For tourism businesses, website development and design is like a coastline full of hidden rocks.

The choices you make right at the start can make the difference between a boat wrecked on the rocks and a yacht on the open ocean with wind in its sails.

I’ve written an article about the 4 most common myths we have come across when working with small businesses - particularly tourism operators. The myths are listed below, and you can read the complete article here: Website Development and Design - 4 Common Myths.

Myth 1. The best person to create my website is a graphic designer

If you were building a hotel, would you get the interior designer to choose the location, draw up the plans, construct the building, put in the wiring and plumbing, install the telephone and Internet system? Of course you wouldn’t!

Myth 2. When someone comes to my website, I need to grab their attention

Your website isn’t a billboard attempting to attract attention by distracting viewers from other things. It doesn’t need to shout, flash or entertain with moving images. It needs to inform - easily and quickly.

Myth 3. To create an effective website, all I have to do is put my brochure online

Transferring a brochure online to make a website is often the first step in online marketing, but a website is a bit like a sailing boat. It won’t go anywhere unless you remember to give it sails.

Myth 4. The more people who visit my website, the better

If 20 people enter Arcadia Bookstore and 1 person buys a book, then another 10 people enter Zenith Books and 9 people buy books - who wins? Arcadia got more visitors, but Zenith sold more books.

Tell us about myths that you’ve come across either by commenting here or by posting on our Tourism Marketing Forum.

We have recently launched a new website for VA Clare Valley, primarily a boutique wine business producing international quality wine, as well as olives, olive oil, red wine vinegar and honey.

Wineries are in a class of their own when it comes to marketing. They’re an attraction and a store, and often a restaurant and accommodation provider too.

VA Clare Valley’s focus is on selling produce, and the site has two objectives:

1. to attract potential visitors to South Australia’s Clare Valley wine region and encourage them to visit the cellar door, and
2. to enable produce to be sold online.

Our keyword analysis told us the words and phrases potential visitors and customers are keying in, and this guided us in structuring the site content.

Searchers are likely to find the site through destination searches on Clare Valley, and product-related searches. Google Analytics will enable VA Clare Valley to monitor this and adapt their content accordingly.

Many of the destination visitors are likely to be self-drivers, so the Getting Here section, with clear maps, is vital for conversion.

The Cellar Door & Shop enables VA Clare Valley to take orders online using PayPal, which takes a commission on sales of between 3.5 and 4%.

This article explains the benefits of using PayPal to sell online, and how to set this up yourself.

Above all, the site has engaging content likely to appeal to its prospective audience and convert them into paying customers - whether online or face-to-face.

Going live recently is a new OM4Tourism website for Boshack.

Chrissy & Deryck Brockhurst offer Australian outback experiences within an easy drive of Perth, with a choice of lakeside camping, farmstay or hotel accommodation.

Notice that the home, tour and package pages all include a contact form at the foot of the page.

This is a strategy we have adopted and recommend to our clients, because we have found it increases the likelihood of site visitors getting in touch. Chrissy & Deryck are already seeing a significant increase in the number of enquiries they receive, because of the contact forms.

We believe this is simply because people will often have a half-formed question in their mind whenever they read a web page. Putting the form right there on the page makes it easy for them to put that question into words and click to send it to you.

Also notice the use of ‘outback’ in the domain name. This was a result of keyword analysis that told us this is an important keyword for Boshack.

This article explains more about choosing a domain name.

Last night we officially launched OM4Tourism’s unique model for website marketing to a select gathering from the tourism industry.

The enthusiastic support we received in response to Glenn’s captivating presentation was mixed with concern that perhaps we needed to be taken away by men in white coats!

Take a look at our new home page and you’ll see why. We are giving away websites and charging no hosting fees - and there’s no catch.

Instead, our revenue comes from the online marketing services we offer to clients who want us to help them with keyword analysis, writing web pages and blog posts, establishing e-newsletters and booking services, or running search marketing campaigns.

Our sites are designed to be self-managed by businesspeople, not technicians. The editing facilities at the ‘back end’ of the sites are user-friendly, and anyone who is used to word-processing will be able to pick up the basics very quickly.

What this means for tourism operators is you can have a fully self-managed website at absolutely no cost, with free tutorials from us to help you market your business online, using the built-in tools that come with your site.

Or you can hire our web designers and writers to do some or all of your online marketing for you.

For example, Goat Rock Texas is a site that we set up and are now hosting at absolutely no cost to the site owners.

The Croft family are managing the site themselves, happily uploading content and images, publishing blog posts and setting up their own banner artwork.

Periodically they receive an email tutorial from us explaining how to use the tools available to them within the site.

We are delighted to see watch the site develop naturally, infused with the family’s unique energy. It has lots of appeal for its target market and will no doubt draw plenty of attention.

Notice that the url contains ‘om4tourism’ - once the site is ready to cut over, this will disappear and the site owners will have their own domain name.

At the other end of the continuum is K2O, who also received a free site and hosting, but have purchased our online marketing services to carry out keyword analysis, establish the look they want for their site, populate the site with optimised content, and set up links and images.

We will also support K2O in monitoring Google Analytics for their site to measure its performance over time.

Given the excellent results we are seeing with other OM4Tourism sites, we are very confident.

You don’t have to create a whole new website to get better at online marketing.

Live History is an example of a site that we have converted to our platform, giving the business owners, Judith and Chris Cornish, more opportunities to get their story out to their target audience.

The new site has the same look and feel of the old one, and the content has been transferred to the new structure. So why is this one better?

Because it has all the online marketing tools that are vital for positioning the business, bringing in traffic, encouraging conversation, increasing conversion and boosting bookings. For example:

• Keyword analysis told us to put Hobart into the domain name to attract more searchers wanting things to do when they visit the city, helping to put Live History on the Internet highway instead of the backstreets.
• Like all OM4Tourism sites, this one is designed to be highly visible to search engines, bringing more traffic to Judith and Chris’s door.
• A blog with email subscription enables Judith and Chris to post regular news and updates to keep visitors engaged and enrich their site content.
• Clearer testimonials and accreditation are important conversion tools - they tell site visitors that this is a good quality experience.
• Easy access to booking and travel information with a prominent contact form helps visitors to incorporate the tour into their holiday and encourages them to enquire and book online.

In addition, Judith and Chris now have access to Google Analytics to help them track where their site visitors are coming from and what terms they key into Google to get to the site. They can then incorporate these search terms into their content to attract even more attention.

Here’s Judith’s response to the site set-up process:

Thank you so much to both you and Glenn for getting us set up with this new site. I know that it won’t be long before I am blogging with the best of them and our testimonials are flowing in from satisfied clients!

As Live History develops, Judith and Chris will be blogging their news regularly and uploading more images and testimonials. As they develop new performances, they can add new pages to the site very easily - if you can manage Word, you can create a page in an OM4Tourism website. And as the content builds over time, so will the authority and PageRank of the site, turning it into an online magnet for Hobart visitors.

We are delighted to have launched our latest OM4Tourism site this week: Undara.com.au

Undara Experience is a fabulous tour company that took out the Queensland Hidden Jewel Award earlier this year, and has many other awards under its belt.

Take a look at the site.

It’s the kind of website that’s good to rummage around, one that draws you into all the fascinating material on the volcanic landscape, the native wildlife, and above all, the experiences to be had in this captivating corner of Australia.

On a practical level, there’s a helpful planning section and lots of support for self-drivers, maps, walk trails, facilities for corporate groups and schools, and links straight into Undara’s iconic events.

Notice that testimonials and awards are displayed prominently, and eco credentials are discussed in a separate ecotourism page - vital for conversion.

The Undara crew are excited about the new site and getting right into blogging straight off the bat. We’ve all very much enjoyed putting this site together and look forward to tracking progress as the site gains momentum.

My previous post went on a journey to find out where travellers are likely to end up when they research travel experiences online.

