Six Ways to Get Your Website Crawled

• It's better to have one main website with numerous domains pointing to the main domain, than to have mini-sites or multiple sites with similar content. Mini-sites and multiple sites with similar content do not increase search engine listings and are frequently viewed by search engines as SPAM.

• If you do have several stand-alone websites, make sure each serves a different target audience and has unique content with different domain or sub-domain URLs.

• Search engines need to be able to follow internal links. To make that happen, use tags, text links, image links, and CSS menus. Spiders have difficulty with JavaScript menus, pop-up windows, drop-down menus, and flash navigation.

• Choose keyword phrases that are most relevant and specific to what your web page is about. Think from the perspective of someone searching for what you are offering on your site. Ask, as if you were they: What would I search for if I am looking for something on your page?

• Validate your keyword phrases through either paid or free services, such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, or Google AdWords.

• Check for keyword competitiveness. Take into consideration the size of your business. In this case, size does matter. If you are a major player with a major brand, you can play in a larger competitive pond than a smaller company just starting out. Know what size pond is right for you, and check for competitiveness by putting: allintitle: "keyword phrase" in your browser and check the number count.

SEO can be both intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating because it seems as if just about everyone has an opinion on what it takes to get a high ranking in Google, so it's hard to know what to believe. Exhilarating because, once you understand the method behind the madness of SEO, you see the art and science of it.

Then it becomes fun and easy to come up with a strategic plan about where to place keyword phrases, how to write copy, and what size pond is best for your company to compete in. Optimize your website, and they will come.

Debunking Some Popular Search Engine Ranking Myths

- Pay per clíck (PPC) ads will either help or hurt organic rankings. (Organic simply means the process by which web users find websites having unpaid search engine listings.)

Debunked: PPC is categorized differently than organic listings. There is no effect, one way or the other, on ranking.

- Websites are banned if they ignore Google guidelines.

Debunked: While it's a good idea to read Google Webmaster Guidelines or Google 101: How Google Crawls, Indexes and Serves the Web, you are not banned if you ignore their guidelines.

- Websites are banned if they buy links.

Debunked: Sites are not banned. The links just aren't counted.

- Copy must be a certain number of words, use a specific keyword density, and contain bold or italicized keywords.

Debunked: It used to be thought that there was a magic number of words used or certain times a keyword or keyword phrase should be repeated. Not so. Same with bolding and italicizing. They don't do anything for ranking.

- Duplicate content will get your website penalized.

Debunked: It will just get filtered out and not counted.

- Reciprocal links won't count.

Debunked: Every link counts, to a certain extent.

- SEO companies can improve your rankings without doing any on-page work.

Debunked: Run if an SEO company tells you this.

According to SEO expert Jill Whalen, SEO isn't magic and isn't a crap-shoot.

"SEO is about making your website the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines."

Want to help the right kind of people find your website? Then you need to design your site so search engines can find, crawl and index your pages.

Destinations and the Benefits of Blogging

Tourism Internet Marketing

July 18, 2007 · By Jens

Blogs, UGC, organic search… it’s getting harder for the destination professional to keep up-to-date with the latest terminology, and harder still to ensure that their online marketing activities fully embrace these new approaches. But experts are warning that destinations which fail to adapt could face disaster.

User-generated content, or UGC, is widely considered to be more persuasive than advertising, yet many destinations have been slow to recognise the benefits, preferring instead to maintain a tight control over their marketing message. But with the growing number of C2C sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Tagzania, Gusto, Wikia, and RealTravel, it is fast becoming impossible to ignore UGC.

Analysts cite blogs, social networking sites and natural search engine optimisation as massive opportunities for the travel industry, with some going as far to suggest that they should form part of every organisation’s online marketing strategy.

A spokesman for the Internet Advertising Bureau, the UK trade association for the internet marketing industry, commented: ‘With such a choice of media at their finger-tips, marketers and brand managers have never had it better, but neither has it been more of a challenge to keep up with consumers.

‘As consumers are increasingly empowered to take control of brands online through a variety of social media such as user-generated content and blogs, brand managers must ‘unthink’ much of the traditional approach to brand management and learn how to use these forms of social media to liberate their brand communications.’

Traffic to blogs (web logs) has grown by more than 50% over the last year to nearly 60 million visitors, representing 34% of all internet users, according to the comScore Media Metrix. In addition, the research reveals that blogs are more likely to attract younger visitors from higher incomes homes, who will visit nearly twice as many web pages as the internet average and are much more likely to shop online.

Yeoh Siew Hoon, co-organiser of the Wired Travel Asia annual conference, commented recently on the growing power of social networking sites and the suggestion that travel writers and agents face an imminent demise: ‘Their argument is that, because of the power of social networking sites where everyone is now a journalist, writer, commentator, opinion-maker i.e. blogger, who needs travel writers to tell us where to go and what to see and travel agents to recommend places to stay?’

