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And what on earth does this mean anyway?

If a web developer has assessed your site and told you that it isn’t search engine friendly, have they explained what they mean?

The mystery of search engine optimisation (SEO) is a common frustration for small business operators. You end up paying a lot of money for someone to ‘fix’ your problems when in fact there’s a lot you could do yourself if you only knew what.

It’s a bit like running a car. Those who aren’t versed in the workings of car engines are forced to rely on others to fix the problem - and your mechanic is unlikely to take the time to explain how you can do it yourself and save yourself hundreds of dollars into the bargain. After all, they’d be doing themselves out of a job.

We are often asked by tourism operators to assess their sites and tell them why they’re not getting the attention they deserve from online searchers.

Glenn has written several articles on SEO and attracted the attention of SEO guru, Mike Moran, by publishing a post recently that explains exactly how to assess your own search engine friendliness.

Once you have assessed your site by following Glenn’s advice, consider your use of keywords, because accurate use of keywords in the right places will help to attract not just more visitors, but more qualified visitors.

Getting 100 visitors to your site and converting 10 is better than getting 100 and converting 1. By ensuring that you are providing exactly what your searchers are looking for when they key in their search words, you are significantly increasing your chance of conversion.

Having your website pages indexed by search engines such as Google is a vital part of your SEO.

So when you upgrade your site, or make any changes that result in new URLs for your pages, don’t neglect the index.

This means ensuring that every page gets indexed, not just your home page, and that redirects are planned and implemented.

Having every page indexed gives searchers more opportunities to find you because more specific content is crawled by the spiders.

For example, Undara Experience has a page on the Savannah Guides in their site. When you key ‘Savannah Guides’ into the Google search bar, a link to this page appears on page 1 of the search results.

Our recent upgrade of the Undara Experience website has made a big difference to the amount of content Google has indexed.

Their old site had some excellent content - but the Javascript menus made for a great spider trap, so only 23 of their pages were indexed.

Less than a week after going live, almost twice the number of pages were indexed, and now they have 66 pages in the Google index.

We also set up redirects from all their old pages to the relevant content on their upgraded site - a vital part of any website revamp or upgrade.

Just like setting up postal address redirects if you move office, you need redirects set up for every one of your indexed pages. Otherwise when the index brings up one of your old pages during a search, clicking on the link will give the searcher a ‘Page Not Found’ result, and the link might be removed.

The same goes for sites linking through to your site. As soon as they realise the page is no longer there, they may simply remove the link, and lost inbound links are going to be detrimental to your business.

There are a few ways redirects can be established. The best way is to use an Apache 301 redirect that tells search engines the page has been permanently moved.

When a site upgrade is involved that will change the URL of any indexed page:

1. Get a list of every page indexed by the search engines (you can do this by entering site:youraddress.com in the search box of Google and Yahoo).
2. For each page indexed, record the old URL and the new URL.
3. When you upgrade your site, make sure a redirect from the old page to the new page is set up.
4. When your site changes over, test each of the old page URLs to test the redirects are working.

Implementing 301 redirects is quite technical, so make sure your web developer knows what to do.

Even when a tourism business is either new or relatively unknown, it can benefit greatly from being in a well-known and sought-after destination.

Seppeltsfield Vineyard Cottage - the second in my series of tourism profiles - has become very popular thanks partly to its location in the Barossa region of South Australia.

Seppeltsfield’s Sharyn Rogers describes this as a “huge plus”, since many visitors are already searching for the Barossa and naturally come across the cottage in their search.

Nevertheless, there’s no time to sit back on their laurels and wait for bookings to roll in. Sharyn pays a lot of attention to their site content in order to keep it alive and lively.

As a small business - the cottage sleeps two - Seppeltsfield is well positioned to benefit from online marketing, where there is no battle for space. Sharyn also finds that, at little over $300 a night, paying 30% commissions to intermediaries isn’t worth their while.

So Sharyn and her partner Peter choose to market their accommodation directly via their site and with a presence on destination and accommodation sites such as SouthAustralia.com, Barossa.com and the B&B and Farmstay Association.

Seppeltsfield also markets through the Barossa Regional Guide which helps to capture last-minute bookings and encourages word-of-mouth recommendations to friends and relatives overseas.

Sharyn and Peter do a great job of packaging their accommodation with other tour operators, so that visitors can get the best from the region as a whole. They are finding that one in five of their guests will book a package rather than just accommodation.

“Packages are especially popular with overseas visitors,” Sharyn told me. “And over 90% of our internationals are now booking directly online.”

Sharyn recognises the benefit of having a self-managed site: “We are updating our site contantly,” she said. “And I insist on having good images on there to help people see the experience.”

By posting regular news with a subscription facility on the site, they are able to express a personality and maintain interest in Seppeltsfield as an ideal base for a Barossa holiday. This is also a great SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy.

And Sharyn has included a link to TripAdvisor, encouraging guests to write up their experience on this social media site as a fantastic way to attract links back to the Seppeltsfield website.

Keep an eye on the Seppeltsfield site, because Sharyn and Peter are in the throes of revamping it to give it a more contemporary feel.

Revamping and refreshing their web presence is reflected in their approach to the product itself. As a 19th century cottage, Sharyn recognises the demands of their market and keeps the cottage fresh with contemporary facilities, including free wireless broadband internet access (and free use of a laptop computer if required), a Bose iPod Docking Station and “Wave” sound system, and, soon to be installed, a Bose entertainment system.

Congratulations to Seppeltsfield for being declared winner in the Hosted Accommodation category at the South Australia Tourism Awards this year for the third time running, taking them into the Hall of Fame.

The world of the web is a bewildering place for a small tourism operator. There are so many huge travel sites out there that it’s easy to feel like a very small fly caught in a vast web waiting to be eaten alive by the search engine spiders.

How on earth do you get attention amongst all the noise and flash?

First, have faith in the search engines.
Second, be authentic.
Third, be brave.

Search engine spiders don’t look for glossy, flashy websites. They don’t care how big your business is. They look for rich, relevant content. How great is that? This means you being authentic - talking online about your expertise, the experiences offered by you and your destination, and the people involved.

Make sure you optimise your site too, which simply means making it easy for the spiders to read the content. If you’re nervous about how to do it, this article demystifies the process.

Another important factor is inbound links. If there are other authoritative, high-ranking sites pointing to you, Google will take this to mean that you must know what you’re talking about.

Our travel sites zoomed straight to a 4/10 PageRank after just a few months of going live simply by paying attention to these factors: content, SEO and links.

What’s great about search engines is that they’re constantly onto those who try to fake it. So if a site tries to buy or sell links, they get penalised. Inbound links need to be genuine links prompted by excellent content on your site. And an inbound link is worth a lot more than a reciprocal link (i.e. you link to me and I’ll link to you).

Here are two of the best ways to get inbound links:
1. Have useful, relevant content on your site AND use your blog to link to useful content on other sites. Not only does this add value for your readers, but you’ll attract the attention of those other sites, and if they like what they see, they’ll add value for their readers by linking to you.
2. This is where being brave comes in - write articles about the travel experiences you offer and post them on article syndication sites, such as ezinearticles.com. Getting an article published on a site like this will automatically get you up to 3 inbound links from a high-ranking (6/10) authoritative site.

So the secret to getting search ranking comes down to:
Having faith that Google will rank you for the right reasons without bias (not forgetting SEO).
Being authentic in your content and your intentions when you manage links.
And being brave enough to publish your content beyond your own site.