A landing page is the first page a visitors sees after arriving on your website. Because people make snap judgments online, they are a critical element in your Internet marketing campaign’s success.

In less than 3 seconds, most people have decided whether they’re going to spend more time on your page or move onto another website.

By optimizing your landing pages, you increase conversion rates and ultimately sell more. Here are 10 ideas for you:

#1 – Understand your visitors. When you know what your target audience is looking for when they arrive on your website, you can provide that information quickly and easily. You’ll be able to develop a message that resonates with the visitor and encourages them to take action.

#2 – Match landing pages with promotional creative as much as possible. Establishing a link between the advertisement that someone sees, and then the first page they see on your website is very important for consistency and reducing confusion.

#3 – Use persuasive images. A recent study showed something very interesting: When a face in stock photography looks away from your copy, people are likely to look away as well. Make sure that all elements of your website — including the visual ones — focus on your sales message.

#4 – Give visitors what they’re looking for… quickly. Provide easy access to the information promised. Prioritize page elements according to their importance. Don’t emphasize something that is not very important.

#5 – Focus on the content: the offer itself. Avoid getting carried away by the latest and greatest new media if it doesn’t contribute to website goals. In nearly all sales situations a focus on the written text – the copy – is what sells and brings you money.

Read more…

Assuring website visitors you offer the best rate is important for increasing direct bookings. To help you with that, I’ve collaborated with my staff to provide these graphics for you. They are all 100% original, and you can use them as you like.

Best Rate Guarantee Buttons

Read more…

Omniture’s 2009 Online Conversion Benchmark Survey – conducted in July and released last Tuesday – reveals some startling facts:

• 80% of online marketers do not serve personalized content, and do not use performance metrics to promote content
• Less than 30% frequently test their content
• 70% of content decisions are unsupported by data

That’s scary. Especially if you depend on your website to generate sales.

Since I often talk about ‘scientific marketing’ it’s good to have some solid numbers on the state of the industry. More and more, I’m emphasizing the importance of conversion tracking, testing, and optimizing in the campaigns I manage. This process is fundamentally at the heart of internet marketing, and it would be a waste if we didn’t fully exploit it.

Tracking

Tracking is gathering the data as it is now. The process is quick and easy through tools such as Google Analytics. By adding once piece of code to your website, you can have access to hundreds of detailed reports.

Testing

Testing is letting the market vote on your marketing ideas. After tracking systems are in place, you can perform split testing to determine the best mix of your website elements. Testing replaces guesswork with pragmatism in the marketing process.

Optimization

Optimization is acting on the information you discover. Once you have data, you must use it. Few website owners continue through all the way to this step. It’s essential your site development is guided by the insights you’ve collected.

This 3-step system is the only proven way to achieve outstanding internet marketing results.

Are you investing enough into this process?

[photo credit: faith goble]

Reader Sylvie asks:

“…I do wonder though how many people think we post false reviews as well. I’d like to think that none but I’m sure they’re out there. How does a company go about ’showing’ their integrity? Proving they’re honest?”

Again, I’d like to take some pointers from the world of ecommerce. There, the credibility of the reviews has a large impact on sales performance – so the industry has developed creative ways to prove they’re real.

Here are 3 powerful ways to prove review integrity:

Postcards, letters, and hand-written feedback

Give away free postcards to all of your guests. If you’ve provided a great experience they will often write back to you. I saw this all the time when I worked as front desk staff at a hotel.

If people send you a postcard or letter, scan it and upload it to your website. It’s harder to fake that.

I like what Hotel SO is doing in New Zealand with their online guestbook:

Hotel SO online guestbook

They even posted this to a separate domain for easy reference…brilliant!

Signatures

If you can’t get someone to write you a whole handwritten letter, at least get their signature on a paper (with permission, of course). You can then scan and add it to your website along with their comments in digital form.

Online video or audio

This is the hardest, but most compelling. If you ever have the opportunity (and permission) to record video or audio content of your guests’ feedback, do so. Showcase it on your blog. Featured on your website.

Your goal is to get some guest feedback in rich media formats. Reviews are typically more believable when they aren’t just typed text.

More importantly, make sure there is no reason for someone to doubt the authenticity of your reviews. Most people will trust the testimonials that you post to your website…unless there is good reason to believe otherwise.

Claim your hotel (or business)

Start off by claiming or listing your hotel in Google Maps.  This step is crucial for optimizing your local search visibility.

