Blog Marketing

It shouldn't be a secret anymore that blog marketing is more powerful than static site marketing for all products including, especially, the tourism industry.

Both models have been tested heavily in 2006 and found that the rankings come far easier with a blog as your alternate content management system as opposed to any other form of web publishing.

Here are some tips to make sure you are taking advantage of all there is to offer in the Web 2.0 world of traffic, links, and easy search engine listings for both your blog, and if you've made the jump, your dynamic tourism website too.

1. Tag/label your posts. If you are using Wordpress use a plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag posts and put together keyword dense archives. You can find this plugin at wp-plugins.net. In Blogger make sure all posts show the labels!

2. Syndicate with RSS. Not just the feed that comes with your blog (normally a wee ATOM one at the bottom), but with custom feeds that specifically isolate keyword groups you develop content for regularly; such as scuba and fishing. The best free tool for this is PheedPress, available from Content Desk.

3. Get Involved online! Trackbacks and comment links are alive and well, despite reports you may have read to the contrary. Bloggers will grant your trackbacks and comments when they are on topic and useful. These are the easiest links available on the web today. In tourism it's easy to pass comments on all the travel blogs and get back links with every post (make sure you have your blog and website auto-signatured on all posts...)

4. Social Bookmarking. Public lists of bookmarks are easy spider food and will get you more traffic the more you use social bookmarking. Your entire site and blog should be bookmarked somewhere, and preferably in all the major bookmarking engines. You know where they are, get out there and do the legwork to drive the links.

5. Get Dugg. Digg.com and other social information networks take "stories" from sites that post them. Then they are ranked by members. You are either in or you're out. Dugg or buried.

6. MySpace Networking. There are social networks popping up all over the place that are like MySpace (even though the demographic doesn't look like yours, the networking is what we are looking for...). One notable network is called Care2.com and it is specifically for tourism business owners to network and get valuable links back to their sites with a dedication to the environmental angle.

7. Article Syndication. Not the old spammy version from a few years ago. In the new Web2.0 in 2007, the best results for article syndication will be for those of us who adhere to the holy grail of content syndication: Topical, Relevant, Well-Written Content! (and beware of duplication, it just doesn't work...)

Most of the above will also work for old-style static sites, like sites written in static html. But not nearly as well as when you publish on a blog platform or a new dynamic website.

Blogging doesn't mean pouring out your feelings or ranting about your problems anymore. It is serious business and the platform itself can be used for anything where information needs to be updated regularly. Ideal for a resort or tourism businesses with lots of new customers...

Properly marketing your blog site depends first and foremost on what you have to say. If it is boring, lame, or focused too much on blatant advertising of products and services, you will get slammed with extremely poor results. Keep it to the point, a little light and relevant to the audience you hope to attract.

The big secret is the content. Very good content will dominate a niche in any market. The platform you put it on will dictate how well it dominates. And how regularly you perform the tasks above will dictate how long you dominate.

Your Webmaster: Tips for a Good Relationship

Your webmaster (or more accurately, your web designer) is an important part of your web team. So it is more than worth your time and effort to build a strong relationship with him or her.

Here are five things you can do to keep the lines of communication open between you and your webmaster.

1.Be specific in your requests. He can't read your mind. If you don't tell him exactly what to do and how you want it to work, you'll be disappointed. The first round of communication is dependent on you.

Specifics include colors you like (either by color code or an example from another site), graphic styles you prefer (based on a graphic you can point to), the way a page functions. Include URLs for the examples and don't be shy about including more than required.

2.Keep an open channel. Use an email address you check frequently. Respond to her questions quickly. She's "into" your project now. If she has to wait 3-4 days to get answers, she'll have to start working on someone else's project in the meantime. Then it takes her longer to get back to your project. The poor workflow slows everyone down.

As an alternative to an email address, consider an Instant Messenger account. Depending on the times of day that you and your web designer are working - and whether you're both awake at the same time - email may be more efficient.