One recent blog success story is comes from Canada’s Bay of Fundy Tourism Partnership. Within just a few weeks of its launch, the blog was receiving several hundreds of visitors per week. Members of the Bay of Fundy Tourism Partnership throughout New Brunswick and Nova Scotia contribute regularly to the blog.

Partnership manager and committed blogger, Terri McCulloch, commented: ‘Our blog provides us with an emerging opportunity to share real time news, recipes, photos, videos, poetry and stories about the place that we enjoy inviting visitors to explore with us.’

But it’s not just the tourists that can benefit from blogging. A new tourism marketing blog, designed to support the industy by providing marketing tips, book reviews, market research and information on industry trends, has been developed by AudioConexus, an audio tour and marketing services company.

Tourism Internet Marketing

How to I check my online reputation?

How do you check what is being said about you online?

1. Simply Google your business name to start with. Have a look through the first few pages of Google and see what has come up. You are meant to find something you did not know about!
2. Go to this page on TripAdvisor and put in your business name or part of it in the top left search box. Go go go, do it now!!! Also try your competitors!!!
3. While catching up on my RSS feeds from my favourite online marketing for tourism blogs, I discovered a little gem: Todd Lucier from TourismKeys.ca mentioned www.twing.com which is a search engine that crawls online forums - you know, forums, these online bars how I like to call them, where you can ask a question and expect a lot of useful answers. I have checked what people are asking about my local tourism region, Australia’s Gold Coast, and its rather amazing! There are people asking about where to stay, if such and such property is friendly and other recommending other properties that they have already stayed at… Talk about free marketing!
4. If you are even more game you could start checking if someone posted some photos of their holiday at your place on Flickr… If not, why don’t you start?

My SEO tip by Suresh Babu

by Suresh Babu

1. If you are targeting different countries. Register a Local domain, If you are targeting UK. Register a .co.uk Domain, have someone who is in that Country to Contribute. Ask them to give review on Local Hotel etc from the same Country. Or with a little bit of creativity you can have anyone from anywhere contribute to a blog or site. Include keywords in that content. (I am not suggesting to Stuff keyword) but keyword that makes sense to the User. And also find a host in that country and Host your site or Blog there. Why? Search Engines give preference to local.

2. Personalized Search Results will be given preference, So concentrate on giving Personalized Search and optimizing your Images, Videos, Press Releases, Blogs, your Podcast Feeds, Tags etc

For more Internet Marketing, SEO Tips Visit: http://searchenginedetails.com Feel free to Comment and if you like the Content, Your Link would be greatly appriecated

Tourism Internet Marketing

What is your ROI on Internet Marketing?

One of my favorite blogs...

Stuart

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Posted in tourism marketing on June 10th, 2008

I sometimes get frustrated when I see how people in tourism invest their hard-earned marketing dollars. It’s not that I think they are wasting their money. It’s that most people have no idea whether they are wasting their marketing dollars on their Internet Marketing strategy or not.

How to know if your Internet Marketing Strategy is working?

Answer the 3 questions below with no more than 6 small easy to understand words. . .

1. Clearly describe what matters. What are your marketing objectives?
2. How can you easily measure what matters?
3. Describe one other thing you can easily measure?

Once you have the answers to these questions, put in practice a system to measure what matters.

Set a time frame for analyzing the results.

Plan future marketing efforts based on the results.

HINT: The reason for measuring things is to learn what works and what doesn’t work with your Internet Marketing practices. So plan on doing things a bit differently once you get the results.

Whether you represent a region, a tourism association, or a business, measuring the impact of your Internet Marketing will help you understand your ROI and report results to other members of your group or your team.

Internet Marketing for Tourism

Interview with the Founder of TripAdvisor Stephen Kaufer

At the recent PhocusWright Conference in Orlando, Florida, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Stephen Kaufer, Founder, President & CEO of Travel User Generated Content leader and pioneer TripAdvisor.com.

In his presentation at the PhocusWright (picture shows Stephen Kaufer presenting in the background, and myself together with Philip Wolf in the foreground), Stephen was talking about the importance of trust in the travel research and buying process. In order to get trust (the gold dust of the Internet), a site need “honest brokers” (people that give trust), and a “social network” (the group that you can trust). He also emphasized the importance of transparency, and that the monitoring of negative hotel reviews would hurt the integrity of the site, but also would diminish the value of all the real true brand ambassadors. Monitoring is a natural process that happens as part of the online community.

Enjoy the 10 minute interview (please excuse the wind noise), where Stephen addresses the growth of Tripadvisor, what is next with the company, his personal aspirations, as well as his views on sites like Facebook and integrating applications.

Tourism Internet Marketing

Free Y! IndexTools

IndexTools, a web analytics tools that claims to offer 80% of the functionality of omniture, was acquired by Yahoo in April.

