I read a great article today over at StateOfSearch.com on optimizing images for search engine rankings.  It was put together nicely and a great resource for “how to” tips on making your images rank in Image and Universal search.

The tips aren’t all that different from what we’ve been saying for awhile now, validation is always nice, but putting all the tips together makes the underlying theme of image search apparent: ALWAYS use keywords where you can.

As with most things ranking – keywords are king – and should be chosen for images with as much thought as they are for the content on your page.  Start your image optimization with fresh keyword research.  I’d take this a step further and see if anyone is searching for your keyword AND image keywords appended together, such as {Keyword} + photo, photos, pictures, pic, pics, image, images, etc.

Once you’ve found your keywords, assign them to the images you have on your website.  You don’t want to overdo it – so maybe one or two keywords per image.  After you’ve assigned them – you can do this by listing the URLs and the photo descriptions in Excel – start optimizing the photos.

Here are the steps according to the comprehensive article cited above: (more…)

The worst way to get inspiration for your own web design is your competitors!

Here are some great websites to turn to for inspiration:

24 Beautiful Hotel Website Designs to Get Inspired

Checking in Hotel Web Design: 50 Cosy Hotel Websites and Trends

90+ Remarkable Examples Of Bold Colors In Web Design

50 Excellent Corporate Website Designs

35 Beautiful Water-themed Web Designs for Inspiration

30 Beautifully Textured Web Designs

Web Design Trends: Testimonials Design

20 Super Creative Website Menus

Web Design – Pricing Tables (more…)

Worried that your new website is missing a few important details? Learn about 5 “invisible” best practices that will help your new website.

Before you roll out your new website design, talk to your website designer about each of these.  Make sure you have implemented the following 5 best practices:

404 Page Setup – A 404 error page is a “whoops” page that your website visitors see when they go to a malformed or non-existent web-page.  Make sure you have 404 page that fits the character of your website and shepherds all those lost visitors back into your website.  With a new website, you are bound to get a few “whoops” visitors.

• Tip: consider monitoring this page to see if there are any major sources of traffic that need accounted for.
• Benefit: it is easier to keep a visitor than get a new one!
• Learn More about 404 pages

301 Redirects - When you build your new website, your page names change (ie from www.yourdomain.com/oldpage.htm to www.yourdomain.com/newpage.php).

This confuses the heck out of search engines and can cause lower rankings and lost visitors.  Make sure you set up a 301 redirect for each old page of your website to a new page. (more…)

As a follow up to Site Maps 101, we present Matt’s top best (and worst) practices for getting the most out of your site map.

10 Best Site Map Practices:

1. First and foremost, every web site needs a site map to tell the search engines where each of your site’s pages are located.
2. You must link to each page of the site with text links.
3. Each text link must use the keyword for the page you are linking to from the site map to create relevancy.
4. The keyword used needs to be a research and strategically determined keyword that is relevant to your customers and is searched. Check out our Toolbox for our favorite keyword research sites. (more…)

The Microsoft Demographic Prediction Tool predicts the age and gender of your website or of a specific keyword phrase.  Its insights into your audience could help you target your website more effectively.  Just enter your website (and press URL button) and press Go.

Blizzardinternet.com is mostly male and in the 25-50  range.  No surprises:

(more…)

A Content Management System (CMS) is the platform on which a modern hotel’s website is typically built.  Just a few years ago, programs like Dreamweaver, Contribute, FrontPage and Adobe GoLive were more commonly used tools to update a website.  Now, a whole new generation of content management systems allows multiple individuals to share in the care and feeding of a website: designers, programmers, administrators, clients, SEO specialists and bloggers.

Choosing a new CMS is a big decision – a CMS that is a good fit can put you in hotel heaven or a bad fit into hotel hell.  Here are Blizzard Internet’s top 9 tips to consider when choosing a new Content Management system for a hotel or resort.

1. Easy management of special features ~ prioritized by use. A CMS system needs to accommodate the most frequently made changes with grace.   Beyond general content updates, tourism websites may need:
   1. An event calendar that is easy to manage
   2. Image management and photo upload tool
   3. A packages or special management tool
   4. A banner ad or graphic rotator to feature specials or partners
   5. A full-featured blog is always a nice addition to any website (more…)

ClickTale is a totally unique web analytics program because it actually videos your website visitors as they interact with your website. Careful, these movies can be addictive and entertaining! ClickTale also produces usable visitor analytics data related to where people look on your webpages and what links they click on.

Use ClickTale to make post-click marketing decisions … which is when you study your user behavior and change your website to increase conversions. The “eye tracking” (or clicking and scrolling) research it provides in the form of heatmaps is very insightful.

ClickTale has a free version that will let you try it out.  We recommend the $99 per month version that should do everything you want, and more!

Blizzard is an affiliate of ClickTale, we signed up after seeing just how exciting a piece of software it is.  Try CrazyEgg too for nice click heatmapping.