Tour and Travel

About las vegas, well who doesn’t know this city. It’s one of the notorious city at Nevada. Some call it city of sin, but hey, it’s much fun there!.

The history began when Raphael Rivera, first European visit Las Vegas Area in 1829. In that time, areas of the valley contained artesian wells that supported extensive green areas (Vegas mean green areas).

In 1844, Las Vegas was still part of Mexico. But on 1855, Las Vegas was annexed by the United States, after that day, United States assigned 30 missionaries to convert the Paiute Indian population to Mormonism. Later, Mormons abandoned Las Vegas in 1857, during the Utah War.

Las Vegas was re-established as a railroad town on 1905, when 110 acres owned by the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad was auctioned off in what is now downtown Las Vegas. Then Las Vegas became an city on March 16, 1911 and Peter Buol was assigned as the first mayor.

Enough for history lesson, now it’s the fun news. According to my friend, there’s a lot of Las Vegas Club and Casino at that city. All of that club and casino have unique landscape and design. And my lucky friend even go to strip club just for fun and prove to me that’s Vegas really had strip club, ha ha. When I ask him, why he didn’t go to Casino, he told me that it’s already seen on film so it’s no fun to go to casino.

It’s amazing how easily myths are born. One origin of many myths is the reality that many technical people out there do their best to promulgate confusion about the Internet; making it appears too complicated and too intricate for the average person to fully understand. They even use technical language to describe simple tasks just to stir-up the confusion still more; it’s simply not that complicated.

Many web site designers tend to be right-brain directed people who use their creative side to build a visual masterpiece instead of a functioning site to sell visitors and deliver reservations. This has created a gap between marketing people who believe that “Content is King”, that a site must conform to search engine parameters, and techies who feel that all they need do is to make a site visually appealing to the hotel manager or owner, who hired them.

These people have little or no concern about how and why people choose hotel rooms because few of them have any experience in the hotel industry. Hoteliers know that their hotel’s location is the primary selection consideration, yet we see site after site, which provide no clue to the hotel’s location; please note that your hotel’s location is not simply its address.

We still see many independent hotels without a booking engine, leaving site visitors frustrated that they cannot make a real-time reservation online. We see unusual and strange site navigation schemes; visitors should not have to learn how to use your site. We see many sites with far more images than text; yet search engines only see text.

We see more and more use of flash elements where they are not necessary with a lack of well-written text; leaving the site nearly invisible to search engines.

Myth:

We Already Have a Web Site, So All We Need Now is Search Engine Optimization

Many people, including some site designers, share this delusion; the fact is that the site design has everything to do with its ability to be ranked and found by search engines. Search engines have some very specific guidelines to enable web designers to maximize search results; all they need do is follow them.

Your web site needs to be prepared to comply with search engine guidelines; well researched title, description, and search tags; search words/phrases which are incorporated into the sales text on your site; content is king. Submitting a poorly designed web site to search engines is a complete waste of money.

Myth:

Animation Looks Cool and Creates Interest

This is one of my favorites among all hotel web site myths. The danger with this myth is that it appears to make sense to the uninitiated. Techies love flash because it does look cool, but the fact is that there are several problems with this thinking.

First, since a site needs to be found before it can be viewed, search engines can’t “see” flash. Second, for the many people, still on slow Internet connections, flash takes forever to load. The need to double-click navigation links, instead of the traditional single-click, is annoying and confusing to visitors. Morphing photos do absolutely nothing to enhance a commercial web site; if they morph too fast, one cannot properly view the images, too slow, some images are never seen. Do the images simply repeat over and over again or do they stop on the most important image?

Since content is king, why not simply post static images so visitors can focus on those of interest? I won’t even comment on hotel web sites designed entirely in flash…rubbish.

Myth:

Search Engines Don’t Use Meta Tags Anymore

The fact is that the most popular search engines use Meta Tags, in various ways, to crawl and rank web sites. The description tag is certainly the most important tag, yet we see many sites without one. Key word/phrase Tags set the stage for search key words and phrases to be used within the body of text.

In my opinion, if only one search engine used Meta Tags, that’s reason enough to have them; they are free to use and can positively affect the performance of your site.

Myth:

My Hotel Web Site is My Hotel’s Online Brochure

The fact is that your hotel’s web site should be far more than simply an online brochure; it’s your online selling piece which enables visitors to make real-time online reservations. This makes it critical that your site has good selling text with all the necessary who, what, why, when, and where information; capped-off with a call-to-action…to make a reservation.

Designing a web site is like sculpting an elephant out of stone; merely chip-away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. With a hotel web site, chip away everything that doesn’t lead the user to make a reservation.

