Hill Country Virtual Tour Special $500.00

Includes 7 room tours plus still photos inside and out and free hosting. Offer good thru March 24^th. 1 night stay required

5 Tips to Increase traffic to your website

1. Ehow will let you register and submit articles and information on a variety of subjects. Below are a few B&B articles, and I am sure all of you could do this well or better.

2. Wikipedia will allow you to add new information and add your website to current information, including your town, state, and local attractions.

3. Search Engine Optimization helps you get your website higher up in highly searched terms and phrases.

4. Make sure you are listed in DMOZ, the procedure will take some time but is worth it in the end.

5. My Space, set up a my space profile for your B&B.

SEO Management What Can it do for you

Many B&B’s have turned to adwords for Internet advertising and while this is a good fast short term solution SEO is a slower long-term solution to Internet marketing. Statistics show that people are six times more likely to click on organic (nonpaid) result than paid results, another study shows only 30% of internet users click on paid results. Other studies found that 66% of customers distrust paid ads. And an Iphone study showed 99.3% of click thrus were for organic results with only .7% for paid results. So is adwords really the place you should be putting your valued marketing money into? That depends on whether you are wanting quick short term results from 30% of Internet users that ends when the budget runs out, or are you looking for long lasting results that attract a larger number of people for a longer term. Focusing on organic results is a more long-term approach, and organic results are seen as more relevant and trustworthy to potential customers. Included below is a quote from an article by Occupancy Marketing and a link to the article.

Organic search engine marketing is viewed to be more complicated and in many ways it is. It can be difficult to make progress in competitive areas and it requires at least a basic level of search engine marketing to make any progress. Hoteliers should not dismiss this medium however as 80% of search visitors world-wide derive from organic search. Tourism businesses can do a lot to improve online visibility. http://www.occupancymarketing.com/white-papers/paid_vs_organic.html

I recently did a study for a B&B looking to pull out of adwords and go with SEO management, on top phrases searched that contain lodging and the city and state. I came up with 15 phrases that have relevance to his website and offering which have a total of 100410 searches each year. He is in the top 20 for 8 of those phrases with a total of 7611 searches each year. Through proper SEO of the site he could reach an additional 92799 searches. While not all searchers will click on his site he will greatly increase his chances and his potential Internet business. Most of my customers have achieved top 20 positions in Google for key search phrases they have selected within the first month or two. The website is then analyzed for words are phrases that are hurting your site via bounce rate (people clicking on your site and finding it not relevant to their search click back off of your site). Tweaking and analysis is done for the contract length to get your website optimized for search engines as well as visitors. Monthly reports are sent with an analysis, recommendations, charts and graphs so you can see the benefits that SEO has obtained for you.

There are two ways to achieve SEO White hat and Black hat. As explained by Wikipedia “In recent years, the terms white hat and black hat have been applied to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry. Black hat SEO tactics, also called spamdexing attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service, whereas white hat methods are generally approved by the search engines.[3] White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.” We prefer the white hat method and offer 6 and 12 month contracts plus a setup fee depending on the number of phrases you are looking to optimize for.

Is SEO for you? While only you can answer that question, there are things that need to be considered including cost, method used by SEO manager, how fast you want results, how long do you want the results for and what % of users you are looking to attract. Still have questions? New Orison will be happy to answer your questions or give you a quote see bottom of newsletter for contact information.

5 tips to spruce up your website

1. Change your pictures. I know many of you do this already but besides giving returning visitors something new to see it also will help get your site crawled by search engines faster and more often depending on how often you change things up.

2. Ask guests what you could do to make your site better and or more informative. They will generally tell you if they missed a function or would liked to have known something more that wasn't available and make the changes.

3. Add a widget. Google has a large variety of widgets that you can add to your pages. You can get tips, maps, quotes, games, all kinds of little widgets that may keep visitors on your site. A simple thing to keep in mind though is to make it relative to your site. You don't want to put Auto Repair tips on your B&B website. You can find them at: http://www.google.com/ig/directory

4. Add depth with a little shadow around text blocks.

5. Be creative, catch their attention and hold it. That is the goal to not just get people to your site but keep them there with attention getters, pizazz and change.