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.

There’s only one way to know whether or not your website is doing its job and, that is, to check the number of reservations it’s generating. If you have an independent hotel, this is an easy task; your booking engine’s analytics should tell you. If it’s franchised, it’s a little harder because most brands don’t want you to know how much your proprietary site is contributing to bookings. Many don’t want you to have a proprietary site at all.

Unfortunately, many franchises still discourage the use of proprietary websites and/or measuring your own site’s production. It’s a matter of self-preservation; they’re afraid you won’t need them, I guess. A big hooray for enlightened brands like Hilton and Preferred Hotels, which support the use of proprietary sites for their hotels. It makes common sense; proprietary sites can do what franchise sites cannot. Only a little more than 20% of searches are performed by brand name, anyway.

Is Your Website Producing Business? (Do you know?)

More and more hoteliers are turning to the Internet to sell their hotel rooms, food, beverages, and other facilities. But, the question is just how effective is that website to attract visitors and book business? It is amazing how many hoteliers have no idea whether or not their site is actually producing business and appear satisfied with only knowing how many visitors the site gets.

Would you hire a sales person and not measure how much business he or she books? Would you be satisfied just knowing how many people they talk to? I doubt it.

More than just the way they look, too many hotel sites are not designed to be found through generic search nor are they designed to drive reservations. In the last few years, many website designers have gravitated towards building websites for hotels. Unfortunately, many of them have no hands-on experience with hotels to understand how and why people choose a hotel online. It’s also sad that many of them don’t know how search engines work either.

Destination-focused Websites

In several past articles, I referred to some hotel sites as nothing more than online brochures. A hotel online brochure is a site, which only covers information about the hotel itself; that makes it dead-in-the-water from a search standpoint. Someone who designs such a site, doesn’t understand how travelers use the Internet to find and book rooms.

Few people choose a hotel before choosing a destination. The fact is that most travelers first select a destination, attraction, or activity, then select a hotel within the scope of that destination. Hotel online brochures mention little, if any, information about the destination features nearby. Yet, this is the most important search findability information on your site. Selecting a hotel is most often the “second” decision made by travelers.

A Matter of Value

The location, not the address, of a hotel plays a very important role in the process of determining value. Most travelers do not choose a hotel by facilities and rates alone, it’s value that counts. How convenient the hotel’s location is, as compared to where they need or want to be, is their primary value decision.

It’s Also a Matter of Search Findability

Just designing a website that looks great is a small part of a site designer’s responsibility; almost any site designer can make an attractive site. You’ve read a lot about a site’s search ability or findability; to me, the most important part of any site. Many site designers appear to have been enlightened about the use of title and description meta tags; important search elements, but we still see a lack of understanding about keyword search tags.

Many search engines, like Google, search for keywords within the body text of each web page. This is why keywords are useless unless they have been incorporated within the site’s content. Remember, content is king. Researching and using popular keywords is essential to generic search. Generic search incorporates location attributes; trip types, such as meetings, weddings, etc; and popular attractions or activities.

Getting on page one of generic searches is an achievable goal for all hotels; the ultimate goal is to be within the first three generic search results. Pay-per-click advertising is a great tool for sponsored search results, but is too costly if generic search is ignored.

Competition has never been keener than it is today and the vast majority of travelers are using the Internet to decide where to go and where to stay. There is markedly less incidental travel since the recession started; making productive hotel websites more important than ever before.

Promoting your hotel through the Internet does not end with the publication of your website on the web, it only begins at that time. There are many hoteliers that are successfully marketing their hotels online through packaging, special promotions, holiday activities, and guest comments. Are you?

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.