Natural Search &
Online Tourism Consultant

No website is the same but users expect to find generally the same information on each hotel website they visit. Here are our top tips for your accommodations website.

• Make sure you include your telephone number, address and postcode, many of your visitors will be using sat nav to find you and a postcode makes that very easy and saves you having to guide them in.
• Use a simple email address; you would not believe how many users create a typo on words like accommodation@yourdomain.com or reservations@yourdomains.com, and if that happens you don’t get the enquiry. Keep it short like stay@yourdomain.com, eat@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com
• Test your email addresses and website contact form regularly to make sure it’s working.
• Get professional photos of your accommodation/business, high quality images will drive more enquiries…it is a guarantee.
• Make a gallery available on your website in small but high quality formats (try and keep image sizes below 300kb)…a great example is at http://www.theperen.com
• Make use of high quality (sometimes free) content providers…most of them just want content so if you write an article about an experience some of your customers had they would be likely to take it and run it on their websites. Even if you look at it as a free link, which is crucial for search engine ranking on your given terms.
• When your listing your business with 3rd party sites make sure you give a good account of what it is you’re offering and upload images…it is likely more people will be looking at their website than yours if it’s on a tourist information website.
• If you’re paying for advertising make sure you are getting a return on your investment; You can measure this by using tools like Google Analytics (your web designer/developer will be able to advise you on this). It’s a free product from Google and just involves installing some tracking code on each page of your website. You’ll then be able to see exactly how many visitors are arriving on your website and what sources are driving the most traffic to your website. At our website using Google analytics we can even tell you how many phone calls we have delivered to your business.

If you want me to audit your online prescence get in touch

Citys.info switched its servers on for business on Friday with a launch expected to challenge the best of the local guide platforms. The platform says it can be launched on any town or city (currently only in the UK) in a matter of hours. The internet franchise can be applied to your local town or city providing hotel bookings, event information, restaurant guides and reviews amongst a whole host of other information on a domain name of your choice said company owner Lee Woodman. To see a live working example visit Swansea.info which has been running for just over a year whilst the platform was developed in a live environment.

When asked how the platform would fair against its competitors Lee said “It’s simple; not only visually do our sites stand out but the engineering that has gone into the design of the management system is second to none. We hope to sit above our competitors such as TheBestOf and CityLocal. The way we have engineered the platform and structured our information architecture will give our franchise owners the edge when it comes to search engine placement. A lot of time has been spent making sure the platform has been optimised for natural search.”

The first Franchises are due to launch their new platforms early in 2009 with the likes of Portsmouth, Plymouth and London already snapped up.