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Guarantee Marketing Results with Web Analytics

“If you don’t know where your business is coming from and who your customers are, you defeat the purpose of advertising”, quoted from Irving Kass, owner of St. George Inn, St. Augustine, FL.

The competition in the hospitality industry is becoming more intense by the day and the thick competition magnifies the need for qualified marketing. Online trackers help companies rise above their competitors because of detailed customer statistics that lead to cutting edge marketing. The following points will depict how a tracker is so vital for successful internet marketing.

Why Do I Need a Tracker?

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Website Monitoring Tool

Might you have too many instances of the same content appearing out there on the internet? Is your content being scraped, splogged or just plain stolen? Do you think a competitor has duplicate websites that the Google spamstalkers should know about? If so, Copyscape is the tool for you.

Simply go to the site, and type in the URL of the page you want to check, then hit “GO”.

Copyscape will scan your page, then look for other duplicate chunks of text elsewhere on the ‘net. Note that the first result returned is usually a cached version of your page.

When you click on any of the results, you’ll see a copy of the page where the duplicate content lives, with the content highlighted.

Why should you care about duplicate content? You’re investing in a strong internet marketing plan. Search engines can ignore or penalize content they deem duplicate. Why risk finding damaging your efforts?

Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Here’s an easy to use tool from Google Labs that can be useful in your keyword research - Google Sets.

Simply type two to five related terms that are already in your keyword universe into the search fields in Google Sets. Then, click on either the Large Set or Small Set button. Google Sets will give you its suggestions for other terms that may be related to the terms you chose. The results are not always useful, but you can often glean a gem or two with minimal effort.

Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Trent Blizzard, CEO of Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc., says that the one question that he gets asked at almost every conference he attends is, “How can I target the demographic that I am most interested in reaching?” The answer to that question is rather difficult.

Leave it to Microsoft to give us the tools that just might possibly answer this question. I highly recommend that you try out the AdCenter Lab suite of tools. These tools are designed to give keyword and demographic data to help with the set up of your AdCenter PPC campaign. While they are not always entirely accurate, they provide a good basis to work from. Make sure that you are using the Internet Explorer browser, or they will not work.

Search Funnels show which keywords searchers use before and after a search. For example: 3.79% of surfers search for hotel after doing a search for bed and breakfast.

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Google’s prestigious placement among the thousands of search engines has been crafted by one intention - “to play fair!” Google has always exercised good, clean, and fair techniques - this is why they dominate over all other search engines. In fact, SEO expert, Jerry West states, “Google is the cleanest and best search engine on the planet.”

With this type of power, it is important to know where your hotel or tourism website stands in Google’s “eyes.” The Google toolbar is designed to give users a brief understanding of their website’s placement as well as offer easy-to-use functions. Here at Blizzard, we find the toolbar extremely useful and strongly recommend it. The downloading process is fast, free, and will give you the opportunity to know the status of your travel website at all times.

To download the new and improved Google toolbar, simply click on the link below and follow along with the instructions: http://toolbar.google.com/T4/.

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If you’re interested in seeing where a particular travel, tourism, or lodging website is hosted, try the Where-Is Tool found at www.parsec.it/whereis/index.php.

Simply type in the URL of the website, and then click on locate. You’ll even be able to see the physical location of the host server on the map.

Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

About Flickr

Flickr is social-networking website that is built to allow people to post and share their own photos. Owned by Yahoo, it is the most popular of this category of sites. According to Alexa, it reaches approximately 10% of all Internet users and is the 42nd most popular website on the Internet.

Potential Hospitality Industry Uses of Flickr:

• Millions use Flickr. Search to see if there are already photos of your travel destination or lodging property. See what people are posting about your hotel, motel, inn, or your area.
• Flickr will link to your website with the photos you upload. This is a great internet marketing strategy: It will help drive qualified traffic, as well as provide potential search engine benefits.
• Flickr is a convenient place to share photos of your hotel or lodging property, and lets you create slideshows to put on your website.
• Flickr is a powerful and convenient way to manage your own photo library. Photos can be made private if you don’t want the whole world to see them.
• Flickr will print all kinds of collateral (calendars, booklets, posters, prints, stamps, etc) from your photos.
• Flickr will let you create a community, offering great photo sharing and online marketing opportunities for Chamber of Commerce’s, CVBs and tourist associations.
• Flickr gives you the opportunity to comment on photos that are relevant to your business.
• Flickr offers easy and intuitive photo-editing of your photos. A good place for people who don’t pre-edit their photos on their computers to tweak them after they upload them.

Tagging

The secret to Flickr is “tagging,” or labeling photos with words and phrases so that search engines can determine what the picture is about. That photo of your spa you upload may have a funny name like 452yt23.jpg, but when you upload it into Flickr, you can “tag” it with its name like “Nantucket spa.” Because Flickr is a “social Internet” site, a Flickr user can view your photos and add his or her own comments and tags like “dream vacation” because you are part of their dream vacation.

Tip #1 - Create and Optimize your Profile

When you create your profile, you have an opportunity to tell the wider community who you are. You also can setup links to your hospitality website(s) and e-mail. Make sure you choose or create an icon (I took a piece out of one of my photos to make mine) to represent yourself. (more…)