Internet Marketing for Tourism

Animoto - a free tool for uploading images and audio - or choose from audio from their site.

With Animoto.com
it's as easy as choosing 10 photos
choosing music from their library or you own
and they'll do the rest.

Email finished multimedia to your guests or post it on your blog or web site.
Simple Multimedia for your Web site.
Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

Labels: simple multimedia

The results of a Marketing Sherpa experiment performed with their newsletter readers showed that using the right two or three click link words can lift clickthrough rates by more than 8%, thus getting newsletter readers to your Web site more often.

Here are the results:

• "Click to continue": 8.53%
• "Continue to article": 3.3%
• "Read more": (-)1.8%

Not only should actionable anchor text be used, also tell people to take the exact action you want them to perform in order to get the best response. Click here to read the original Marketing Sherpa article in its entirety.

Another excellent post highlighting the way Yahoo ranking can be optimized for your Web site.
http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1712/1/How-to-Optimize-for-Yahoo/Page1.html

http://www.tourismclicks.com

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers

Domain	Aug-07	Jul-07	Aug-06
	63.98%	64.35%	59.99%
	22.87%	22.13%	22.73%
search.msn.com	7.98%	8.79%	11.86%
www.ask.com	3.49%	3.21%	3.37%

The Hotel Association of Canada is taking the lead in North American green certification with its "Green Key Eco-Rating" program. It currently has over 600 members who will benefit from a 10% discount on services offered by Eco Crown Hospitality. Hotels, motels, B&Bs, resorts, timeshare properties, vacation rentals and hospitality chains can all gain access to Eco Crown's unique programs, and be positioned to succeed in the emerging "green economy.

www.ecocrownhospitality.com

Here is an excellent overview of how to use Google to understand how many others are competing for your keywords.
Google can display only those results with the keyword in the title or file name or meta tags.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-exhaustive-list-of-search-engine-based-keyword-research-data

http://www.ottawatourism.ca/meetingseasy/
is an excellent example of a community portal designed to make life easy for their ideal guest.
in this case, Meeting and Convention Planners visiting Ottawa have one stop to solicit RFP's from up to 300 Ottawa Meeting support businesses.

Core, to the success of such a tool (this one has a fine multimedia show/tell design) is the capacity of members to respond!

How quickly would you expect a response to an RFP request?  Does your cluster group agree on the timeliness for responding to group inquiries?

15 Best Free SEO Tools
a really nice page featuring some of the Best Search Engine Optimization tools.  Many have been featured on this blog before.

Robots (sometimes called Spiders) are used by search engines to crawl the links between Web pages to determine the content that exists online in order to effectively index it and return the most relevant pages as search results.
Most Web designers want their content to be found by these robots.

Sometimes, tourism businesses place documents online that they do not want search engines to find. Registration forms, cancellation policies or other documents may be irrelevant to search results but keywords may get these pages incorrectly listed. The existence of old web pages or content that is not search optimized will also decrease the ranking of pages and lower your ranking with search engines.

The simplest way to block the robots from content is with the use of a plain text Robots.txt file.

The content of the file is simple.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /docs
Disallow: /moredocs.pdf
Disallow: /hidden.html

The User-agent line identifies the robots to block the content from. The "*" indicates the disallows apply to all search engine robots.
Your Robots.txt file may contain one or more disallow statements which indicate subdirectories, documents, or web pages that you do not want the search engine to use in showing search results.

So the robots.txt file is sort of a filter that helps you maintain a clutter free appearance to the search engines, enhancing your ranking in search results and blocking irrelevant content from being indexed.

A best practice for posts of multiple disallowed web pages would be to use a one line statement that disallows documents in a folder. Then place any new disallowed content in that folder.



Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

Labels: robots.txt, search engine optimization

An excellent article on optimizing your PDF documents on your Web site.

In Tourism Keys Workshops, attendees learn how to effectively use PDF's as a core component of their Web site.
Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

Labels: pdf, seo

The shows all advertisers have access to this service. Just ensure your landing pages are phone friendly.

These Mobile Ad displays will be limited to 70 characters (normally ads contain 95 characters).

One of the big challenges is to provide landing page content that shows the mobile phone toting traveler info they require on a concise landing page.

Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

Labels: google, google adwords, mobile

http://www.opendns.com
is a Web site that filters Internet Web sites by blocking access to sites which may compromise the safety of your computer and personal data.
By using a DNS filtering service like this, Web sites are blocked at their source, keeping your browser from opening sites that can cause damage.

Remember, an email newsletter is usually read in an email client which has smaller width than the typical Web browser.  Keep your width down to 500 to 650 pixels so that the reader doesn't need to scroll to read your content.

http://seoz.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/seo-firefox-addons/

1. Are your Keywords in your Title Tags - between <head> </head> tags?
2. Are keywords in the first Heading Tag on your page <h1></h1>?
3. Are keywords in hyperlink text on your page (anchor text) linking to other relevant information related to the keyword?
4. Are other sites linking to your site?  Are they relevant?
5. Is there at least 200 words of text on pages that are relevant for your keywords?
6. Do your file names include the keywords - including embedded image file names?  use "-" between words ie: here-are-my-keywords.jpg
   

Blogging can significantly enhance your search engine optimization, but Blogger default code does not optimize your blog posts.
To get better search engine ranking for your Blogger Blog you need to:

• ensure each post title becomes the page title of the post
• ensure that keyword and description tags are optimized

To enhance your search engine optimization, open the blogger template and near the top look for the line that includes:

<$BlogPageTitle$>

Replace this entire line of text with:



Once you have edited your blogger template, save and republish your blog. Then view your blog posts and View the Page Source to confirm everything is working properly.

What this code does:

• changes the title of each blogger post to the Title you gave the post, followed by the blog title
• adds description and keyword tag that is identical to the page title.
• keeps the home page title of your blog and archives of your blog the same as they were originally.
  

(PS. sorry I had to paste an image of the text due to blogger restrictions on posting code.)
Thanks to: http://www.blogcatalog.com/discuss/entry/optimize-your-title-tag-for-blogger-users
http://www.bloggingmix.com/2007/08/optimizing-your-title-tag-blogger.html

Todd Lucier - TourismClicks.com

Labels: blog, blogger, links search engine optimization, seo

http://mashable.com/2007/07/04/podcasting-toolbox/

One stop shopping to learn all about Podcasting.