My web designer and I are 12 hours apart, so he's awake when I'm asleep, and vice versa. However, when we're working on a quick turnaround project, I'll stay up later so we can exchange emails about the project more frequently. And when I'm turning in for the night, I always send a message to that effect so he won't be expecting a quick response.

3.Keep an open mind. No one is perfect. Your webmaster should feel free to ask you questions, even if it might appear that he knows less than you thought. That's not generally the case; instead, he's asking for clarification. Or information.

It's not unusual for my webmaster to email me to ask if I know of a resource that does "xyz." Or he'll tell me he's not the person to do that task; that I need to look for someone who can do "abc." That feeling of "you're okay, even if you don't know everything" is very important to open communication.

4.Say thank you. Just a short thank you in response to exceptionally fast turnaround or a great job or a surprisingly wonderful job goes a long way.

And if you're willing to share, refer others to your web designer. She'll appreciate the additional business and will be extra careful to give you continued great service in exchange for more referrals.

5.Pay promptly. When you first work with a web designer, they may ask for payment up front or immediately after finishing the job. Don't wait two weeks to pay them. They need their money now. They should provide you with a link for payment, so use it quickly.

When you follow these guidelines, you'll find that your work gets done faster and with greater efficiency. Because you are saving your web designer time and trouble, your work will be something she looks forward to receiving, rather than dreading.

And you'll both save time - and most importantly, you'll save money as a result!

Advertising your tourism business on Yahoo!

For tourism businesses with a limited online-advertising budget (i.e. most of us!), Yahoo!'s featured directory listings are a great way to reach out to millions of potential customers. Having your company's Web site featured in a directory listing is actually very easy.

First, you'll need to get your site listed in the appropriate Yahoo! directory. Type your company name in to the Yahoo! search box. If your site doesn't appear in the search results, you will need to submit it for consideration. Unfortunately, this process can take a long time. Currently it's taking 2 to 3 months...

Your other option is to use Yahoo!'s Express Service, which provides expedited listing. There is a US$299 annual fee for this service, and there's no guarantee that your site will actually be listed — only that it will be reviewed within seven days. However, if you don't want to wait a long time to be added to Yahoo!'s directory, this may be a great choice.

Once your site has been listed in a directory at Yahoo!, upgrading to featured status is easy. You will need to pay a monthly fee, which is determined by the directory where your site is located. This fee can vary from $5 to $300 per month. All you need to do is provide a credit card and your monthly fee will be automatically deducted along the way.

Featured listings appear before the rest of the businesses in a directory, which means that you won't have to worry about having your company buried far into the listings. This is also a benefit for business owners who are having difficulty optimising their site for Yahoo!'s search engine.

So, what does featured status actually do for your resort's site? It provides targeted advertising, and targeted advertising means the right people will see your listing: people already looking for a vacation or diving in your destination. Once your resort or op is featured in a directory, your listing will be one of the first results when customers perform a search in your area.

With more small businesses jumping on the Internet every day, it's getting harder and harder for companies to retain their current customers and attract new customers. With literally thousands of choices for online shopping, it can be almost impossible to entice customers to visit your site first.

Having a featured listing removes much of this concern, since most users will click on the first match they find. If your site is at the top of the list, there's a much better chance your listing will be clicked on, as opposed to if your listing does not appear until page 20 of a user's search.

For SME tourism businesses worried about advertising costs, Yahoo!'s fixed monthly fee is certainly a benefit. Knowing how much your advertising will cost each month makes it a lot easier to stay within your budget while still reaching out to millions of new potential customers.

Another way to guarantee appearing on Yahoo! is by buying keywords through Overture, a subsidiary of Yahoo. With Overture's pay-per-click products, you purchase keywords related to your business. Then, when Web surfers search for those keywords, your listing will appear in Yahoo!'s Sponsor Results box. Overture's distribution network also includes many of the Web's other top search engines and portal sites, including MSN, Altavista, and CNN.com.

With Yahoo! still the number 2 search engine spot behind Google (albeit a long way behind), your resort should see a dramatic increase of traffic once your site is listed in one of Yahoo!'s directories, and much more should you choose to have your site featured.