In my experience, even 15 minutes making sure all the details & keywords are correct pays dividends for months after.

Use the map on your website

Many hotels are using Google Maps on their directions or ‘find us’ page. It provides an extra layer of functionality to a traditional map image: allowing your visitors to see satellite and street view, as well as custom directions from anywhere they are.

Google provides a little widget that makes this process super-simple. First, you just search for your location – and click the Link link:

Following the customize embedded map link will lead to a page where you can edit the view, and obtain the website code:

Make a custom map

A logical step in concierge marketing, a custom map can show guests the special attractions in your area. Here’s a good example that Xotels created for the Puerto Antilla Grand Hotel in Spain – it shows golf courses in the region:

You may want to take this a step further and add rich media to the map. A 3rd-party tool such as Trippermap allows you to add your own photos to a custom map – which could work well for custom city tours:

Trippermap

Advertise on Google Maps

If you’re advertising in Google AdWords, your text ads will have the opportunity to display to people searching the maps.

For additional coverage, some businesses are painting logos on their roofs – like this Target store in Chicago:

Chris has a (spoof) tutorial on how to optimize your roof ads for Google Maps.

Are you paying more commissions to online travel agents (OTAs) than you should?

Many hotels are. In fact, increasing direct bookings is the #1 request I get from hotel owners and operators. It’s why the mission of this site is to “show hotels how to use the internet to increase direct bookings.”

If travel websites are helping fill rooms with guests that wouldn’t have booked otherwise, that’s one thing. It’s quite another if you’re paying unneeded commissions for bookings that could have been made through your own website.

Here are three common ways I see 3rd-party sites stealing direct bookings from hotels:

1) They bid on your hotel name for cheap clicks

On search engine PPC networks, your hotel name is often just a few cents per click. At prices this low, I’m amazed when hotels pass up this opportunity and allow OTAs to bid on their own name.

How you can beat them: Include your hotel name as a keyword in your PPC campaign

2) They outrank sloppy search optimization

Some hotels have websites that are so poorly optimized, that they don’t even appear at the top of search results for their own name!

Savvy OTAs can come in and rob hotels of all these easy pickings and get lots of free traffic.

How you can beat them: Implement a smart search optimization strategy for your website

3) They attract searches for ‘reviews’

Keyword research reveals one of the most common search query structures is: keyword + “review.”

The reason is simple: people want other opinions before making a purchase. Based on this logic, sites like TripAdvisor nearly always outrank a hotel’s website for review searches.

How you can beat them: Publish your own page of 3rd-party reviews…and promote it.

Sometimes, they’re just a lot more savvy about online marketing

Recent industry studies revealed that Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline and Orbitz rely heavily on the hotel industry for the bulk of their profits. Since airlines do not pay commissions on tickets sold, the hotel industry contributes more than 60% to booking fees collected by OTAs.

So these companies will fight hard with every trick available to encourage bookings through them.

What if you budgeted the current amount you spend on OTA commissions to build an online marketing campaign that drove direct bookings? This strategy would quickly pay for itself, and reap dividends over the long term.

Are OTAs stealing bookings from your hotel website?

This post is by guest expert Neil Salerno.

At last, most hoteliers would agree that the only way to measure the effectiveness a hotel website is to track the number of reservations being generated from it. For those of you who are still satisfied with simply knowing how many visitors your site gets, you may be missing the big picture. Getting more visitors doesn’t necessarily mean you are getting more reservations.

There are actually two separate issues at hand:

1. Driving visitors to your site
2. Converting lookers into bookers once they visit

Many people are quick to consider search engine optimization, but more people need to concentrate on WSO, website optimization. WSO is your site’s ability to sell your hotel, once users visit the site.

There are many WSO points which contribute to making a productive hotel web site. Contrary to the belief of some site designers, a hotel website is not just an attractive online brochure with moving parts, bells, and whistles; it should be a tool to generate sales; and that takes marketing expertise. Unless one is designing a site for a museum, there are definite marketing principles involved in the design itself.

Perhaps the most difficult undertaking is to make people understand that their attractive web site may be a marketing failure because it lacks the sales tools to produce reservations; such as well-written, keyword rich, sales text, technically acceptable photography, an easily understood navigation scheme, researched and carefully chosen search terms/phrases, workable description and title Meta Tags, and a good link strategy.

Here are nine steps that others are using to help ensure that their site will capture a greater share of online reservations.