One of my searches - for an interactive dolphin experience in Western Australia - took me to 2 specialist operators: Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins.

So why did these operators get my attention?

1. Relevant content, optimised for search

Well, for one thing, they appeared high in Google’s ‘organic’ search list.

These are the links that appear through a process of natural selection on the left-hand side, as opposed to the sponsored links listed on the right and sometimes at the top.

Their position in the organic links tells us that Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins carry authority in the eyes of Google. To achieve this, the sites are search-optimised and contain relevant content (i.e. the content matches my search intentions).

2. Inbound links

It’s also likely that both sites are getting some quality inbound links, as this is another way the search engines decide on a site’s overall authority.

The best way to achieve this is to link to other high-ranking sites and encourage them to link to yours. Google checks where the links are coming from and only gives you brownie points for authentic links from relevant sites.

Naturaliste Charters has some excellent links at the foot of its home page, which are a useful resource for site visitors and will serve to encourage back links from those sites.

But while a high ranking will bring you traffic, it won’t necessarily hold the attention of your visitors or convert them to bookings.

There are certain features of a site that help to keep your prospects’ interested enough to have a good rummage around. Both Naturaliste Charters and Rockingham Dolphins held my interest for different reasons, but I’m going to focus on Rockingham Dolphins because they kept me onsite for longer.

3. The travel experience

First, I could immediately read not just about the tours available but about what it’s like to swim with wild dolphins. And the good quality images help to tell the story visually. This all confirms for me that I want to share this amazing experience - I want to “be there, doing that”.

Tourism Australia research tells us that inbound visitors to Australia are “experience-seekers” first and foremost. So the experience needs to be paramount in your online content.

4. Personality and passion

It’s easy to get to know the crew through their profiles, which communicate their personality and humour in just the right measures. There’s also some interesting information on the history of the company that conveys the passion that led Terry to set up the business.

A conversational style with lots of personality is something that Tourism Australia also encourages in marketing material, since research shows that this is what visitors find most engaging.

5. Awards and affiliations

There’s also plenty of credibility in evidence on the Rockingham site, with awards and environmental affiliations. They now have my trust.

So don’t be afraid to blow your own trumpet - this is a vital part of the conversion process.

6. The booking process

In practical terms, if I want more detail I can download a brochure (quickly) and the information on booking and getting there is easy to find and clear.

If site visitors have to work hard to find out what their options are and how to make a booking, you could well lose them.

7. The all-important blog

There’s only one thing missing for me from these sites: a stream of news and stories that I can read and maybe even subscribe to. Naturaliste Charters does have a newsletter that visitors can subscribe to, but having news on the site is more immediately engaging and likely to lead to more subscriptions.

Blogging is vital for tourism operators in today’s online travel environment, and is an easy way to post regular updates and news. Site visitors can subscribe to a blog by email, or via an RSS feed which means they can receive your news stream without giving their email address - some visitors will prefer this.

Blogging also helps your search ranking, attracts online browsers through blog search engines (such as Technorati), engages visitors who are used to a more informal, newsy style of content, gives you more opportunities to link to other sites, builds a more comprehensive portfolio of content on your site, adds personality, and encourages interaction through comments.

We’ve just seen our first two sites designed specifically for tourism operators reach a Google PageRank of 4/10. This is an excellent result, and if you’re not sure why, I’ll explain.

An online marketing site is designed to get results.

It’s a dynamic system that attracts the site visitors you want, engages them in your content and converts them to paying customers.

To achieve this, your prospects first have to find your site, and many will do this by keying relevant search terms into a search engine - the top 2 being Google and Yahoo.

What Google “spiders” do when they search the web is decide which site pages are important enough to display in the ‘organic’ listing when someone searches on your keywords. By ‘organic’ listing, we mean the main listing on the left of a Google search results page, as opposed to sponsored links that have been paid for.

Here’s how Google explains PageRank to online searchers:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.”

