You are invited to join Blizzard Internet in Woodbury, New York at The Inn at Fox Hollow on January 12th and 13th,  2010 for a hands-on 2-day workshop.

This Blizzard University will be for resort, hotel and inn managers and marketing types in the hospitality industry looking to increase their search engine visibility and kick up their internet marketing strategy for ‘10.

Attendees will learn powerful tips, tools and tactics for search engine success:

(more…)

Presenting….the schedule for Blizzard Internet’s fall and winter webinars:

Join us during the last few months of the year to learn what you need to know to create a powerful internet marketing strategy for 2010.

This season’s webinar lineup includes in-depth internet marketing sessions covering Facebook, best practices for website management, the top tools to use, and wraps up with how to prioritize everything you have learned for a practical marketing strategy.

Sign up today: (more…)

A Request for Proposal (RFP) kicks off the selection process for a new website design.  A good RFP helps find the best company for the job.  A good RFP guides the design of a successful site… and a good RFP reflects positively on the company that builds it!

Blizzard Internet receives RFPs from hotels, resorts, CVBs and others pretty regularly.  They vary in quality but are generally pretty useful.  We would like to share some tips to help you get more out of your RFP:

Questions to Ask to Protect Yourself:

• Ask permission to do a D&B Credit Check. (You do check the credit of your major vendors, don’t you?)
• Ask for professional liability insurance.   A hotel has a lot to lose if something goes haywire with their website.
• Does Vendor work with any competitors? Is Vendor willing to forego working with direct competitors?  Most resorts don’t want their vendor working with the hotel next door.
• Do you have an office?  What percentage of your employees work there?  Do  you want to do business with a virtual company… or someone with a brick and mortar presence?

Feature Requirements to Consider: (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…)

What is a Site Map?
A site map is one page of a web site that lists all of the pages (URL’s) for that particular web site and to each page of the site.  The structure of a site map is typically in an outline form listing the web pages within related categories or themes.

Most web sites that do have a site map just list every page in the form of a link from the “home page” down to the “contact us” page with no flare or logical order.  Site maps are typically left alone with no existing optimization and are just merely part of the site’s architecture.

The Evolution of the Site Map
Google first introduced the site map in June of 2005 and then it was not until the next year that Yahoo! and MSN joined with Google to recognize the fact that site maps are needed for individual web sites to submit their site’s pages to the search engines.

Google’s size limit for a site map is 50,000 URL’s which, to me, is more than enough.  I, personally, have not worked on any site that has more than a few hundred pages so leave it to mighty Google to give us way more bandwidth than we will ever need.

XML vs. HTML Site Map
An XML site map is a version that Google likes to use almost exclusively.  With Google being the #1 search engine out there and growing by the day, why not adhere to their guidelines and best practices.  An XML site map has a very beneficial feature called the “priority tag” which tells the search engines what pages are most important therefore indexing and crawling those pages first.

Those priority pages would probably be the “home” page, the “vacation rentals” page, etc…  Any page that you would like the search engines to see first and foremost (your “money pages”) would get tagged.  This allows the webmaster to control what pages the search engines can see and index.

(more…)

Over the past few months, Blizzard Internet has offered a webinar series titled “All About Google” that presented the latest tips and tools to create a search presence for hotel, vacation rental, resort, and hospitality websites.

Each webinar is about an hour long and packed full of search marketing strategies that can be implemented today to boost qualified traffic, encourage bookings, and increase your bottom line.

The webinars are now available on-demand and are recommended for everyone from the savvy search optimizer to the novice marketer. This series includes:

All About Google I – Google and its Many Algorithms: get started by learning the basics of Google and how it works including: vertical search, search engine optimization vs. search engine marketing, organic search, and local search.

All About Google II – Local Search: creating a local presence is essential for hospitality companies to dominate search terms for their area. In this webinar, Trent Blizzard covers the key components of Google local search, factors to improve rankings, how to get into the top 10 map listings.

All About Google III – Keyword Research: how a website ranks in Google isn’t everything, a listing must be compelling and relevant for the searcher to click. Learn why website optimization and in depth research is an important part of on-page search engine marketing, and how to create a smart strategy for optimization implementation.

(more…)

Google is getting ready to roll out a new infrastructure and algorithm update – but don’t freak out, it’s a good thing!

We have been testing during the last month along with other developers, and thus far the studies have shown upgrades including:

• The Local Business Map results (the “10 box”) has been cleaned up. There are fewer duplicate results and there aren’t as many spammy titles so it’s visually appealing.
• Results are served up at a supersonic speed – 0.22 seconds compared to 0.27 in the old version. So hold on!
• Fewer results are served up, so irrelevant sites and non trustworthy sites are thought to be excluded.

Why the upgrade?
The chatter is that this upgrade is in response to Bing, and a few improvements were needed anyway.

So what about Bing?
When tested against Bing, Google is still faster and offers sites that are relevant to the search; and like the hokey pokey, that’s what it’s all about.  Bing is positing itself as a “decision engine” and using it means that you will avoid “search overload.” However, I agree with John Ellis, Senior Online Marketing Manager, it’s not about the destination, it’s the journey.

What does this mean for you?
We anticipate that Blizzard Internet clients won’t see a big difference in rankings because Google will be further rewarding websites that have been utilizing best SEO practices.

Test it for yourself here – http://www2.SandBox.Google.com

Make sure to also check out Trent’s related article – Up and Coming Search Ranking Factors