is that Wikipedia pages for those businesses show up in the top 10 results very often. Most businesses do not know that you can create a Wikipedia page for your own business.

However, these business entries do get deleted sometimes, so try to make yours fairly informative and complete, not just profit driven!

If it offers real information or you are a well known business then it is a lot less likely that one of the editors will delete the business page you've created. Deletions still do happen, but if you can get it to stick it is almost guaranteed to rank on page one in Google for your business's name. This will put more and more of YOUR pages on the Top 10 pushing competing agents and commission earning websites down.

Some Wikipedia pages for the BIG businesses include:

AboutUs.org is similar to Wikipedia, except that its entire focus is for businesses to insert their listings. Creating a page for your business on this site will also tend to rank very well for your business name. And your chances of getting deleted are much lower. A walk in the park compared to Wikipedia, but not as strong...

Google - Flight Status Now On Results Page

Our flight stats search feature can now deliver real time status and info on your flight directly on the search results page.

Just type the name of the airline and flight number ( e.g. American 123, ua226, aa 1018) into the search box, and we'll return the most up to date information from FlightStats.com.

http://www.google.com

28 Dec 2007

Free BlogSpot account and splogs...

Ha, this really is what we're fighting!

Splogger

SPLOGS:
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites.

24 Dec 2007

Britain's queen takes up YouTube

Britain's queen takes up YouTube - Yahoo! News

LONDON - Britain's 81-year-old Queen Elizabeth II, considered an icon of traditionalism, launched her own special Royal Channel on YouTube Sunday.

The Royal Channel: http://www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel

he queen will use the popular video-sharing Web site to send out her 50th annual televised Christmas message, which she first delivered live to the nation and its colonies on Dec. 25, 1957.

Buckingham Palace also began posting archive and recent footage of the queen and other royals on the channel Sunday, with plans to add new clips regularly.

YouTube, which allows anyone to upload and share video clips, was founded in 2005 and bought by Google last year.

"The queen always keeps abreast with new ways of communicating with people," Buckingham Palace said in a statement. "The Christmas message was podcast last year."

The palace said, "She has always been aware of reaching more people and adapting the communication to suit. This will make the Christmas message more accessible to younger people and those in other countries."

The royal page — which bears the scarlet lettered heading "The Royal Channel - The Official Channel of the British Monarchy" — is illustrated with a photograph of Buckingham Palace flanked by the queen's Guards in their tall bearskin hats and red tunics.

Its modern video clips show shots of garden parties, state visits, the queen, the many British prime ministers who have served during her reign and a day in the life of her son, Prince Charles.

The footage of the queen's 1957 Christmas TV broadcast will remind viewers that TV once was as groundbreaking a creation as Internet is today.

"I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message more personal and direct. That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us," the queen said of television at the time.

The Royal Channel also shows excerpts from Lord Wakehurst's film "Long to Reign Over Us," which has never been publicly released. Wakehurst, a member of Parliament who died in 1970, was an avid amateur film maker, charting events such as Queen Elizabeth II's accession and coronation.

The color images convey the historical events from the public's perspective, showing crowds holding street parties and camping out on The Mall — the wide boulevard outside Buckingham Palace — to catch a glimpse of the queen on Coronation Day.

The Royal Channel also includes rarely seen silent news footage of the 1923 wedding of the queen's parents, then known as the Duke of York and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

On Tuesday, Queen Elizabeth II's annual Christmas speech can once again be downloaded as a podcast from http://www.royal.gov.uk.

It also is being made available on television in high definition for the first time.

The Royal Channel: http://www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel

Network Marketing Scam - How To Tell If It Is A Scam

Network Marketing Scam - How To Tell If It Is A Scam

There are a lot of people who automatically think that network marketing is a scam. This is not true. There are companies out there that are legitimate network marketing companies that are not scams. However, there are also ones that are a network marketing scam. This is why you need to be careful about what you sign up with on the internet. Here are some things that you can look for to find out if it is a network marketing scam or not.

See here for full post: Marketing eBooks

11 Dec 2007

Google says Using ALT attributes in images smartly helps SER's

Using ALT attributes smartly does indeed help search engine results... DUH!



Here's a video blog posts showing the famous Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, providing some useful tips on how to optimize the images you include on your site, and how simply providing useful, accurate information in your ALT attributes can make your photos and pictures more discoverable on the web. Ms Emmy Cutts also makes an appearance.

10 Dec 2007

The Importance of Profiles on Social Sites

Damn near any popular site which lets you create a user account works, as long as those user accounts are search engine accessible. If you're not sure about this then find some of the other profiles on the site and search Google for the web address where the profile is listed. If the page shows up in Google, then you know Google is indexing the individual profiles from that site.

An Amazon reviewers account is a good example. Make sure your reviewer name is the same as your business name . Since these profiles are subpages of the Amazon-Amazing-Url they rank well, especially for keywords such as business names.

The easiest and best in ,my opinon are the following. And yes I do have a user account on these sites for myself and one for each of my clients (sometimes 2 if they have a couple of niches, e.g. diving and fishing).

Use your business name as the profile name, blog name, or page title, as instructed by the site. For example, if your business name is Adventures Fiji, create pages such as:

http://www.myspace.com/adventuresfiji/
http://www.flickr.com/adventuresfiji/
http://adventuresfiji.wordpress.com/

...and so on and so on....

Creating a Squidoo page about your business can also be very effective. Here's a list of other sites where I have used to create a personal or business profile that will often rank highly in the search engines:

These are some of the best ones, but there are many others. They're all easy ways to get your business name on an authoritative domain where it's likely to rank highly. Adding links and additional content to these pages makes them even more powerful.

1 Dec 2007

ENN: Google plans renewable energy push

Great news that the big IT companies are taking the environment seriously.

Stuart

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ENN: Google plans renewable energy push

/sci-tech/article/25967

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. said on Tuesday the Web services and online advertising group plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in coming years to promote a new push to encourage cheap renewable electricity.

The project, known as Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, is hiring engineers and targeted investment financing at advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other new technologies, Google said.

Google is, in effect, taking advantage of its growing mountain of cash, global brand recognition and mushrooming market capitalization as a pulpit to campaign for alternative energy. The company's leaders argue that the time is ripe for investments in innovative research to cut energy costs.

Read full article here: