Travel Site

In travel and tourism marketing, websites are typically the first way people see a potential destination. Luckily, they are interested in coming to the destination, but when they have landed on your website you have about 30 seconds to make them stay on your site long enough to get enough information. Here's how you can do that.

Keep your website design and navigation clear. All of the important information must be on the home page or at most, one click away from the home page. The top part of a web page that can be seen before you have to scroll is called "above the fold." Keep your most important information there.

Thing like a call to action ("Book now!"), text and images that illustrate your destination's benefits and make people want to visit. Create a FAQ page and populate it with the your most-asked questions, then answer them honestly and clearly. Don't forget to make it easy to book, and ask for the sale.

A mistake that people often make on their websites is to not include enough text. They think people don't read and that pictures sell more than words. Study after study proves this is not true. Well-written, professional sales copy will sell every time. Invest in good copy for your website and it will pay off in increased sales.

To make room for more copy, ditch all the fancy animated stuff that makes your website entertaining. Your website is not meant to entertain. It is meant to sell. Use it wisely.

Photographs are important too, when used properly with text. Be sure to use only top quality photographs, and include happy people in them that look real. If you're lucky enough to get celebrities at your destination, use their photographs for sure.

Testimonials are another wise investment and a great use of website space. Testimonials are how people perceive that they are being told the truth. This makes them extremely important to the travel and tourism industry, as travelers who are coming from far away have no other way to reassure themselves that they are making a good choice. Put as many testimonials as you can on your website.

To summarize, great copy, professional photographs and testimonials are key ingredients to a killer website that outsells your competition. Don't waste space on bells and whistles that you could be occupying with copy and photographs that sell.

Article by Chad E, owner of the Travel and Tourism Marketing website, information for travel marketing professionals in the travel, tourism and hospitality industries.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chad_E.

Labels: how to make your travel and tourism website sell

If you have a travel website or blog then you know how difficult it can be to rank in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing in this incredibly competitive market. Huge authority sites like Expedia and Trip Advisor naturally dominate the rankings, and at this point there is probably very little one can do to outrank these industry leaders. However, with some diligence you can get your website to outrank many other smaller players in the industry, which will bring you more traffic, and ultimately more customers and more money to your business. How can you do this? You need to build backlinks to your travel website.

One of the main components Google and other search engines use to determine the importance and thus the ranking of websites is how many other websites are linking to their content. The more sites that are linking to your site, the more important your site will be in the eyes of the search engines. Now in a perfect world your content would be so exemplary that thousands of sites would link to it automatically. However, this is far easier said than done, and ultimately most webmasters will need to do their backlinking manually.

So what are some of the best ways to get travel backlinks to your website? I've outlined some strategies below to guide you through this tedious but necessary process of building authority for your travel site:

Social Bookmarking - With the advent of Web 2.0 the net has become an increasingly socially interactive place. Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and others have tens of millions of users, and an interesting article or story can spread like wildfire. By submitting your site to these social networking sites you will not only gain a direct high page rank backlink, but you may receive hundreds or even thousands of other links from fellow webmasters who found your story interesting enough to link to.

Blog Commenting - Careful with this one. I'm not suggesting you start spamming every site in the blogosphere. Writing nothing more than "nice post" or "thanks" with a link to your site will more than likely get your comment deleted. Take the time to actually read the article you are commenting on and then leave a respectful, relevant comment with a link to your site. Blog commenting can be a great way of networking, and is also one of the easiest ways to target backlinks in your particular niche.

Write Guest Posts - If you have some writing ability then you might want to consider doing some guest posts on travel blogs. Bloggers are always hungry for fresh, unique content for their website and will often be more than willing to allow you to tuck in a backlink to your site (with relevant anchor text) in exchange for a guest post.

Submit to Video Sharing Sites - When it comes to the travel niche people often want more than just words to help them plan their trip. They want to see pictures, and especially video of destination spots they are considering to help them make up their minds. If you have some video footage of a recent vacation to a popular holiday destination throw it up on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Add a link back to your travel site in the description so visitors can click to see more. If you have a bit of technical know-how (and a relatively short URL) you can also watermark the video with your URL to drive traffic to your site.

These are just a few ways to build backlinks to your travel website. It may sound tedious, but trust me when I say this process is absolutely necessary if you want to increase your search engine rankings, website traffic and ultimately make your business a success.

Want to start building travel backlinks immediately? Submit your travel stories to our website at http://www.GlobeTales.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dennis_Lindsay

Labels: blog commenting, how to build backlinks to your travel website, social bookmarking, submit to video sharing sites, write guest posts

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