Staying on top in Internet business is never easy, but Yahoo! has made it possible for small tourism companies out here in the islands to effectively compete for potential customers, and at a controllable and budget-able cost.

Scuba Diving Top 100 Readers' Choice Awards

For all the Scuba Operators and Resorts out there, there is no excuse for not sending all your past divers to the Scuba Diving Magazine Reader's Ratings page here:

http://www.scubadiving.com/readerratings

Reader's Ratings all go towards their annual Top 100 Readers' Choice Awards.

Scuba Diving is the magazine divers trust for objective gear reviews, cutting-edge scuba training articles, underwater photography and video tips and unbiased dive travel information. In addition, Scuba Diving features Diver To Diver, our online scuba board and dive forum featuring discussions on topics from Cozumel dive resorts to the latest regulators and dive computers. Whether you are a sport diver, an old pro, or a new diver looking for lessons, Scuba Diving has something for you.

How to Succeed as a Small Business Owner ... and Still Have a Life

I'm an avid reader/researcher and now and entrepreneur so I have read LOTS of books on small business. This is the first book that I really felt "got it!" The writer clearly knows what it is like for a small business and has realistic tips and ideas for growing your business the right way and ending up where you want it to be.

The title initally appealed to me since running your own business can be so draining. This book was approachable, easy to read, and had actionable ideas from the beginning. I also like that it "got" the realities of being a small business owner and didn't take up your time with worthless "exercises" or visions of what your business plan should be like. After reading this book I was so inspired to create my own business plan and start working on business improvements laid out in the plan. The book helped me find the clarity I had really be lacking and it made me feel like it wouldn't be too difficult or onerous to do.

This book is a MUST for every small business owner who wants to see their business grow in a sustainable way!!! I can't recommend it highly enough.

How to get your site reincluded if banned...

All the major search engines have procedures whereby a webmaster who has determined that his site has been censored, has somehow determined which was the offending feature, removed the offending feature, and is suitably repentant, can apply for reinstatement:

Google: You can go to: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reinclusion?hl=en

You will have to sign up for Google's Webmaster's Tools Service first, which if you have been reading any of my blog, then you would have .

Google only solicits reinclusion requests from sites that admit and stipulate that they violated Google's guidelines or inherited a domain name that they suspect violated Google's guidelines.

"By submitting this form, I acknowledge that: I believe this site has violated Google's quality guidelines in the past. This site no longer violates Google's quality guidelines. I have read and agree to abide by Google's quality guidelines."

You can include a note pleading your case, explaining all the corrective actions you have taken, and promising on your genuine Batman ring never to do it again. Google might eventually reinstate your site. There are persistent reports that Google has “punishment periods” that vary depending on the “offense”. If your site has been banned for editorial or competitive reasons you are out of luck.

Google people, looking down on lowly webmasters from their lofty positions as industry leaders and employees of a $100 billion company, tend to be unusually condescending. Google treats webmasters like children with “punishment” and “penalization”:

“Tommy, you’ve been bad. Go to your room.”

“Why Mommy? Why?”

“I’m not going to tell you why. I’m the parent and you’re the child. I don’t have to tell you why.”

“How long do I have to stay in my room Mommy?”

“I’m not going to tell you that either. I’ll let you out when I feel like letting you out.”

Yahoo: You can request a “re-review” at: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_rereview

In Yahoo parlance, the “original” review was the one they did when they decided to ban your site. Your message should include all the changes you made in order to be in compliance with Yahoo guidelines.

MSN Search: You can go to: http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=search&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts and fill out an MSN Search problem report form “Search, Problem, Finding a Web Site” stating that your site has been deleted.

You will get an immediate web reply with a ticket number promising a support person will be in touch. Soon, you will get an email from a support person directing you to help pages, guidelines, etc. You reply to this email with your plea, including that you have indeed confirmed that your site has been intentionally de-listed by MSN Search. You will then eventually get a reply that the support person has forwarded your plea to the MSN Search Product Specialist Team. Eventually, your site might be reinstated.

