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The following article is the first of a two part series discussing the growing need for Internet Marketing. Today’s portion will discuss what you get with Internet Marketing, the future of the industry and travel statistics driving the market

Most often people are afraid of investing in Internet Marketing because it is difficult to see or measure the results of the campaign. While it may be true that Internet Marketing is largely intangible, it is actually not difficult to see the results by means of measuring the return on investment with the proper tools.

What should you be doing to get ahead of your competitors?

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Voice over Internet Protocol is a technology that allows an internet user to make a phone call over their broadband connection instead of using a telephone (analog) connection. A VoIP service may only allow calls to be placed to people using the same service, however there are some services that will allow you to call any telephone number whether it is local, long distance, mobile or an international number. The services differ greatly including the fact that some will require use of your computer or a special VoIp phone, while others may allow you to use a traditional phone connected to a VoIP adapter.

VoIP will allow users to travel anywhere they wish and still receive or make a phone call. It will possibly facilitate tasks that would be more difficult to achieve using a traditional network, like giving call center employees to work anywhere given they have a fast and stable internet connection. There are some shortcomings to the technology, but for the most part seems to be the up-and-coming way to place a call.

Jackie Binion - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Broadband refers to a type of connection to the Internet offering much greater bandwidth than is available with a dial-up modem. It is a type of data transmission in which a single medium (wire) can carry several channels at once. There is no specific definition of the speed of a “broadband” connection but, in general, any Internet connection using DSL or Cable-TV lines is considered a broadband connection.

Blizzard Associate - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Effective search engine optimization is often a difficult and tedious task. Fortunately, the internet is host to a large variety of useful tools that help in making wise and informed SEO decisions.

                

One of these wonderful (and free) tools, the Keyword Difficulty Analyzer, can be found at http://www.seomoz.org/tools.php. This particular tool evaluates elements such as the top 3 Overture bids (Yahoo Search Marketing), number of monthly searches, and individual analysis of the top 10 sites in Yahoo, Google, and MSN for whatever keyword you are analyzing. The tool then gives the keyword a “difficulty score” which helps in understanding how hard it would be to highly rank a site for that term.

Apart from the Keyword Difficulty Analyzer, SeoMoz.org offers other tools that help in analyzing page strength and looking up IP addresses. Coming soon are a Rank Checker and a Sandbox Detector.

Chris Adema - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Link Popularity

Link Popularity is defined as the number of links pointing to a web site. Strong link popularity favorably influences organic search results. Links from sites with high link popularity will carry greater weight with search engines than links from “unpopular” sites. Furthermore, links from sites with related content are seen (by search engines) as more important than those from sites with little or no relevance.

Link Reputation

Link Reputation is defined as the WORDS other sites use to DESCRIBE a site. Link reputation involves the relationship that backlinks (links pointing back to you) have to a target web page and the context of those backlinks. Ideally, you want links pointing to your site to contain your keyword terms in the link text e.g. Hotel Internet Marketing.

Kathy Barta - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Here’s a simple online tool that will give you an idea of how hard it is to rank for a specific keyword. The creators don’t tell us what parameters it uses, but I expect it compares the number of searches per day for a specific term to the number of pages competing for that term. Higher numbers indicate more competition and lower numbers mean less.

Access this handy free tool here: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficulty/

The Keyword Difficulty Tool can give you the impetus to create pages on your website for which it will be relatively easy to rank. It also alerts you as to how hard it will be to rank for more competitive terms. However, don’t let tough competition deter you. If your page is highly relevant and you work hard at following the search engines’ guidelines, it will eventually pay off in your marketplace.

Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Is it a crucial part of Online Marketing to have a professionally designed website? This question can often be overlooked, but while I have been working in the Promotion Department for Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc., it is apparent that an essential part of marketing depends upon an appealing website. It affects the ability for promotion to bring optimal results. The goal of Promotion is to bring traffic to client’s website. Blizzard is very successful meeting this goal with expert tools to target relevant traffic. Unfortunately, some of our clients experience a high bounce rate, meaning relevant traffic are coming to their site homepage and then leaving. Tracking a client’s bounce rate confirms that while promotion is important, it is half the investment when implementing Online Marketing. The technology of the internet is dynamic and continually changing, and it is therefore crucial to stay current with the marketing trends, including continual updates to website design. Impression and perception are the cornerstones of Online Marketing, therefore when updating your site, the following ten steps contain information that will give your website the leading edge, and help develop it into a strong marketing tool representing your products and services.

The top portion of your website is prime real estate and should feature a visually appealing header/logo navigation system with eye-catching graphics. Your navigation buttons, as well as, the name of your inn has good positioning at the top portion of your site. Another important part of navigation is positioning contact information and reservation links in a prominent place, making it easy as possible for your website visitors to book. The links to your online availability calendar, reservations page, and contact information should appear prominently on every page of your website.

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