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 3.0 Getting People to your Web site
"Search engines, created initially as a way of sharing information between universities, first came on the scene in the early '90s. In fact, the first search engine (Archie) was developed by Alan Emtage and functioned as a way to match a file name with a specific query. Archie emerged as a database of Web filenames, which could then be matched to user queries. By December of 1993, the first bot-fed engines appeared online and the first Web-crawler to index complete pages (WebCrawler) went live in 1994. Carnegie Mellon University's Lycos, one of the earliest contemporary engines, emerged in July 1994, by containing an index of 54,000 documents and a search engine which hosted relevance-ranking retrieval, word-proximity and prefix-matching algorithms. From there, catalogue size continued to reach astronomical quantities, topping 60 million documents in 1996." - from Search Insider link below- Feb 10, 2005.
Today, search engines present the most powerful way to connect buyers and sellers of tourism experiences. With billions of web pages competing for attention, taking steps to understand the keywords your visitors will use to find your business is the first step in getting people to your site.
Step 1. Your Keyword Universe: Determine your keywords
- Take out your marketing material and highlight words you think might be searched for by your guests.
- Eliminate generic words.
- Use a tool like wordtracker, google or overture keyword selection tools to determine which words are searched for the most often.
- Identify other Key words from: your key customer segments, activities you offer, regional attractions and parks, special themes (ie. weddings, fall colours)
- Create a master keyword list.
Step 2: Write your Keyword Content
- Determine which pages you can write (or rewrite) content for. Which keyword combinations have the best potential as doorways into your web site? (Assign specific keywords and keyword combinations to specific pages on your site).
- Create distinct pages for different keyword combinations where possible. Copy your keyword list and eliminate keywords that are not appropriate for each page. Reorganize order of importance and write.
 Determine the information that people visiting this page need to know: traveler needs, customer focused content-
Include the benefits you offer, customer needs you will meet.
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Describe your services using keywords with appeal to each target market.
Step 3: Keywords and Doorway Page Promotion
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Ensure your offline promotion is computer centric: Give out things used at and near computers: calendars, screensavers, sticky notes, mouse pads, pens and pencils, scratch pads.
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Make sure every piece of information contains an appropriate web site address and emphasizes you keyword universe.
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Consider smaller print runs with narrower content to align with web design.
Try: Overture Keyword Selector
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