It’s important to understand that, with few exceptions, people don’t travel to stay at your hotel; they travel to visit an area or attraction, conduct business in an area, attend a meeting, or other such reasons; they merely stay at your hotel. Your site should provide reasons to stay at your hotel when they travel to your area. No matter how beautiful your hotel, that’s not a good enough reason to stay at your hotel; provide the reasons why your hotel is the perfect place to stay when they visit the area.

Myth:

People Who Use the Internet Are Only Looking for the Lowest Rates

Any attempt to put all Internet users into one neat market segment is short-sighted and fool-hardy. With the exception of destination resorts, people will shop for the best overall value within a chosen market. This is often falsely interpreted as rate shopping. Few people shop for the lowest rate alone; most people look for the best deal, which includes the location and facilities they want…, at the best rate. This is shopping for value, not rate.

Hotels with the lowest rates within a market area are often viewed as “poor choices” among shoppers. Low rates are often interpreted as “unbelievable or too good to be true”. Your web site should “position” your hotel within the market. If it’s available in your market, use Smith Travel Research’s STR Report and a good competition analysis to determine your hotel’s position in the market; it’s worth the time and effort.

Your rates should reflect your position in the market, even if they are the highest. Showing the best overall value, with rates that show demonstrate that value, sells rooms.

Having a web site, and not promoting it, is like buying a flashy new car and leaving it in your garage; great web site, but few people will ever see it. Some people still think that simply having a web site is enough to drive new business; wrong. The biggest problem with this thinking is that a web site needs to be “found” in order to be used by its visitors; and it needs to be structured to “sell” your hotel to get reservations.

A hotel web site’s visibility is largely dependent upon its generic search capabilities; its ability to be found by search engines. BUT FIRST, a web site needs to be compatible with search engine guidelines. Senseless flash elements, poor navigation schemes, lack of properly researched search tags, and poorly constructed text all contribute to poor search results.

Web Site Optimization

To be certain that your site is search and sales ready, get a comprehensive web site analysis. A web site analysis consists of a page-by-page review of your site to evaluate its sales design and search ability. Your site will be analyzed for compatibility to search engine requirements, its navigation elements, sales text structure, and many other necessary web components.

Most competent site designers can provide you with an analysis of your current web site. This analysis should provide you with both a subjective and objective review of the overall design, compatibility with search engines, and the effectiveness of the imbedded code or technical areas of your site. It should provide you with an easy-to-follow blueprint of suggested changes to make your site “search friendly” and “sales-ready”.  A site analysis, often less than $500, could be the most effective small investment you can make to improve your Internet results.

Search Engine Submissions

Ok, so you’ve optimized your site and you’re ready to begin promoting it. Whether your site is new or recently optimized, a site launch plan, which includes search engine and directory listings, could increase its popularity and reservations production. Search engine and directory submission is a tedious process and should be left to those skilled in working with search engines.

The launch plan will, of course, include continued submission of your site to search engines and directories; setting a timetable for periodic submissions to improve visibility. There are literally hundreds of search engines and directories depending upon the sales reach of your hotel.

By attaching a data engine to your site, your web master can review the progress and results from search engines. Data-collection, from companies like Web CEO or Web Trends, takes the guess-work out of continually assessing the effectiveness of your site. Their reports can identify the most productive search referrals, popular pages on your site and other necessary marketing information, so you can be pro-active to make changes to improve your site’s production.

Pay-per-click Advertising

Although there is a lot of controversy surrounding pay-per-click, it is a great way to stimulate popularity results for your site. Your site’s popularity is a major factor in search engine rankings; pay-per-click can provide your site with temporary increased popularity until your site obtains good generic search ranking.

A well-researched and well-managed pay-per-click advertising program almost always provides a great return-on-investment. You can establish a monthly budget to limit your financial exposure; even very low budgets produce results. It’s a great way to dominate your competition on the web. You can make your hotel dominant against the competition.

Link Structure and Strategy

Links to and from your site can provide explosive growth to the search properties of your site. In effect, a carefully developed link strategy can improve your site’s visibility in ways difficult to achieve otherwise. A travel resources page can be developed to help you “borrow” popularity from the entertainment and business sites in your area.

NEVER place outgoing links on your home page; inviting visitors to leave your site too soon can be costly; links should be imbedded deeply within your site.

Create a Searchable Photo Gallery

It amazes me how many hotel web site photo galleries still contain miscellaneous images with no text definition; these photo galleries are invisible to search engines. Remember, search engines read text and ignore images when scrolling a search.

A photo gallery, complete with descriptive text, becomes a searchable page.

These are some very basic ways to promote your web site; they may sound all too simple to some, but, we see way too few sites which use even these simple promotional methods. It all starts with an unprejudiced review of your site; promoting a poorly designed site, no matter how beautiful it may look, is foolish.