Internet Marketing/Hospitality Industry Best Practices
If this is your first day joining the travel blog this week, you are in good company. Even the White House has seen the importance of blogging and this week accepted the first blogger into the White House press room! (See article from CNN)
Today’s topics will be on Internet marketing and what is in store for the travel industry. Blogging is just one way to enhance the effectiveness of an organization’s website and increase the Return on Investment for Internet Marketing. Here are some new technologies and techniques that are available to use in your marketing efforts.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Why do search engines love blogs? The answer is simple: Content. Blogs are similar to online journals that are updated on a frequent basis; more popular blogs are updated several times a week. When a search engine spider visits a blog, it knows it will find the new content that it’s always searching for. So blogs are visited by the search engine spiders more frequently (blog readership increased 58% in 2004 to 32 million Internet users)
Search Engine Advertising (SEA):
A new emerging program in this area is Pay per Call Ads. While there is not much data on success rates, it is estimated to be one of the largest growing advertising vehicles through 2010. The program works as follows: you choose a category to bid on and the ads display a phone number rather than your property’s URL. Instead of being charged by click, you are charged by phone call. Generally, the average cost is $2 to $12.50 per call; in the travel category the average is about $4.50 per call. Front end costs are higher and the call volume is lower, but conversions are higher (about 5 – 20 times more valuable) than PPC.
Regarding standard search engine advertising, or pay per click, consumers should be aware of the following…Competitors are purposely engaging in Click Fraud by clicking on search engine advertising ads in order to increase your spending, therefore lowering your Return on Investment and wasting your budgeted funds. Google and Overture have their own click fraud teams, but they do not catch everything. If you track IP’s and notice specific instances, a refund may be granted with valid proof of this occurrence.
Interactive Media:
Local Search is the latest development; all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves) have local search tools. Google reported that during the holiday season, their local search tool was visited more than their shopping search engine Froogle. It is important for your property to be listed on yellow pages and local directories and have the website address available in text and prominent on all pages of the website.
Return on Investment (ROI):
At the end of the day any new techniques or technologies, be it SEOP, SEA, local search or Blogging and RSS need to be leveraged to maximize Return on Investment (ROI). It is all about bringing more qualified visitors to the website and converting as many of these as possible from “lookers” into “bookers”.
With today’s emphasis on ROI the underpinnings of any effective Internet Marketing program should always be a clear focus on your website’s Visitor-to-Look ratio (a measure of the qualification of the website visitors) and the Look-to-Book ratio (the measure of the ability to convince the visitor to book).
I
You mentioned that search engine love blogs because of fresh content. Could I put a blog on my website? What
Users want to be led directly to what they are searching for, especially if you are advertising a specific promo or event. The landing page is your chance to grab the users
Hello! Although my brief experience with SEA campaigns on Google and Overture did not involve customized landing pages, all of the reading that I've done indicates that they can have a huge impact on conversion if they speak directly to the customer you are targeting with your ad. Repeating the ad text and search keywords prominently on the page is supposed to be key, as is testing and tweaking the ad and landing page content (one element at a time) until you achieve the desired results. I intend to try this for my next campaign.
Absolutely! The most important thing to remember in creating a blog is that it shouldn
I have a fairly new travel site so I would like to increase my brand awareness, how could I use blogs to do this?
Local Search is great but I wanted to know if you had any thoughts on link popularity and Google? I was recently approached by a company that said they could submit me to thousands of websites to get my link popularity up in Google and that in turn would help my rankings. Should I sign up?
Run the other way as fast as you can. Educate yourself about SEO, including link building, by taking advantage of the volumes of information at your fingertips. Two of my favorite sites are SearchEngineGuide (http://www.searchengineguide.com/linkpop.html – links directly to their Link Popularity information) and HighRankings (http://www.highrankings.com/). Good luck!
Blogs are a great way to increase brand recognition through search engine marketing.
Start a blog on your website. You can hire a blogger, or maybe have someone who works in your marketing department to write a blog about topics related to your business. The topics are endless
There are a lot of companies that will promise results like this, at E-site Marketing we like to stress quality not quantity when it comes to linking your website. Besides looking at the number of websites that are linking to yours Google also pays attention to what types of website are linking to yours. More weight is given if the site is considered an authority and whether it relates to the keyword category you are attempting to rank for. For example if you are a golf resort it is important to obtain links from other golf related websites, a link from John Doe
Here are two free, open source blog software programs recommended by my Internet Service Provider:
b2evoloution:
http://b2evolution.net/
Nucleus:
http://nucleuscms.org/
STEVE O'KEEFE
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