Avoid Flash Intros and Other Flash Elements

An introduction landing page may look pretty, but they don’t do a thing to help your site’s popularity nor its productivity. I’m sure one of the most frequently clicked links on these web sites is “skip intro.” People aren’t looking to be entertained, they are looking for information. Tell your web designer, no thanks on flash intros.

Search engines only read text. A little flash can be attractive, but too many web designers get carried away with it. Your web designer needs to spend more time developing text, which is far more important to the success of the site.

There appears to be a growing preference towards developing the entire site in flash. It sure is pretty but it has some huge problems. It’s costly to produce and costly to make changes. Most flash requires navigation links to be double-clicked in order to function. This may sound like no big deal, but many users will assume the link is broken, since we are all so accustomed to single-clicking links.  This type of site may be perfect for an art gallery or museum, but dysfunctional for a hotel sales site. Second, flash confuses search spiders and almost always encourages a low site ranking. Third, take a good look at successful booking portals like Expedia, Travelocity, etc…No flash!

Be Careful with Photos and Other Graphics

Photos create interest, but text sells. You can make your photos more interesting and searchable by simply adding text descriptions to every photo. This works especially well for “photo galleries” on your site. Since search engines only read text, your photos will become part of the search process and actually increase the popularity of your site.

Navigation Scheme on your Site

The first rule of hotel site design; don’t make it necessary for visitors to “learn” how to navigate your site. Website designers, who lack hotel marketing expertise, tend to become overly creative when designing and naming navigation elements. Your site’s navigation scheme is among the primary evaluation essentials for search engine spiders when ranking your site.

Drop-down menus are acceptable, but stick to common labels. You can’t go wrong with common labels such as “facilities”, “amenities”, “activities”, etc. Talk about confusing, we even saw one web site that labeled their home page “lobby.” Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Navigation elements do not need to jump, twirl, or flash in order to create interest in your site.

Meta Tags and all that Technical Stuff

There is some debate over the importance of Meta Tags, some search engines swear by them, some don’t. It only makes good ‘ole common-sense, however, to make sure that you have the proper tags attached to your site-they are free. Want to see your tags? It’s easy, go to Explorer and find your site, then click view, source.

There are various tags, such as Title Tags, Description Tags, Key Word Tags, etc. If there are tags entered, how well were they researched? How accurate are they? For most search engines, tags help them find your site. By the way, some Meta Tags should be different on each page of your site. There are several web sites which will allow you to see how many searches were performed, during the previous month, for each search term used. They will even suggest search words and phrases you might never have thought of. Don’t guess; you could be wrong.

What Does Your Site Say? (and how does it say it?)

The most common error on hotel web sites is poorly developed text. I can always recognize a site designed by a techie; the text usually looks like an after-thought. Text is the most important element of the site for two reasons; text is the only element that search engines can see, and second, text is what sells your hotel. Photos create interest, but text sells.

Realizing that most visitors will rarely read your entire site, it’s essential that the text is written in order of importance from top to bottom. The first two to three paragraphs should include as many key words/phrases as possible to facilitate searches. Be careful not to overdo it, you could be accused of spamming.

Home page text is obviously most critical. This is your opportunity to clarify your location, not simply your address and the most important selling features of the hotel. The location description should contain distances to room generators, such as attractions and businesses, etc.

Don’t forget to ask for business; you are writing sales text, not a brochure. The old concept of features and benefits still apply. Write as if you are talking to your visitors; forget ninety-dollar technical terms: talk plainly. Developing text should consume the most time and thought in designing your site.

A Booking Engine Could be Your Best Investment

For the life of me, I can’t think of a single reason why every independent hotel site shouldn’t have a booking engine attached. Independent hotels need a booking engine to gain equal footing with franchised hotels. Simple fact is that more and more users are booking reservations in real-time online. Email availability inquiries just don’t do it, anymore.

Not all booking engines are equal. Look for an engine that can be easily maintained; you will have to maintain rates and room inventory. Look for a well-designed engine, which is user-friendly and professionally designed. Look for an engine that charges a flat fee each month with no commissions or booking fees. Look for an engine that has a good technical staff to assist you.

Above all, don’t expect Internet users to be satisfied with email reservations on your site. We can only guess how many reservations you could be missing. For those of you, who think that a booking engine is financially out of reach, think again, the return on this minor investment is huge.

