If you are involved in any form of online marketing in the UK, you or your online team should be at SASCon if you want to  establish or maintain your competetive advantage.

built by Media Spin

The immediate answer would be right now but if you have an old site and are thinking of upgrading it then this might be the time to launch an SEO campaign. Companies such as the Venture Hotels Group have recently invested in a new site and decided on running an SEO / online marketing campaign. They had a clear understanding of the need to develop new guest opportunities and improving the online presence of the site. The group had seven hotels and decided to bring it into one simple and easy to use website. Launching a campaign at this time can be extremely effective as you can alter the design, feel, navigation and usability of a site to fall inline with your SEO campaign. So for example you can look at keyword theming and site navigation.

You may be wondering why SEO is so important however these stats might give you a small insight:

The top result on a search page gets 42% of the clicks
The top 3 results get 79% of the clicks
The top 5 get 88% of clicks

Put simply if your not on the first page then the likelihood of your hotel being found is greatly reduced. Although hotels are found in many ways this is a huge opportunity and can be an effective place for hotels to spend their marketing budgets.

So to the good stuff…..

Hotel SEO Tactics

We could spend a lot of time going in to the various different tactics but I wanted to discuss some of the key areas in which you should look at optimising your hotel site.

Firstly looking at geographically based search. Many users when looking for hotels will search by location. For example if your looking for a hotel in Chester then you may use the search term Chester Hotels. This is because people are going to get much more relevant search results rather than lets say searches for just hotels. It is important to take advantage of this through the SEO of your site.

Optimising your site for geographical searches is usually fairly straight forward. It’s a case of optimising your content and page titles for these geographical terms. You would for instance want to look at title tags, page headings and of course content. Hotel owners can also take advantage of Google local business listings. This provides a quick and easy win for geographical searches.

The other key area hotels will need to look at is the booking process. The booking process can have a huge impact on your conversions (bookings) and requires careful planning and analysis. If users find it difficult to make a booking then they are likely to go elsewhere. Hotel owners need to optimize the site so that it is easy for users to make bookings. You effectively need to optimize the process.

Tools like Google Analytics can be used to monitor and measure the performance of your booking process. Any site owner should be using tools like Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of their SEO campaigns.

Beyond SEO

Of course optimising your site is just beginning, as successful hotels will make use of other innovative online marketing techniques to promote their hotels. Social media and review sites provide plenty of opportunities to interact with potential guests. For example many people use Trip Advisor to help make decisions on which hotels to stay at. Hotels can do certain things to improve the feedback left on these sites and identify key issues for visitors.

Content also plays a valuable part in a campaign. People need to know about attractions and facilities in the area of your hotel. You need to give people a reason to stay with you. Providing guides can be invaluable and researching what customers want is key.

The key to any SEO campaign is research, testing, analyzing and developing. You need to set out objectives and find what your customers are looking for. Once you have done this you can implement your plans and begin testing. Once testing is on progress you should analyze your results. Then you must make changes to improve the campaign.

Launched last Wednesday, CreativeTourist.com is an initiative of Manchester Museums Consortium, a group that includes all the major museums and galleries in Manchester. It showcases the best exhibitions and cultural events Manchester has to offer, all wrapped up in a package that features writing, blogging, photography and design by our most talented digital denizens.

The ultimate aim of CreativeTourist.com is to attract visitors to Manchester; but this is not another bland tourist brochure. Like the city it represents, CreativeTourist.com is proud, passionate and controversial. It seeks to provoke as much as promote, appealing to visitors who want more challenging things to do in Manchester than the usual round of landmarks and tourist attractions.

PushON are excited to be associated with this project. Yes, we’re excited because broadsheet-quality content and high-authority linking opportunities make our job of promoting the site a whole lot easier. But it’s more than that. We’re excited about demonstrating to a wary public sector that search engine marketing has come of age; that search is an ethical, effective and, indeed, essential part of any online marketing strategy.

Although there are many factors that influence where your website will be ranked in the SERP some factors are more important than others. After taking a look at Bing for a few days now and carrying out some analysis it has become apparent that Bing uses a very different algorithm to Google. A good example that shows this clearly is searching for SEO Manchester in both Google and Bing.

The two SERPs looks very different, only one of the top ten results are the same and many big SEO agencies in Manchester are missing from the Bing SERP. You’ll also notice that the Bing Local Listings are not very competitive at all with only one agency being listed.

So which factors should you focus on to rank well in Bing?

• A mixture of inbound links including a good number with good keyword rich anchor text (see this great article on Link Building Secrets by Patrick Atloft).
• Make sure you write keyword rich, unique meta data which is also human readable.

If you have any other ideas on which factors are most important to rank in Bing please leave a comment and let us know!

Here is an example of organic local listings for a Bing search in Manchester:

As you can see there is little competition for Bing Local Listings at the moment and the results are not great, one nightclub, a cafe and a strip club…

The new Google Webmaster Tools interface makes using the service easier and more intuitive. The site dashboard interface is particularly useful, displaying the top search queries and any crawl errors that Google has found.