So a PageRank of 4/10 within the first few months of going live is a very good result for NingalooBlue.com and GreatOceanRoad-Torquay.com.au - many sites never make it that high.

However, there are other factors that help their sites to be found by their target readers. Google continues:

“Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”

This is where Keyword Analysis is essential. Having an authoritative site is important, but using the words and phrases that your prospects are keying in is vital. These are your keywords, and when Google spiders crawl the web looking for content that matches those keywords, you want them to find your site. Where, how and how often you use those keywords will help Google to make the match.

And before any of this can happen, Google has to be able to ’see’ your site in the first place - that means submitting your site to Google for indexing.

So - there are 3 vital steps here:

1. Create authoritative content on your destination or style of travel that attracts back links from equally authoritative sites.
2. Carry out Keyword Research & Analysis and incorporate your top keywords into your site content, headings and tags.
3. Submit your sitemap for Google indexing.

I’m delighted to be launching OM4Tourism - a site dedicated to online marketing resources for small to medium tourism businesses.

We decided to launch a site just for tourism operators because:

• you have told us how important the Internet is to your business success, and
• we believe small tourism businesses offering unique experiences have a great deal to gain from online marketing.

At PublicityShip, we have already enabled small businesses to grow through online marketing. To find out exactly how our very first online marketing clients, ocularists Paul & Jenny Geelen, achieved phenomenal success purely through online marketing with us, check out this case study.

We have continued to develop our services since then, and established our first two tourism sites: NingalooBlue.com and GreatOceanRoad-Torquay.com.au

Why Tourism?

Small tourism businesses offering unique experiences have far more to gain from online marketing than large operators, wholesalers or online agencies.

Why? Because with smart online marketing, you can now reach your target customers directly, wherever they are in the world, placing you on a level playing field with bigger businesses. To find out exactly why this is happening now - and why Glenn turned his life upside down to create businesses based on this model - read this article.

We also know that the tourism industry is rapidly responding to the enormous changes occurring due to the widespread availability of broadband. Travellers are researching, booking and writing about their experiences online, and the rate of growth is extraordinary.

The popularity of blogging is growing fast too, which is good news for tourism because blogging represents a fantastic way to help your clients understand the experience you offer them, in a way that can be much more authentic and up close than a website on its own.

Scan some of the 1.7M+ travel postings on Technorati travel blogs for a while, and get a feel for how many travellers are sharing their thoughts and experiences using blogs as the medium.

This is why we have developed online marketing strategies and services to help tourism operators market themselves online.

How We Can Help

Most tourism businesses have websites. But a website is not a marketing tool on its own. Keyword Analysis, Search Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing and Affiliate Marketing offer significant opportunities for tourism operators to reach travellers while they are researching and planning their trips, and to increase bookings and visitor numbers.

We’ve put together a carefully researched and tested set of services, that will enable you to get online marketing at your own pace, spreading the cost and drawing our support as much or as little as you need us.

We can also guarantee dedication. Travel and tourism is close to my heart, having spent six years working as a travel writer and then editor of national travel industry magazine, Traveltalk. This brought me face to face with a wide range of tourism operators and fired up my determination to help this passionate group grow their businesses.

After joining Glenn Nicholas and Julia Sutton as manager of their new business, PublicityShip, in 2006, I established the Hidden Jewel Awards for small tourism operators because we saw how these businesses were struggling to enter the spotlight at established state and national awards schemes.

Thanks to Glenn’s extensive experience in business development and IT, I also quickly learned the ins and outs of online marketing, and recognised the potential for tourism operators to take advantage of the Internet’s level playing field. Since then I have been itching to launch this site.

We Want to Hear from You

We’re dedicated to helping you market your business online, so that you can claim your share of the growing number of travellers planning their holidays online. So do contact me with your feedback, requests and suggestions.

To kick off a few ideas, I’ve just published an article based on interviews with 12 tourism operators from around Australia. It examines some of the most common challenges faced by businesses marketing to overseas visitors, and I’ll be posting on each of those challenges in more detail. You can read the complete article here.