Collect and Use Your Web Site Data

There are many web site data collection software programs and basically they all collect just about the same information. You need to know your primary feeder-markets, primary referral sites, most productive search engines for your site, etc.

Make sure that your web master knows how to use this information to make changes to your site. There is no “perfect” web site; only those we continue to strive to make perfect. Software such as Google’s Analytics can show the popularity of each page on your site, so adjustments can be made. This service collects data from visitors to your web site. Yes, it’s affordable too; for now it’s free.

In the old days of print advertising, my favorite saying was “50% of all advertising is a waste of money; the problem is we don’t know which 50% it is.” This is not true with a web site; we can easily see what is productive and that which is not productive.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

In those good ‘ole days, we had to spend money to advertise our hotels, without knowing what the response would be, if any at all. Pay-per-click advertising is exactly as it appears; you only pay for those users who actually go to your web site.

Check it out; it could be a great investment if you find someone who knows how to use it properly and will maintain it for you. It could help you dominate your competition.

Develop a Link Strategy on your Site

Several search engines also use your site’s popularity to rank your site. They measure in-coming and out-going links. Links to attractions and relevant locations can be very useful. Use some caution, however, it helps to link to those sites that are most popular and never place out-going links on your home page.

Dollar for dollar, Internet website marketing represents the best-value sales tool available to hotels today. It still provides a great return-on-investment and is the great equalizer for Independent hotels. Don’t be satisfied with a site which looks attractive, but produces too few reservations

Neil Salerno, the Hotel Marketing Coach, advises hotels on how they can best use their websites to attract more guests. You may email him at NeilS@hotelmarketingcoach.com.

Josiah’s note: Today I’m excited to welcome guest expert Neil Salerno to share his insights on budgeting for hotel internet marketing. Neil has worked over 35 years in the hospitality industry, and has experience with franchise and independent hotels ranging from small boutiques to world-class resorts.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked how much hotels should spend to develop a successful presence on the Internet. I guess this is one of those questions that would get many different answers from many different people, but I will attempt to present a common-sense approach to the Internet budgeting conundrum.

I’ve read a recent article which produced a survey as a budgeting guide for hotel Internet marketing. I think it’s good to know what others are doing and focusing on, but most of the numbers, that the survey offered, have little relevance to the average hotel. As an example, the article suggested that 33% of their respondent hotels budgeted $100,000 to $500,000 for Internet marketing in 2007; this obviously includes franchise spending versus individual hotels, it appears somewhat unrealistic for the average hotel.

Internet marketing starts with an optimized proprietary web site followed by a well-conceived SEO, web marketing, and link strategy program. Internet marketing is not rocket science; hotels need a site which is easily found through generic search and one which contains the right content to generate reservations.

Make no mistake; the Internet is still the best value in hotel marketing. Dollar for dollar, nothing you can do to promote your hotel can equal the resulting benefits from having a significant presence on the Internet. Most hotels have a web site, but too many of them are ineffective in today’s web marketplace; mediocre is no longer good enough.

The question of how much a hotel should invest in Internet marketing is largely an individual hotel assessment, however, every hotel, small or large, franchise or independent, should have a strong presence on the Internet. The best part is, unlike other areas of marketing expenditures, Internet marketing results are completely measurable and transparent; and therefore, this is spending which can easily be justified to owners and managers.

The amount of money which any hotel can invest in Internet marketing is limited by its total marketing budget; so, how much should be devoted to the Internet. I have always been an advocate of proportional spending in hotel marketing. If your goal for Internet generated sales is 30% of total sales, it is certainly reasonable to devote 30% of your marketing budget to achieve that goal.

The challenge is that not enough hoteliers know how much business their site is generating or how much business their site should produce. Franchised hotels have an edge, in this regard, since most franchises produce a periodic report of Internet production, which can then be compared against their spending for Internet marketing.

Independent hotels can gauge production through reports from their online reservation booking engine. Their advantage is that booking engine reports provide much more detailed information than that which is forthcoming through the franchises. The combination of web site analytics reports, to evaluate visitors to your web site, and booking engine reports, which measure reservations made, gives hoteliers the opportunity to assess the effectiveness of their web site.

The actual dollar amount which should be devoted to Internet marketing will vary greatly depending on the characteristics of the hotel, its market environment, total dollars available, and other factors. As one hotel owner mentioned to me recently, “I don’t have a pre-determined Internet budget, but I am willing to invest whatever is necessary to get my share of Internet reservations.” This is sound thinking.