A very curious note: The reply email from Microsoft Support contains a number of features usually associated with email spam and therefore was tagged as spam by our Spamassassin anti-spam software. The items flagged by the filter included: "HTML obfuscation", "Envelope sender in postmaster.rfc-ignorant.org ", "Message-Id has pattern used in spam", and "Reply-To is empty". Be careful or you might miss the reply message.

Alternately, you can try to follow this note on MSN's site: "We may remove a website from the index if the website was reported as spam. If you suspect that your website was incorrectly identified as spam, please send an e-mail message to webspam@microsoft.com."

Microsoft is a huge company and MSN is a large division but MSN Search is a relatively small group. Although MSN has an extensive, responsive, and well managed support department, it is our impression that the “team” responsible for MSN Search is still very new, relatively small, and feeling its way. Despite all the hype by Microsoft that they are going to “bury” Google, Microsoft does not appear to be expending all that much effort on search. Just about everything about MSN Search is pretty primitive when compared to Google and Yahoo Search. Once your request has been sent to the “MSN Search Product Specialist Team” you may be in for a very long wait before you get any response. The “reinclusion” department at MSN Search may well be essentially non-existent.

Handling reinclusion requests at search engines is not a priority and reinstatement can reportedly take months or even years. Search engines often do not advise sites if they are going to be reinstated so site owners spend a lot of time waiting and wondering.

How to know if your site is banned from SE's

You can find out if a search engine has singled out your site for exclusion by doing a search for “site:www.domainname.com” in any of the them. The SE will report the number of your pages it has indexed. If it says zero or one, your site has been censored. If your site has been de-listed, “link:www.domainname.com” may also report zero even though other search engines report that you have incoming links

Yahoo! Search is using a second link-only banning method in which the site's pages are not indexed by the search engine but links to the site that have been found on other sites are still included and can theoretically be found in a search. The pages have not been indexed so text on the pages cannot be found in a search. The pages are not cached. No descriptive text is provided in the unlikely event that such a listing is included in a search result, so a user is unlikely to be able to determine what the site is about. The title text provided in the search results is the "link text" provided by the site linking to you. These "supplemental results" are essentially useless for search users and are apparently included so Yahoo Search can claim to have a larger index than its competitors. If the site: search reports many pages, check to see if the listings consist entirely of "link-only" entries. Your site is banned if the search engine is not indexing your text. The link-only entries result from indexing other people's sites. Link-only banning adds insult to injury. Yahoo Search is claiming your pages as included in their index while actually refusing to index them!

Another test method is to search for some unique phrase that appears only on your pages. Some webmasters include a phrase such as “Vmxzwh S34pp” on their pages for this purpose. This search will avoid listing “link-only” entries and will also disclose some of the other sites (not banned by the search engine) that have stolen your content, if any.

The “ultimate misfortune” is to find that your site has been banned but that many sites that have stolen your content have not been banned by the same search engine!

We would expect that spiders would stop visiting a censored site. They do visit much less frequently. However, they usually continue to access some pages and to check /robots.txt apparently to monitor that the site still exists. Yahoo’s robot “Slurp” checks /robots.txt up to several hundred times per day. One reason for doing this might be to determine if a domain name is sold to another owner by detecting a substantial "down" period.

Building Quality Links Outside of Link Exchanges

There are more ways to generate links to your pages than just exchanging them. Create quality links by doing the following:

1. Get your site listed on large directories like Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and Yahoo! Directory. Google uses Open Directory Project listings in these directories to formulate its own directory and listings in either or both directories can help boost your "importance" or PageRank on Google.

Listings in the Open Directory Project are free. Just be sensible, honest and careful into which categories you try and get listed. Don;t choose the first one that looks 'likely'...

You will have to pay to be considered for inclusion to Yahoo! It's a whopping US$299 just to be considered with absolutely no guarantee of listing. Given the Yahoo's search results are currently provided by Google, I don't believe it's necessary. If you still want to proceed, click here for tips on getting listed on Yahoo.

