Trip Advisor, the well established travel/accommodation review site is no stranger to controversy with many blog posts and comments from the hotel & leisure industry questioning its policy on ‘the right to reply’ and ‘bonifide posts’.
TA bills itself as providing “Unbiased holiday reviews, photos and travel advice for hotels and vacations”
It came to light in 2009 that Trip Advisor was to begin charging for business listings – this has now come to pass.
As we have over 20 years experience in the hotel & leisure industry we are interested in feedback and comment from any Hotel, Guest House, B&B, Self Catering, Restaurant etc as to what this means to you ….
Popularity: 9% [?]
As you know, we are neither an hotel or a guest house or a B&B however, many of our customers are and this latest ‘gold star’ addition to the VisitScotland rating system has put the accommodation cat amongst the paperwork pigeons.  Â
The main question being how, do visitors know what they are booking into with so many schemes on the go? Some schemes are voluntary, some are most definitely not and what is the difference between a 4 star property and a 3 gold star property – is the 3 gold star one now better?  It took quite a bit of digging but I did eventually find the star grading information but I am still not quite sure how clear I am.
We are interested to hear your views as we have only heard negative comments so far and we are sure there are positive ones as well – aren’t there? Not quite sure why everyone we speaks to seems to dislike VisitScotland, what we are sure of is that the majority of our accommodation customers are members and pay a lot of money to stay members, so VisitScotland must be doing something right.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Part 1.0
How to drive traffic to your website
So you have your new website and now you need to get visitors to it and generate sales. Assuming that you have identified your online competitors and evaluated the phrases that you wish to target (see my recent article on keyword research), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the starting point for getting web traffic to your site.
SEO is the process by which a website is ‘made ready’ for both search engines and the human visitors alike. Â
SEO for search engines
The subject of your site generally and site pages specifically must be clearly communicated, whilst focusing on your targeted key phrases – a search engine must be able to ‘read’ the different attributes of your pages clearly and concisely so that it may effectively index the site.
Some key SEO attributes
- Meta tags
- Text based navigation
- Page/Content headings
- Contextual linking
- Text style attributes
- Image naming/alt tagging
SEO for site visitors
The content of your website must be well constructed, engaging and relevant to your target user group(s), answering questions that they have in relation to the products and services that you are offering. Ensure that you give the user plenty of opportunity to contact you or find out more information – add some value to your content:
- Run a special offer
- Discount a product
- Run an online competition
- Always ensure that your content is up to date
- Encourage feedback
Good, content will make people want to re-visit your site and create a platform of recommendation to others requiring the same type of products and services.
All the points covered in this brief article relate to what occurs on the pages of your site – I will begin to look at what influences traffic driven to your site by other websites, search and content networks in part 2.0 – coming soon!
visit www.aviemorebusiness.co.uk for more information
Popularity: 52% [?]
We are pleased to say that a successful re-design of a long time customer’s website is now online. Chris Helik, owner of GBC Scotland wanted a clean, simple to use, brochure website. With a couple of well chosen images this just shows that simple doesn’t have to mean cheap and nasty looking.  Chris had been deliberating over having a new website as his old one had been online a long time and he was worried about the overlap between old and new. We made a smooth transition between the 2 with no loss of service, email or any other complications and he is now delighted with his new site as are we. Lets hope more business rolls in for Chris and his team of landscape contract gardeners in Aviemore.
Popularity: 43% [?]
We have received another good review from a customer…. you can read it and other reviews on the Which Web Design Company website.  It is always nice to read good things about a service you have provided and knowing that your customers would happily recommend you to someone else – long may this continue to be the case.
Popularity: 49% [?]