Invest too little and your results could be below acceptable levels as well. Short-cuts, such as using a web site design template or employing a site designer with no hotel marketing experience or a proven site development record can also be too costly in terms of booking results.

Every time I think of this subject, I think of the story my friend David Brudney offers about the man who is frustrated with a loud creak in his stairs. He calls in a carpenter to fix it; the carpenter examines the stairs, promptly hammers in a nail, eliminating the creaky noise. He hands a bill to the man for $65. The man says “all you did was put a nail in the stairs.” He then looks at the bill and it says:

Adding a nail to the stairs…$2.00

Knowing where to put the nail…$63.00

Knowing how and why consumers search for and choose a hotel, how the search process works on the net, what content is needed on the site in order to have the site found and what is needed to drive visitors to make a reservation; this is all more important than simply knowing how to design an attractive web site.

As I have said so many times before, a hotel web site is not merely an online brochure of your hotel. It needs to be an interactive sales piece designed to be easily found through generic search; and, once found, it must be designed to produce reservations. It is simply not enough to have an attractive web site.

The cost to develop a web site is largely a matter of the time it takes to research, prepare, and create it. There are a number of search and sales elements which are necessary to make it a functional hotel web site. Many people think it’s simply a matter of creating a unique design, but there is a lot more involved. Here are just some of the necessary steps:

• Perform research to find and exploit the most popular search key words and phrases
• Perform a comprehensive online competition analysis to shape the site’s overall substance and design.
• Compose body text (Content) which incorporates those key words in a hierarchy format to facilitate search.
• Incorporate good quality, high resolution, and optimized images into the overall site design to focus attention on site content.
• Design a functional site navigation scheme to facilitate easy viewing of site pages and favorable acceptance by search engines.
• Develop site sales content which contains the necessary hotel sales essentials, such as location, facilities, and attractions.
• Craft a design which is totally compatible with search engine guidelines.
• Develop a “white hat” link strategy to popularize the site and produce a higher page ranking.
• Build local & regional search listings to dominate local competition.
• Monitor site traffic results to evaluate the sites effectiveness.

Once a site is properly developed and published, then and only then, is it ready for search engine optimization and other site marketing techniques necessary to dominate your competition. Any efforts to search optimize or market a poorly developed site is a waste of time and effort.

Making Difficult Choices

Most other forms of hotel marketing have a very limited shelf-life. Printed brochures, print advertising, and even broadcast advertising have very short life spans. Yet, the effective life of a well designed web site is five years or more.

Before the Internet, hotels budgeted and spent huge sums to promote their hotels, with no guaranty of results and, even worse, no practical way to measure results. Web site analytics provides detailed data which smart hoteliers use to track, modify, and measure the results of every Internet dollar invested. Never before have we had that ability.

Just a few years ago, it was difficult to find a web site design company that had any hotel marketing experience. Today, it seems that there are so many more designers laying claim to that experience. Choosing the right company to design, optimize, and market your hotel’s web site is critical to its ultimate success. Every day I hear from hoteliers, from all over the world, who have had attractive sites designed, but are getting terrible booking results.

The first thing one has to do is to stop judging a web site by how nice it looks. The way your site looks is not nearly as important as the way it functions in search and sales. A well-designed site can function well and be attractive, but function is by far the most important.

There are too many so-called hotel web site design companies who know all the Internet buzz-words, but have no clue how to design and market a site for search and sales. Don’t be fooled by the size of the design company bidding to design or re-design your web site; large or small, do they develop functional hotel sites and marketing programs for an affordable price.

When creating your Internet marketing budget, my advice is don’t let yourself be influenced by surveys, tables, and graphs; your Internet marketing program should be decidedly exclusive to your hotel, or group of hotels; their individual markets, funds available, and your goals for Internet sales. Choose a marketing partner with the knowledge of how hotel Internet marketing can work for your hotel.

Neil Salerno, the Hotel Marketing Coach, advises hotels on how they can best use their websites to attract more guests. You may email him at NeilS@hotelmarketingcoach.com.

Our next hotel website makeover comes from Chris, a reader from South Africa, and owner of the Whale Cottage Guest Houses. First, a little background information:

• Location:  South Africa
• Property Type: Guest houses
• Number of rooms: 33 rooms across 4 properties
• Price range: R 300-450 pppn (winter); R 490-650 pppn (summer)
• Typical Guests: From the UK, Germany, and South Africa

Website analysis

(Click image for full size review)

What I would change

Unlike the Apple Tree Inn last week, the Whale Cottage Guest Houses have started to build their web presence with a blog and Twitter account. For this reason, my review focused on their homepage – where a makeover is most likely to provide positive results.

