Marketing Tourism Online, Part Two: Attracting Visitors to your Website

This is part two of an article series which will introduce some basic strategies, considerations, elements, and techniques for marketing tourism products online. We plan to update and refine these articles as situations change and when we have new knowledge to present. If you have comments or questions, or you are interested in Leave Home's travel marketing consulting services, please visit www.leave-home.com or contact the author directly. You can also request to be notified when a new article in the series is available.

GETTING THE WORD OUT

Your site does no good if nobody visits. Put your website address on everything you produce that goes in the hands and in front of the eyes of your customers, distributors, and other audiences: in your email messages; on your brochures; on your letterhead; on handouts at presentations; on company vehicles; etc. Mention the address when you are speaking with potential customers and in audio communications.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

Optimize your website for indexing by search engines, and above all, get other sites to link to yours. Most of the popular search engines, including Google, base their rankings on key word and phrase relatedness to the search and the popularity of your site as measured by the number and popularity of the sites that link to it. You'll usually need to be in the top 20-30 results for the most important related search terms to really benefit.

The other major determinant in search engine ranking is the amount of content on the site that matches or approximates the search terms...so, a site with more content is likely to be ranked higher.

Make sure search engine "spiders" or "robots" can crawl through your pages (follow links to all the pages on your site). If your site is built entirely in Flash or another multimedia plug-in (offfer a plain HTML version!), or generates most pages dynamically, you will need to take special steps to ensure that your site can be indexed.

Get your site listed and linked in portal websites covering tourism sectors, destinations, and lifestyles related to your offerings--generally, for free. Trade links with related sites. These activities not only help with search engine rankings, but will be a source of visitors by themselves.

There are many factors that affect rankings, and they are weighted differently by each engine. Despite these differences, you will be on the right path if your site has plenty of content that contains the search words or phrases your customers will use, if you include key search words and phrases in the page text and in the TITLE tags in your HTML pages, and if you can get a few dozen pages on related sites to link to your site. It can help to bold or italicize some of the main key phrases in the text of your web page and to put them in heading tags (, etc).

Generally, you do not need to bother resubmitting your site to the major search engines once you have done this for the first time. They will continue indexing changes to your site as they are made. Check your site access logs--you'll see that their robots keep returning to your site! It may not be worth your time or resources to keep returning to some of the minor engines that are slower to update without your involvement, unless they are important to a target market! The major ones are used worldwide and have multiple language versions.

Consider buying pay-per-click advertisements in popular search engines like Google and Yahoo!. You'll never pay more than you specify per click and per day, and these can be very effective while you are still working to build a search engine ranking that puts your website on the first page!

BEYOND SEARCH ENGINES

Include tools on your site for visitors to tell others about your website, products and destinations! Consider using electronic postcard tools or offering subscriptions to free email newsletters (which should, of course, contain links to your site!). The topics of email newsletters and multimedia tools will be covered in subsequent articles in this series.

Consider writing articles for submission to Web article banks, sites which offer free articles for use in websites, email newsletters, and other communications (You may be reading this article via an article bank submission!). In return for use of your article, you receive a listing of your name and company and a link to your website. This can also be a good way to establish yourself or your organization as an "expert" in your field or tourism domain.

Also consider frequenting relevant Usenet discussion lists (e.g., rec.travel.japan) and Web-based bulletin boards, or joining email discussion groups, to offer advice in your area of expertise or about your destinations. Don't spam and do follow their rules of "netiquette", or online behavior. Do include your Web address and a short business description with your "signature" at the bottom of your responses. Not only will you attract visitors to your site, but you'll learn about the concerns and interests of potential customers. You can incorporate questions (paraphrase or attribute) and your answers into an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section on your website!

Paid Web banner advertising can be cost-effective if properly targeted and timed, and if the message is right. The same holds true for ads in print and other media (but these are outside the scope of this article).

IN CONCLUSION

There are many techniques for attracting visitors to your website. Make sure you cover the technical basics like search engine optimization, but don't focus on technical tricks or spam methods--you may be removed from search engines and turn away potential customers. Offer quality content, find online partners to share links, and be a bold online networker!

The next article in this series presents guidelines for the creation and use of websites.

(Seattle, USA; August 2004)

About The Author

Bryan Wilson is a travel marketing consultant and partner in Leave Home Productions. Leave Home Productions provides marketing services and tools to tourism-related businesses and organizations. Our clients benefit from strategies, tools, and creative concepts developed to clarify their needs, make use of their resources, and help them achieve their goals. We specialize in promotions, online communication, distribution and the creation of multimedia and Internet tools. Leave Home also supports marketing with traditional media formats and personal communication. We work to develop solutions that support healthy growth for our clients' business and sustainable tourism for the host communities and environments.

(Leave Home, tourism marketing consultants)

bryan@leave-home.com

More Traffic Building Articles

Optimizing Your Dead Links!
I have been reading, with great interest, all the online advice about how to optimize a website. We have a financial planning business in Victoria, BC.

Finding Keywords to Build Your Web Site Traffic
What are web site keywords and how do I go about finding keywords that will work for me?You may have the dandiest web site with eye popping text and graphics, but if you have missing keywords then you are going to be out of business quick.Web sites revolve around traffic.

Turn One-Time Hits Into Repeat Visitors
Every website owner faces the same challenge: How to get more traffic to their website."Build it and they will come" worked for Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams," but that approach leads to bankruptcy and a failed business when it comes to your website.

Are Links From Unrelated Sites Really That Bad?
When I started GetQuotes-IT.com in 2003, I knew nothing about link exchanges and didn?t even know what SEO stood for.

The Best Traffic Secret I Ever Learned
If you could get high quality traffic that would grow on a daily basis free of charge starting tomorrow would you do it?If you answered yes?I?m going to show you exactly how to do that right here free of charge.Let me be completely honest with you, after reading this, I guarantee you will never again have to pay any money to get high quality traffic to your website.

Rethinking Linking - Link Exchange Back to Basics
In the old days of the internet, links were the primary communication path between web sites. Search engines were not as sophisticated as today, and search results rather crude.

Sales Marketing: Secrets To Using Cross Promotion To Increase Your Business For Maximum Profits
What is cross promotion?Cross promoting is when two or more businesses promote their products or services together.It is a sales marketing secret that works better for businesses that have the same target audience, but are not in direct competition with each other.

13 Steps to Increasing Your Link Luck
Link development can be an absolute nightmare. It takes up most of a marketerâ??s time and the yield isnâ??t always what we originally hoped.

Finding and Managing Quality Reciprocal Links: A Tutorial for The Newbie
All of us want to increase traffic to our web sites. It helps our search engine rankings, and is a very cost-effective way to provide us with potential new customers.

Ten Tips for Generating Traffic To Your Website
I know what you?re thinking, oh great another article about generating traffic to my website. Well it is important for your website to have traffic.