You cannot request a listing in Google's Directory. You need to submit your site for free submission at the Open Directory Project.

2. Write a press release about your website. Submit it to online newswires like PRWeb or Click2NewSites.com. You can also submit to newspapers that run their stories on their websites. Click here for tips on writing a press release.

3. Join associations related to your business or field of specialty. Many of these associations will link to their members.

4. Have your articles with your byline published on other websites. Submit your articles to sites that host free content. Consult our list of free content sites to get started.

5. Get links from other big, "important sites". Do you have an eBay About Me Page, a Ryze Page or even a Yahoo Groups page? Did you know these have link popularity? It makes business sense to link to these pages and then have them link back to you.

6. Link the various pages of your website together. Your most important links should be on all your pages for easy navigation and to increase your link popularity. You should also link to relevant information on your other pages when appropriate.

7. Create a few websites with similar themes and create a few links between them. For example, if you sell children's books on one site, you can also make a site on children's literacy and so forth. One is your sales site and the other is purely informational, but be careful of cross-linking to heavily...as this can be penalized by search engines.

8. Purchase ads on various directories that have a relevant theme to yours. If you are a wedding planner, get your site listed in Wedding-related directories.

9. Create an informative and useful site. If your website is good, people will WANT to link to you. You won't need to ask them.

10. Offer testimonials for products and services related to the tourism industry. Many websites will give links in return for testimonials. For example, if you are a dive operator, provide testimonials for various dive equipment and software.

11. If someone asks you for an interview for their website or to contribute to an article, do it. They should (and you should insist they do) give you links back to your site in return.

Is your scuba diving SEO clear and simple?

By Gabriel Machuret

When I started working with SEO I spent a lot of time on the phone with prospects and clients. I was always amazed by misconceptions given to so many people about how to get a top listing in a search engine. Often times, I felt as though dive centers managers and dive professionals, were educating themselves with literature written in the early nineties.

Unfortunately, the penalty for some of these techniques is not just a bad ranking but rather permanent delisting or banning. Nobody wants to be banned! I have organized a list of concepts that people confuse or as I like to call them “Frequently Confused Concepts”.

The most frequently confused concept of search engine optimization is the value of meta tags. Way back before search engines were sophisticated enough to scan and save the content of your diving web site, they would simply review your meta tags. A meta tag gives the title of your diving site, a description of what you do, and a list of five to ten keyword and keyphrases that are relevant to your web site. The problem with relying on these tags is that many people caught on to the unfortunate truth that pornographic keywords would generate more traffic than the terms related to their web site. Now, this is not traffic you want since the person looking for his favorite centerfold does not want what you have to offer. Also, this makes the search engines quality of results very poor for the searching public.

All the major (and most minor) search engines index your entire site and use the meta tag as a minimally valuable map of what your web site has to offer. You content is the most important. If you have “scuba diving, bikini, surfing, free tickets” in your keywords list in your meta tag and your web site pertains to “diving holidays” then you are spamming with your meta tags and they will not be positively received by the search engines robots. At the same time, piling a whole encyclopedia of keywords and keyphrases into your meta tag and not mentioning these words in your general wordage of your site will also not help you. Your meta tags should have descriptive, relevant, descriptions and keywords pertaining to your sites content.

This brings me to the second frequently confused concept of search engine optimization which is keyword lists. You have all of your literature and content in tacked on your web site. Then at the bottom of your web site, you put a long list of keywords such as:

• Diving
• Scuba Diving
• Divers
• diving Products
• Dive gear
• Liveaboard
• Dive Courses

Since these words are not in anyway (other than a list) part of your wordage, the search engines will disregard this as low quality content. You do NOT want to have low quality content as it is high quality content the search engines are looking for. After all, you will be in much better shape if you are holding hands with Google and Yahoo as apposed to thumb wrestling them. So avoid long lists of keywords and use that time to include your keywords and keyphrases frequently in your wordage. For example:

“Aquatech Diving Centre, Manchester's premier school, was established in 1993 and has grown from strength to strength in that time. The school offers Internationally recognized qualifications from the main SCUBA training organisations BSAC and PADI. We are also a RYA recognised Centre and run the GMDSS radiotelephony course and first aid courses for BSAC, PADI, RYA and more recently the full range of HSE first aid at work qualifications. ”

The above paragraph will be welcomed as quality content whereas a list of unused words will simply look like garbage.

I have had the unfortunate task of waving warning flags at prospects that come to us after working with a black hat search engine optimization specialist or misguided web designer about hidden keywords. This is my next frequent confused concept. Hidden keywords are lists of keywords in the header or footer that are the same color as the background. This makes them only viewable to search engine spiders. Do not do this! This is an offense that is punishable by black listings, banning, and overall delisting of your web site. Once again, use this time to creatively mention your keywords in your wordage.

Now that you have a quality diving web site, you need a few relevant diving web sites to link to you. Not all links are created equal. A much used (and still very popular though useless) technique is submitting to free for all link pages. These are pages that accept links to everyone’s web site.

The search engines hate these as they are just lists of links. Aside from that, these sites are NOT relevant to your web site so the link you wasting your time posting will not benefit you. The best way to add your link to other web sites is by searching for relevant directories and web sites then offering link exchanges. Our friends at XYX diving organization could add their link to dive centers directories, forums, and blogs. Another valuable technique is simply writing informational scuba diving articles and include your link in the footer of the article. Then submit these articles to places like Scubabible.com , scubapedia.com or ScubaHerald.com who will post your article for others to use. They use your article with the understanding that your link and footer stay in their original context.

Last but not least in my list of frequently confused concepts of search engine optimization is “hocus pocus”. Yes, we still get calls from people that believe the key to optimization is by the use of magic tags and invisible mojo. The truth is, search engine optimization is based on the three pillars of Relevant Content, Fresh Content (update your information frequently), and Relevant Link Population. If all of your techniques are centered on ethically doing those three things, you will have a better ranking and sleep better knowing that the search engines will not.

Ready to improve your positioning?

Start adding your website to places like:

www.scubaboard.com - section dive business directory.
www.scuuuba.com - directory
www.divegoogle.com - search engine
www.3routes.com - scuba diving directory
www.topdivecenters.com - dive center map
www.scubabible.com
www.topdivecenters.com

More info? google the term "scuba directory" and start improving your web positioning.

What tools do I need before putting together an Internet marketing plan?

Simple answer is fewer than you think!

If you want to have an online presence, you only need several basic technology tools at your disposal to guarantee that you will be successful with your Internet marketing plan for your tourism product. Without the following in place, it will be difficult to successfully market your business on the Web:

Web site:

You must have a Web site to successfully market your company on the Web. And you need a domain name that reflects your company's identity and brand. Using your company name as a domain name is a good place to start, although keywords and phrases are also another way to also do some SEO along the way.

Check out your competition:

You will find that Web sites have varying degrees of sophistication. Make sure that yours reflects your industry. If you are a Spa, for instance, you cannot get away with a low-tech text-heavy Web site, you'll need a softer feel.

Reliable ISP or Web host:

The inadequacies of your service provider will come across to customers as inadequacies of your company. Make sure you do your homework first and research potential Web hosts. The key factors in choosing a provider are connection speed, site uptime, spam policies and support. In addition, watch for hidden costs.

Also, make sure that certain technologies are available to you should you need them. For example, you may want to run server-side scripts to extract information from your database to include on your site. Many basic Web hosting programs do not include such functionality.

Email:

Customers and guests need to be able to contact you by email. All staff in reservations and sales should have an email address. Train your staff to use email for guest service. And make sure your email address is easy to find on your Web site and your marketing material.

Email newsletter:

An email newsletter can be a key component of successful online marketing. Its success hinges on the number of customer email addresses you successfully collect, so it is helpful to have a strategy and set up your Web site with that in mind.