Top Webmaster Tools Tips

• Check your Webmaster Tools account for Not Found URLs, these are URLs which are linked to either internally or from external sources which cannot be found by Google. Webmaster Tools provides you with a list of these and a list of the pages where these links are coming from. You should 301 redirect these not found pages to a relevant page on your site, or to the home page. This will improve your link equity and remove the error messages from Webmaster Tools.
• Check the HTML Suggestions area of Webmaster Tools (under diagnostics) for problems with meta descriptions, title tags and any non-indexable content.
• Add your sitemap(s) to Webmaster Tools to ensure that Google knows where all your pages are.

The new toolbar is not only extremely quick but also incorporates everything in a nice and easy to use format. I personally, to this point have been using SEOpen and in the office we use Search Status but in the coming months we will no doubt switch to this new and much more advanced tool. If you haven’t seen the tool bar yet we definately recommend that you take a look. You can find out more and download the tool from the link displayed below.

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

The first thing i would like to point out is that there is no point in releasing a video for the sake of it. You need to release something that is useful to it’s audiences and content that is expressively more useful in video format. If you have something that can be delivered more interestingly in text then you should consider that.

Ok so lets begin by looking at your potential audience and what keywords you would like to target. The great thing about video is its popularity. Google and other search engines like to rank popular and useful content and videos hosted on YouTube often perform well on Google. YouTube is of course one of the most popular video sites to date and achieves around 60 million unique viewers a month (Quontcast). The site is extremely popular with generation y viewers however it is not the only site to look at when considering video marketing.

Keywords

You are probably not going to rank for extremely competitive terms with your video so when titling your video look at some long tail terms or at lease terms that are less competitive. Google keywords tool should give you some nice hints. Obvious titles would be ‘How To ******’ if you are offering some type of guide or tips in your video. You would probably achieve good rankings with this.

So now that you have your great idea and well crafted title you should look at distribution and delivery.

Promoting Your Video

• Upload your video to YouTube and other leading video sites. I personally like Vimeo and you may also find video sites that operate in your particular niche. It may also be worth varying your titles across the sites.
• Video content is perfect for social media sites such as Stumble Upon. Stumblers tend to like humerous content so this site is a must if you have this type of video.
• In YouTube leverage the power of the subscribe feature. The more subscribers you have to your channel the better as your videos will be embeded in their subscriptions panel. This means more people are likely to see your video.
• Use a consistant layout and theme with all your videos.
• Make it easy for people to share your video. Social media buttons etc.
• If your making regular video’s add it as a feature on your blog and maybe in your newsletters.
• Post video in relevent and related forums. Engage with your audience.
• Chose the right thumbnail. If the first image users see looks dull then they will be unlikely to click the play button.

Benefits Of Video

I’m not going to bang on about the benefits as they are mainly obvious but some of the main ones are listed below.

- Lots Of Traffic
- Rankings
- Promote Products and Services
- Build a community & following

Hope you found these tips useful and don’t forget to look out for our up and coming monthly video series.

• Tweet Deck – Twitter Client. In marketing we all understand the need to follow conversations and be able to engage in them quickly and easily. The standard Twitter interface makes this extremely difficult so making use of a comprehensive Twitter client such as Tweet Deck can make this much easier. The three panel layout means you can see track your direct messages, your standard responses and also the overall Twitter conversation of the people you follow.
  http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/
• Tweet Scan – Brand Monitoring. This tool is excellent for finding out what is being said about you, a topic or a particular business. Tracking what people say about your business is extremely important. This tool is a great customer feedback tool as you can see what people are saying about your product or brand.
  http://www.tweetscan.com/
• Monitter – Real Time Keyword Monitoring. This tool allows you to type in multiple keywords and track the conversation around those in real time. This gives marketers the chance to see what people are talking about around particular topics and themes. This gives us the chance to release pages or news items around this coversation. This means that your site is keeping up to date with the latest trends and gives people a reason to come back.
  http://monitter.com/
• Twitter Tools Plugin – Keeping Your Readers Up To Date. Twitter Tools is a plugin for wordpress that allows you to post new post url’s to your Twitter feed automatically. This drives traffic to your blog or news section. If you post a lot of new blogs each day then this probably wont be the tool for you. Tweeting to much can annoy people.
  http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
• Twitter Local – The Local Angle. This is something that i came across and have not had chance to fully research it however the concept behind it is interesting. A lot of SEO campaigns are going local these days so with this tool you can now track what people are saying in a particular geographical area.
  http://www.twitterlocal.net/

This list could essentially be endless as the number of tools being released is rapidly growing. If you think we have missed an essential tool then why not drop us a line. It is also worth checking out Julia Roy’s blog. She does an excellent weekly round up of Twitter.