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:

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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.

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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

There are lots of developments out there that SEO folks are watching and talking about.  While they may not be important yet, they might become have an impact on your search engine rankings in the future.

Trust is a big SEO topic in the Blizzard Office.  Google has made it clear they want trustworthy sites to show up in their rankings.  Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the Internet is a cesspool.   While there are many factors that can affect your trust, here are a few worth reading more about:

• Does Including a Physical Address On Your Website Help Rankings? (by Michael Gray) Clearly, many untrustworthy sites lack of a physical address.   While an address does not appear to be a huge factor now, it could prove interesting for the many “virtual” businesses that don’t have a physical presence.

Wesley Fryer

• Is Page Load Speed Google’’s Next Organic Factor? (by Jeremy Bencken) It sure would make sense.  Slow websites are pretty irritating, and I wouldn’t mind if Google dinged them.
• Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian’s Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust (by Karen G Schneider) is at Google’s Librarian Central.  This librarian says that, among other things, Librarian’s look at:
  • A site’s availability.  Uh, being down is a bad thing.  But this also means putting valuable content behind passwords or pocketbooks.
  • The site’s credibility.  Who owns, operates and writes the site’s content?
  • External Links: Broken links on your site kills its reputation! (uh oh… this blog has lots of those)
• Optimize Your Search Engine Listings for Improved CTR (by Chris Silver Smith) points out that Google may be posturing to give sites with higher CTRs a boost in their rankings.  Makes sense!  If people “vote” by clicking, then give the people what they want.

Click Thru Rate (CTR) is a hot topic because you can get more traffic from your existing presence by making it more appealing.  Increasing the CTR from search results, PPC search results, banner ads, listings sites, etc. is big business and becoming more important and accessible to small businesses.  One area of promise is the ability to enhance your listings in search engines with “rich content” that really catch the eye and provide useful information.

Last Year, Yahoo introduced SearchMonkey which was a way to add rich content to search engine listings.   These enhanced listings have increased Click Thru Rates by as much as 15%. Now, Google has introduced Rich Snippets.   Both SearchMonkey and Rich Snippets promise to let websites enhance the way they show up in search engines and increase CTRs.   This new opportunity is too new for most businesses… for now. But, keep you eye on this, because it promises to open up a new area to improve your online results.

Google Insights To Search offers… um, insights into several important elements of search.  While it is hard to predict what the data from this tool is exactly good for, I can imagine using it to get insights into geographic originations of search as well as seaonality of search.  Its usefulness is  limited by the fact that it only shareds results for widely used terms.

It lets you strain your data with several parameters:

• The Location of the Searcher
• The Keyword Phrase used
• The Timeframe
• By Category

In this example I created “outer banks”.  One thing I found was that I could get lots of different “insights” by changing the filters, search terms, etc.

Here is the overall traffic for that search term during the last year:

And the top 10 states that searches for outer banks originated:

These are the variations on the phrase during the specified time period: (more…)

Tracking competitors and determining the strength of their (and your) online presence has been a recent theme.  In the last week I have written about how to compare two website’s ranking strength and also compare their link strength and quality.

The harder question today is how do you compare and analyze local search? Local search is clearly a growing segment.   It is very fragmented, but, there is one powerhouse: Google.  There are a multitude of local search sites ranging from local.yahoo.com to yellow page sites (like superpages) to city guides (like CitySearch).

I certainly don’t have a clear answer… but I have a few ideas.  Here is how I evaluate a local business ranking for a typical hotel.

The first place I look is the Google’s 10-box.  This is the map and 10 businessess that typically show up at the top of a search like Charlotte Hotel:

Local Search 10 box

Clearly, being in this top 10 is important.  Businesses in the 10-box get a much higher exposure. Please note, the 10-box typically appears above the highly coveted #1 organic ranking.  The exact factors that cause a 10-box ranking are rarely agreed upon.  Better listings are often buried on page two! Your location to the center of town seems to help a lot here. (more…)

LinkVo0doo

LinkVoodoo has a Quality Score Calculator that detemines the strength and quality of a website.  It was born as a tool to help search engine marketers determine how good a website and therefore make a decision on whether to obtain a link.

While it is certainly handy for determining whether a site is worth obtaining a link from, it is also a pretty good overall indicator of any website’s online presence. I like to run a bunch of competitive websites through it to get an analysis of which competitors are the strongest or weakest, comparatively.   I find that it correlates very strongly with a website’s overall online presence. So, if you have to look at just one indicator of a websites online strength, LinkVoodoo might just be the tools.

LinkVoodoo Search Engine Tool

LinkVoodoo uses a weighted algorithm to calculate its score, making sure that important factors (like backlinks) are counted 10X more than minor factors (like Alexa Ranking). Here are their factors, in order of importance: (more…)