• 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

The business listings content management system has been made as simple to use as possible to give them full and powerful access to their listings. By building the tools to give users the option to do this it not only cuts down on start up costs for new site editors but through research on the Mumbles.co.uk platform the reporting found that the same people were posting information time and time again who belonged to organisations and events companies who saw a free approach to some of their marketing. This in turn drives traffic to the portals sites and provides users with information and the portal with content.

The administration suite is made up of 8 channels from accommodation administration to events and job postings. With the added feature of Google Maps, exact driving directions can be added to each and every listing on the website. All the user generated content has to be managed and reviewed before it goes live on to the website to avoid the sites being the target of automated posting bots. This filtering keeps the quality of the content high and spam to an absolute, almost eradicated level with a simple 1/0 column in the database which activates (1) or de activates (0) on any given listing, we also recently introduced Captcha which again reduces the spam further.

But just how important is information architecture? Where does it come on the list of priorities for the new site design and development? Most would argue that it is of less importance, but during the build process, the more knowledge that is gained in understanding how search engines interact with the content it is felt that its importance is under-estimated.

Not only will this investment in time and development help the user in terms of accessibility, but with search engine optimisation an established method of improving a websites performance it is felt that by truly understanding what a user wants to get from the content how else can content strategy and layout design be implemented?

Without a sound foundation provided by effective information architecture the site was likely to be less usable, accessible and less persuasive in its sales pitch. When the word accessible is used in these circumstances, that not only means user accessibility it also implies its crawlability by search engine spiders.

Search engine optimisation is not the dark art that many marketing professionals make it out to be. It is about ensuring that the websites are running at their optimum performance from each and every aspect that editors and users want to look at them; whether that is page views per visit, page loads times at server level (for a search engines eye view on this variable visit Google Webmaster Central), the quality of the content offering right through to how efficiently a users browser deals with the website. Webmaster central might suggest load times are long, resulting in crashing the user’s browser and that is something that’s not going to have a good effect on the platforms reputation.

The only way to gather user information is through testing or being able to analyse a product of service in the same market as is being developed. Even then if there are slight differences in what the user’s expectations are; what might be working for one website will not necessarily work for another. During the information architecture design on the Citys.info franchise a lot of time was spent understanding navigation trends on Mumbles.co.uk. Top line navigation paths that users were requesting were checked and analysed. Understanding if there was any content that was missing relied on the internal search queries used by visitors when browsing the website. Internal search is discussed in more depth later in the paper but is a vital step in understanding a market if the information is available.

Citys.info is developed with the theory in mind that content is king and structure and relevance is queen but both are required to get the best performance. Like with any publication having well structured content to take users on a journey through each section is going to help give them a good experience. The platform structure and content offering are developed for the user but always taking in to consideration how a search engine would deal with the same content offering.

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.

If you have recently acquired a new business whether thats in the online tourism sector or any other there’s always going to be some surprise invoices coming through the door for services and business listings that you may never of heard of let alone know how well they are performing.

So how do you measure these different sources of marketing spend?

If it’s offline it’s notoriously difficult to measure how effective one stream of spend has been over another. Maybe you took out a full page spread with a local magazine or have invested heavily in a TV advertising campaign, both are nearly impossible to measure. Unless you ask each person who walks into your hotel or buys your latest music CD where they heard of you, you’re not going to be able to offset that person against your marketing spend.

In the online world we have the ability to trace that individual user to see where exactly they came from and we can attribute a value to that sources overall cost. Tools such as Google Analytics or Omniture can accomplish this task well. If you’re able to get a trial period with a particular advertiser you’ll be able to see very quickly through your stats how well an advert is performing by looking in the referral sources.

Its all well and good driving traffic to your site but you then need to look deeper and see how those users behave and how well they convert whether thats page views per visit (usually for display advertising) or the value of their transaction (shopping cart).

Being able to effectively measure your online marketing spend will save you money and free tools like Google analytics make sure you only target those businesses that will work hard for you and the ones that don’t…well you’ll be able to see that far sooner rather than later.

• Good quality high resolution photos are my number one, not only will other tourist portal sites use them to showcase your property, but users will enjoy browsing through to see what you have to offer. Don’t be afraid to pay for a good photographer you’ll reap the rewards very quickly.

• Stick with a simple email address for booking enquiries like book@yourhotel.com or stay@yourhotel.com using an email address like enquiries@ or reservations@ is asking for trouble, the frequency with which these two terms are misspelt is very high.

• During the users enquiry process around 5% will enter their own email address wrongly so you won’t be able to respond by email. An easy solution to this problem is to ask for the users email address twice similar to a password validation. If you do manage to contact them by phone or fax ask them again for their email address so you can add them to your mailing list for future offers and events, you’ll be impressed at the levels of repeat visitors this can generate.

• Don’t try and rank for terms that are very generic to your city like “hotel accommodation in Swansea” your very unlikely to achieve it, better still look at your unique selling point as a hotel. Maybe you are located on the sea front, next to a museum or a sporting venue. Go with those terms instead and you’re far more likely to be successful.

• Make sure you’re listed in the Google Local Business directory, it offers an excellent way for you to be found when people use it to browse results. If you’re fortunate to be located in or in close proximity to a city centre your listing will appear at the top as a natural listing. This position is absolutely priceless! So with zero marketing spend you could be ranking for the keyword “hotels in {your city}”. Ive seen this feature work with 2 of my hotels and its incredible the amount of traffic that it drives to their websites.

• In your copy talk about the things that are in close proximity to the hotel but be wary of linking out to other sites at this stage, this is after all a site that you want to result in conversions so keep it simple with the end goal always to try and sell. Once you have your conversion why not generate an email to the user with a local guide attached or on a subsequent thank you page once you have a confirmed booking.

• Try and embed a Google map of where your property is located and a text box so users can enter their postcode and get directions. All this can be embedded in your website free with Google Maps

• Keep a call to action in plain site all the time like Book or an Enquire button on every page of your website.

• When your asking for the users details keep the enquiry form short, you don want to overwhelm the user at this stage, let’s keep pushing hard for the conversion.

• If you have a restaurant provide a menu, this saves them phoning you and asking you to send one. It also saves you postage costs.

• Find free tourism portals to list your site; you’d be amazed how many free high quality ones are out there.

• Have a late deals section where you can showcase offers that you might have and keep it updated. One of the most proactive hotels I have come across is Fairyhill in South Wales. They stay in tune with all the local tourism sites and always have their late deals updated. In a future article i’d like to talk about how you can maximise the return from your reception/front of house staff.

This isn’t a definitive list and i’d love to hear what experiences you have had with achieving those high conversion rates.