Sally and Dan run Sunset Holiday Villas, providing a great Arthur River accommodation option for visitors to the remote west coast of Tasmania. They bought the property mid way through 2008, and we helped them plan an update to the website (Dan is Julia’s brother).

We could immediately see that the old website didn’t rank very well with the search engines, and that there would be a lot of opportunity to get more visitors to the site from organic search.

For a tourism operator, a blog is a brilliant tool for building search engine profile. I use the analogy of a sailing ship, with each new blog post acting like a new sail, catching more wind and helping the ship sail faster.

If you would like to see a great tourism blog in action, have a look at some of these posts:

• Abalone Recipe from the Edge of the World
• Crayfish and Scuba Diving at Arthur River
• Arthur River Fly Fishing

The posts are short and to the point. They share something about the experiences on offer in Arthur River that is hard to find out elsewhere. I don’t know about you, but I want to try that Abalone!

And while the posts are great for people considering a visit to Arthur River, each post is a new web page in the eyes of the search engines, each attracting its own share of search engine visitors and building on the strength of the website as a whole.

If these seem like modest goals, they are. It is a gradual process building the profile of a website, and you don’t need to write like a rock star blogger to be effective in building your tourism business online.

Write regular posts like Dan and Sally are writing and the number of relevant visitors to your website will steadily improve. Blogs really work for tourism websites.