Blizzard recently hired three new employees to join our busy design and marketing firm.  Tammy is our new Administrative/Technical Assistant.  With a degree from the University of Mass, she brings with her a very diversified skill set for handling our day-to-day operations. She will also provide hosting and IT support.  Kimberly graduated from the University of Denver and is a Project Manager.  She has an extremely diverse work experience and background including advertising, graphic design, and marketing.  She excels in customer service and is exited to help our clients reach their online marketing goals.  After graduating from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Dan moved to Colorado and is now our new Business Development Manager.  He will be concentrating on creating relationships with our current customer base and working to increase our internal sales. We are happy to welcome our new employees and look forward to a mutually successful future.

We can target a 34 year old mother of 2 with a full time job and a college degree that “likes” vacation rentals, beach vacations and Kill Devil Hills, NC and has a household income of $175k+ and lives in a town within a 2-hour drive of my client’s lodging property.

Like I said, CREEPY!

This infographic is floating around and has a great roadmap for getting started on a successful campaign.  Keep in mind, we find that your Facebook Ads need more frequent maintenance than even your AdWords ads to be effective, so don’t expect to set these ads and forget about them….If you need help getting started, give us a call!

In the realm of Search Engine Optimization, the real thing we can see is a website ranking for a keyword or even an actual visitor to a website.  However, the small building blocks that cause those results are invisible to the untrained.  Check out the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors for an visualization of how the Universe of SEO is organized:

Google Analytics Multi-Channel Conversion Tool
Monday, November 28th, 2011 10AM MST

Learn about the most exciting new Google Analytics feature to come along in years!  This may be the single most exciting online marketing development during 2011.
Learn how to setup and interpret this valuable new data which is guaranteed to shed new light on where your online bookings really come from and will most likely change your budgeting process in 2012. This is a 30 minute webinar.

The Power of Your Brand in Google’s Search Algorithm
Thursday, December 8th, 2011 1PM MST

Learn how your Brand is becoming an increasingly important component in Google’s organic search algorithm.  Google monitors your brand signals and will rank you higher and drive more search engine traffic to your website if your brand appears stronger than your competitors.

Learn about the brand signals Google tracks in its algorithm and what you can do to increase the strength and frequency of those signals.

Google Plus for Hotels and Vacation Rentals: Strategies, Tactics and Tips
Wednesday December 14th, 2011 10AM MST

Get a head start in the new Google+ social networking platform. Learn how to get your account going and how to get the most out of it.  Includes tips for newbies but focuses on strategies and tactics that will work in the world of guest marketing.

There is a lot of great travel related data that is worth checking out.  They also have a “Real Time Insights Finder” which can help you discover all kinds of free real-time data from a plethora of Google Tools:

10/28/11 Hoteliers and restaurateurs anxious to sue TripAdvisor in the U.S. over travelers’ disparaging reviews may have to rethink their strategy following a legal decision involving Yelp. Read More

10/20/11 TripAdvisor gets sued for 10 million after naming hotel the “dirtiest hotel” in the country.  The Grand Hotel, in Pigeon Forge, was ranked the dirtiest hotel in America and now its owner is going after TripAdvisor.  Read More.  Also read: Does TripAdvisor Play Dirty with Hotel Reviews? in USA Today.

10/20/11 TripAdvisor is seeking verification from a consumer after discovering a potentially false review.  The Howarth House (a hotel in the UK)  brought brought the review to TripAdvisors attention. Read More

10/4/11 Trip Advisor punishes hotel for writing its own reviews, and for writing a negative review of a competitors.  The hotel now has the “red badge” on its listing at TripAdvisor and denies wirting fraudulent reviews. Read More

9/27/11 TripAdvisor now emphasizing Traveler photos (along with reviews).  With over 8 million traveler’s photos on TripAdvisor, your guests can now shape public opinion of you not just by writing about your, but by also sharing photos.  This is a natura; extension of TripAdvisor’s user-generated content.  Read More

9/12/11 TripAdvisor waters down its trustworthiness when it removes “Reviews You Can Trust” and changes to “Reviews from our Community” Read More

9/22/11 – TripAdvisor (and Yelp) complain to US Senate anti-trust panel that Google threatened to shut them out of search altogether if they don’t provide their content to Google Places.  Today, Google doesn’t use snippets of TripAdvisor reviews in Google Places, but merely has a link to TripAdvisor.com with the number of reviews of a particular hotel in parenthesis. Read more

9/1/11 TripAdvisor Gets Investigated: Interesting developments from the UK after the Advertising Standards Authority confirmed it has launched a probe into TripAdvisor over claims it has untrustworthy reviews. Read More

2/22/11 TripAdvisor shows a large ROI from TripAdvisor Business Listings.  Read More

1/24/11 Duncan Bannatyne, the Dragons’ Den panellist, is to spearhead a campaign against the “despicable and cowardly” TripAdvisor website after it refused to remove a review comparing one of his hotels to Fawlty Towers. Read More

1/22/11 TripAdvisor and Google Struggle continues with TripAdvisor complaint that Google won’t stop using its content.  Read More

Here is a timeline of the struggle between TripAdvisor and Google:

• October 27th, 2010: Google updates its Places Algorithm
• October 29th, 2010:  TripAdvisor Benefits from New Google Places Algorithm
• December 8th, 2010: TripAdvisor Blocks Google Places from using TripAdvisor Reviews.
• December 14th, 2010:  TripAdvisor Upset their Google traffic down 10% due to new Google Places Algorithm
• January 21st, 2011: Google refuses TripAdvisor and continues to use TripAdvisor’s user-generated reviews.