Within few days after the acquisition, Yahoo announced that it will be giving away the tool for free. Well another few months flew by but there were still no sign of Free IndexTools.

Well, last week Yahoo announced that IndexTools is available for free but it is not freely available yet. At this time, all the new account activations will have to go through existing IndexTools partners. IndexTools is limiting new accounts to ensure they have proper infrastructure and capacity to handle new accounts.

In a letter to their partners, IndexTools wrote:

We here at IndexTools are now pleased to announce that the Add New Account function has been reactivated on your partner account, but with some limitations.

Please bear in mind that our current server capacity was based on our original projections according to where IndexTools expected to be in 2008 in regards to volume and revenue. The acquisition by Yahoo! rendered this forecast obsolete. Our number one responsibility is to ensure that our existing partners and clients are not negatively impacted by an oversubscription of accounts on the IndexTools system. These limitations will be reviewed in the coming months.
So, what are these limitations?

• You will be limited to three projects per client account"should you require more than three please contact your account manager


• We are limiting the monthly page volume to 20 million page views/month for the immediate future (this limit is per client account); data collection will occur up to that 20 million page view mark, but not beyond


• You will be able to add 5 accounts within a 30-day period ( based on former invoicing period)


• Note: all new accounts will be created as Enterprise accounts from this day forward"furthermore, as there are no longer fees there is no longer any need for trial accounts

Backpacking: the new luxury way to travel

By Fabienne Rabbiosi, Chief Executive Optimiser @ Untanglemyweb.com and Outdoors Sports Junkie

I spend most of last week travelling around the Whitsunday islands in Queensland, Australia. My incredible husband surprised me with organising it all. All I was given is a list of items to bring. I did not know where we were going, did not even know we had to catch a plane. Now just imagine how scary that is to the tourism professional that I am.

We stayed in Airlie beach, at one of the largest backpackers called Magnum. Backpacking in Australia is not what it used to be in my young (!) days. No more searching for staff member that has gone surfing when you arrive. You are now welcomed almost 24×7 by name-tagged staff in a larger than life reception with the latest computers, broadband and booking systems. They even wear staff uniforms. If you are lucky you will even be given a swipe (yes swipe) card to open your room. Backpacking is an industry. The biggest by far in Airlie Beach. Hostels owners make a mint trust me. When I asked for “industry rate” I was told “we don’t do such thing, we are just a backpackers and you would understand that we cannot afford to offer discounts”. Just a backpackers….Basic service: shared bathroom, no duvet but just one sheet, not much cleaning requirements and all that @ 60 dollars a night for a double room. Time it by approximately 100 and you start getting the picture!

On top of that, backpackers act as booking agents for tours. Another very good income trust me! Especially when a daytour costs minimum $100… Talking about daytours, this is me in a helicopter being whisked off to Whiteheaven beach on a surprise picnic trip…

Another thing is the food. Backpackers used to rhyme with cheap feeds. Now, a plate of pasta will set you back minimum $15… The best I have seen is packets of cereals being itemised in small transparent plastic containers where a few of your favourite corn flakes will cost you $3 dollars… Clever isn’t it? Just add the milk (another dollar? that’s unless you are the “organic” backpacker and want soy… thats another $2 thank you very much!)

These guys have understood it all. Online marketing is key in the backpacking industry as their target market (the average backpacker, between 16 and 40+) is, just like me, an Internet baby.

How is your business telling all these rich backpackers what’s on offer behind your door?

E-tourism

Upgrade to Blended Content

Great little article at EzineArticles.com by Anuj Pathania about not just being happy with text no more. I am right in the middle of blending content on all my websites right now. Easier than i though actually!

"Blended content is a recently coined term in web terminology, and is widely being discussed ever since. Blended content refers to the today's generation content, generated from combination of several multimedia elements available together into one cohesive unit.

Web has evolved into something much more complex, than what it initially was during the time of its conception. World Wide Web has made many fold progress in its underling technology and overcome many constraints such as bandwidth and storage. In its nascent stages it was used to work only for data in form of text with low quality images sprinkled between them, and it made sense considering the very limited processing and networking resources available that time. But now, no such limitation exists and along with increase in technology capacities, there is a similar increase in the expectation of the users which now surf the web.

Today's user are no longer satisfied with mere text, they want a rich user experience using blended content. Blended content includes a large variety of objects such as text, along with images, video, audio, flash, feeds, widgets,etc blended together with each other. List of interactive component which can be embedded into normal content to convert it into blended content is increasing every day, with new stuff rolling out every other day.

Webmasters need to appreciate and understand this fact, and accordingly create new blended content and also upgrade their previous work into this format. Webmasters who fail to adapt to this every changing world will sooner or later perish."

Upgrade to Blended Content