Here’s what I recommend changing:

• The heading area – to focus on more useful content
• The navigation – to be simple and intuitive
• The page structure – to eliminate duplication
• The body copy – to explain the benefits of the cottages
• The call to action – to encourage more bookings

It all comes down to two words

Simplify and focus.

Take-away questions for anyone:

1. Is my website concise & intuitive?
2. Is the navigation simple?
3. Is important content “above the fold”?

How would you optimize the Whale Cottage website?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of making your hotel’s website easier to find in search engines. With the majority of people beginning their travel planning process with a web search, SEO has become an increasingly important discipline for hotel marketers.

However, there is some misinformation floating around the web, being propagated by quack “gurus.” Some of these myths are outright lies, but they are more likely to be tactics that no longer work: constantly-changing search algorithms make SEO a rapidly changing science. I want to debunk some of these myths before they hurt your optimization efforts.

Basic Tactical Myths

Myth: Adding a lot of keywords to your page’s title will help rankings

Fact: Stuffing the title with keywords will give the appearance you are a spam site. Since Google will only display up to 68 characters in the title tag (cropping to complete words), I recommend you write a short, people-friendly title that contains one or two of your most important keywords.

Myth: HTML META tags such as keywords and description are very important, and should be stuffed with as many keywords as possible

Fact: Meta tags don’t play that big of a role, and again you definitely don’t want to stuff your tags with keywords if you want to avoid being penalized as a spammer. You do, however, want to write a compelling Description tag. That’s what people see when they perform a web search, so you want to encourage clickthroughs with a strong benefits statement.

Myth: Adding every keyword to every page is good

Fact: Doing this confuses search engines – and your guests – about the purpose for each page on your site. Instead, group your target keyword list into themes – and use one theme per page. (More on this in SEO for Hotel Websites)

Myth: Trading links is a good idea

Fact: Exchanging links may be a good idea for referral business, but don’t do it for SEO purposes. Google’s Matt Cutts has explained they don’t reward reciprocal links like they do one-way links. Instead, create great content that naturally attracts links.

Myth: You should submit your site to search engines

Fact: That may have helped 10 years ago, but today search engines can find you. If your website has existed for more than a week, there is a strong chance Google has already found you. A better strategy is to get links from existing websites. I’ve taken several brand-new websites to Google PR4 (a ranking importance measure) in less than 3 weeks.

Myth: Submitting your links to directories is the best way to improve your ranking.

Fact: Google frequently penalizes sites that get listed in shady directories. Since it can be hard to determine the legitimacy of a site, pursue a better way and create some great content. If you’re publishing great stuff and interacting with other people online, getting backlinks is only a matter of time.

Many of the above myths have been debunked by others, and thankfully are becoming less common. But every few weeks I still hear someone asking about these tactics, so I wanted to put them to rest. Let’s move on to more high-level misconceptions.

Dangerous Strategic Errors

Myth: SEO is a hoax

Fact: As we see success stories from companies of all sizes, this is less common than it used to be. When done correctly, natural search engine optimization can be your most effective method of bringing new visitors to your website.

Myth: SEO is a one-time event

Fact: The notion that you can improve your search ranking by just changing a few website components is false. Today, search engines look at dozens of factors to determine how relevant and useful your content is. Yes, I wrote the 15-Minute SEO Tuneup – but the reality is that it needs to be part of an ongoing process.

Myth: Your goal is #1 ranking for your top keyword

Fact: While you should aim for the top position for a popular keyword, your real goal should be to rank near the top of results for dozens (if not hundreds) if different keyword combinations. A quick review of your website analytics will reveal that people find you through hundreds of different search queries. For this reason, you need to build your internet presence to be as large as possible.

Myth: Search optimization is a job for the web designer

Fact: Optimization is a strategic marketing function, and has nothing to do with design. It requires comprehensive keyword research, a knowledge of branding, and careful targeting of guest personas.

Myth: It’s all about the rankings

Fact: It’s actually all about how many qualified potential guests you bring to your website, and how many of them book a room. Rankings and overall traffic are meaningless unless you can convert that into sales.