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. You can request to be notified when a new article in
series is available. Getting word out Your site does no good if nobody visits. Put your website address on everything you produce that goes in hands and in front of 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 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 popular search engines, including Google, base their rankings on key word and phrase relatedness to search and popularity of your site as measured by number and popularity of sites that link to it. You'll usually need to be in top 20-30 results for most important related search terms to really benefit.
The other major determinant in search engine ranking is amount of content on site that matches or approximates 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 pages on your site). If your site is built entirely in Flash or another multimedia plug-in (offfer a plain HTML version!), uses frames, 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 right path if your site has plenty of content that contains search words or phrases your customers will use, if you include key search words and phrases in page text and in 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 main key phrases in text of your web page and to put them in heading tags (
, etc).Generally, you do not need to bother resubmitting your site to major search engines once you have done this for 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 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.