In a nutshell, Google has an army of humans that guide their algorithm changes by examining the “quality” of websites.  Those quality signals eventually become encapsulated into the mathematical algorithm and then roll out into the entire Google index.  Your website goes up-or-down based upon  your “quality footprint.”  The possibility even exists that your site could go up or down as a result of a manual review, outside of an actual algorithm change.

Here is a short video from Google explaining:

Is this scary?  We don’t think so. In fact, this really confirms what we have been teaching our clients for years: Focus on making your site the BEST site and your search results will follow.

The most fascinating element of her post is that she shared a “proprietary and confidential” 125 page document from Google that gives step-by-step instructions on how to do a “quality rating.”  Unfortunately, Google asked her to remove that link. (you can find it probably by searching for it)  Fortunately, we downloaded the document last week and will summarize the important bits for you.

The rating scale for sites are based upon what is most helpful for the users of Google and what their intent was.  Sites are broken down into:

• Vital: A special ranking only for “official” pages when a websites should “own” the query.  For hotels, that is only a brand name search.
• Useful: A page that is very helpful for most users.  Here are some of the words used to describe useful sites: highly satisfying, authoritative, entertaining, recent, well organized, trustworthy, reliable, not spammy, reputable, helpful,  well-known, highly informative and popular.
• Relevant: a page that is helpful for many or some users
• Slightly Relevant: a page that may be low quality and or contain less helpful information.  They may look nice but have very little genuine helpful content.  They may have many links and ads without content to support them.  less satisfying, less comprehensive, less authoritative, too narrow or too broad.  They have copied content, are disorganized, links don’t work, writing quality is poor and are outdated.
• Off-Topic or Useless.  Speaks for itself!

Those are pretty good guidelines!  Is your website Useful??

Here are some of the negative indicators that struck me as important. They were often mentioned over and over.  Also, each one strikes me as something that could be encapsulated into the algorithm. In other words, the computers over at Google can probably evaluate your website on these factors without much human assistance:

• Copied (or duplicate) content seemed to be a big problem.  Clearly unoriginal content is a problem.
• Broken links are bad… but pages with links to helpful websites were given credit.
• Hidden text and keyword stuffing were talked about extensively… don’t overuse your keywords.
• Matching the registrant (owner) of the domain to the business was discussed.  Does your domain registration belong to your business?
• Misspelled words, disorganized pages and poorly written copy were negative indicators.
• URLs with keyword stuffed into them and overuse of dashes and slashers were considered spammy.  Don’t overdo this!

Other factors were mentioned repeatedly as positive indicators of high quality pages.  In the realm of hotels and lodging, here are few that stood out to me:

• Videos and photos were mentioned several times as adding value to pages.
• Original product reviews were also mentioned several times.
• Links to helpful websites received positive mentions.
• Content that is timely and new.
• Contact info, phone numbers and addresses were mentioned as useful content.

If you are serious about better Google rankings, keep your focus on creating the best website for your guests.  Fill it with original, valuable and informative content.

We are making the full video available on Monday October 31st.  You can order it for the small investment of $50.  It will be available “on-demand” so you can watch it at your desk and at your leisure.

Topics Included:

• Google +1 is a promising new feature from Google that is still being developed.  Learn what it can do for you now and what strategies to implement in 2012 to achieve maximum benefit.

• Custom Facebook Apps and Tabs: A review of the nifty, convenient and seductive world of Facebook custom tabs.  The real pros are using these to turn their Facebook page into a second website that can turn lookers into bookers.  Bonus: Blizzard will give each attendee a free Facebook App. ($250 value)*

• Facebook Pay-Per-Click Marketing: Learn how to take advantage of Facebook’s PPC program to increase your ‘Likes’ and steal mind-share from your competitors.

• Top Facebook Tips: The top 10 tips for getting new fans and engaging with your current ones.

• Link Building is still going strong.  Learn about recent changes and how Google uses links in its algorithm. Bonus: Blizzard will give you 10 great links that will drive qualified traffic ($250 value)*

• Website Load Time: Learn how your website’s speed… or slowness… is being factored into Google’s algorithm.  Find out how to measure your speed, track it in Google Analytics, and what simple steps can improve it.

• Schema: Learn about the new coding directives that Google, Bing and Yahoo! rolled out in June, 2011 and how you can take advantage to help Google index your website.

• The Changing World of Online Reviews: Google has changed how they index your reviews and your strategies should change accordingly. Learn the best way to get more out of your current reviews and where to drive new reviews.

• Google Analytics: Learn about all of the changes and new features that have happened to Google Analytics in the last year that will help you to measure your growth and success.

• Email Marketing: Learn some easy tricks and discover a few powerful tools to capture more email addresses, and get more out of your existing email marketing efforts.

• Vacation Rental Marketing Benchmarks and Stats: Learn how your website compares to industry benchmarks using BlizzardTracker.

• Booking Engine Effectiveness: Increase your conversion rates by implementing 10 proven features.

• New Online Tools: Discover cool new tools to track your results, monitor your competitors, increase your effectiveness or just plain have fun.

• $50 to watch the video-on-demand at your leisure.
• The video is free for current Blizzard clients.

In order to make this new feature work you have to add a snippet of code to your tracking scripts: “_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);”  You can read all about how site speed works and how to add the tracking script on the Google Analytics Blog.

The other 90 second improvement I made to my Google Analytics reporting was to integrate it with my existing Google Webmaster Tools account.

Both these steps are worth the few seconds required!

Watch the Video: