Business Blogging Tips

I stumbled on this interesting blog - Business Blogging Tips - which had an interesting link to the book - Meatball Sundae - Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?

While the book looks interesting this comment on the blog says a lot about the purpose and usefulness of SEO:

We tell clients this all the time. MOST print advertising, including the YELLOW PAGES, is a waste of money these days. Would you rather spend $1000 on ad that is gone in month? Or spend $1000 online, where that ad can live on indefinitely?

Seth also comments on the speed of SEO - "

"My position is that the clients are the problem, not the consultants. That's because they want shortcuts, not hard work. The best SEO is great content. Don't do that and you don't get much."

The Web 2.0 has powerful tools to help someone be found online. But it takes time. It does not happen overnight, usually. You have to build the temple....and then they will come! It's like planting seeds in the garden. It takes time for the seeds to fully grow and develop.

I think the comment about print advertising says it all as does the comment about content. It reinforces the comments we have made before:

• Start a blog - one post a week means 52 pages of new content in a year
• Take the best content on your blog and integrate into your website
• Add a page of things to do on your website
• Employ someone to edit the content if necessary. Having a professional edit your content is extremely helpful to pick up typos, errors and come up with good unique content.
  
• Employ someone to help with SEO.

All these things are possible and we can assist you with any of these things through our various partners. Do feel free to contact me for a no obligation assessment of your tourism marketing needs.

SEO Hints, What's happening in your district,

When planning your website or looking at updating it, think carefully about who your target market is, what does your area have to offer them, think about what they might like to do, and what might encourage them to stay a day or two extra or just enjoy their stay more.

Then add a page to your website, or ask your web designer to incorporate information about these activities or local attractions into your website design.

You may think, oh I'm not paying for another page on my website, what am I made of money? But think about it a bit from your website visitors point of view. Ok, they may have decided to stay in your area for some specific reason, but chances are they won't know places to eat, or know what else is available in your area apart from the reason they are visiting.
So looking at a what's nearby type page, may make them think hey, I would love to go horseriding, or fishing, kayaking, take that nature walk, visit Stills Valley Skifield whatever it maybe. And they may decide to stay at your place for another night becuase of it.

That isn't the only reason to have this information on your website though. Again think of it from your customers point of view.
Say they already know a bit about Stills Valley Skifield, and want to find a place to stay so they could go sking for the weekend, so they go to a search engine, if your website is optimised correctly, a search for say "Luxury Accommodation near Stills Valley Skifield" will find your website ranking highly. If your website doesn't mention Stills Valley Skifield, there is no way that a search like that would find your website at all.

So giving a push to the local activities can have many benefits, and is well worth doing.

Lynny
SEO Hints and Tips

Address of your Accommodation Rental

One thing that many people forget to add to their website is an address to their Hotel, Motel, Lodge, or rental property.

I can understand if your are renting out a small cabin in the backwoods, that only get's rented in the Summer, and you are concerned about vandalism or security.

However no address, to a hotel where you live in, and hopefully has people staying every night.

When people are browsing your website, they really do want to know where your accommodations are situated, even if they don't know they town or place at all, they will often want to know.

On the page you have your contact information, it's a very good idea, to make a list of places that are nearby, this is great for the SEO of your website, and often will help someone find your place as the one to stay at.

Have you contact details at the top of the page, easy for everyone to see, and write out your full country address, including postal code. Then underneath write a neat list of places around your accommodation.

You may wonder how this will help with SEO. I'll make up the details, but you will get the idea.

Well imagine you motel is 5 miles from a Hospital called, St Mary's Hospital, Timbuktu. And you have that listed on your contact page.

I have an Aunty Mary who is in St Mary's Hospital, and I need to visit her, so I do a search, I try
accommodation near St Mary's Hospital, Timbuktu.
no results, so I try a search
Motel near St Mary's Hospital, Timbuktu
And what do you know, your motel website is the only one that says it's near that hospital, in that place, so guess whose website will rank #1 for my search...... see you in a couple of days.....

This is getting away from putting your address for you rental accommodation on your website, but you can see other ways having your actual address would be useful....

eg. I am making a google map of all the places that are listed on the Rainbow Tourism directory website.
Well at least the ones in New Zealand today, I haven't quite finished, but I'm going to try adding that map to this post. I hope you can see it, I plan to make one of these maps for each place in the world.
And see if your address was listed on your website, and I could make a link exactly your business, then whenever anyone was searching in google maps for anything near where you are, in your part of the world, they would see your motel listed.
Cheers Lynn



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SEO KnowAll Lynny from Canz Design.

My name is Lynny, I’ve been employed by DownUnder Mark recently, to among other things, manage the new Rainbow Tourism website, that my business Canz Design Ltd, is building for him.
I’m taking care of entering new properties into both the directory site, and the booking system, that everyone listed on his site is invited to try out free.
I will also manage the whole back end of the website, leaving Mark free to market the Accommodation/Tourism directory site.
Once the new site is up and running, in about a week from now, I will also be doing the SEO of his sites.
I specialise in SEO (search engine optimisation) which very basically means making specific changes to a website, to make that website, rank well in search engines like Google, for keyphrases or search strings that are the sort of things people looking for your business would search for.
I will talk about SEO extensively in my posts, since it is of little use having a website, advertising your motel or B and B, if that website cannot be found, by someone looking for a place to stay, in your area.
Combining these two jobs is extremely interesting, since over the past month, I have visited just over 200 accommodation websites. I have seen some very nice looking websites, that when I did a search in Google, for the name of the business, which is a very specific search, that website did not appear in the first 2 pages of the search results.
I have definitely seen the good, the bad and the ugly accommodation websites, and will discuss with you some of the issues faced by the owners of the sites.
I’ll take a look at several ways of advertising an accommodation business, and show you how SEO can fit into your marketing budget.
Lynny