Optimisation - Q & A
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Tourism business Search engine Q&A
Below are some of the questions we get asked regularly, it should be your first port of call for answers to some of your website optimization grey areas!
Q How can I get more business from the internet?
A Well we can look at a website and almost always recommend changes which will result in an increase in visitors to your website through search engine referrals. When you put a website online for the first time your website should be submitted (many search engines will find your website even without submitting) to the main search engines. The spiders will eventually visit your website in order to evaluate the site content. After crawling your website, they will enter your information into their database along with thousands of others in order of importance! When someone does a search for products or services similar to your own, he will see the websites that the search engine considers most relevant to his search, at the top of the page results.
if your website is at the top of the list, it follows that more surfers will click on to your website, simple! The process of helping your website to be at the top of the list, or page one is called search engine optimisation.
Q What is seo ?
A SEO or Search engine optimisation, ought to be referred to as website optimisation. It is the process of presenting the information contained within a website, so as to make it as relevant as it can be to the search phrases that are most likely to be used to find your particular business. Once a website is optimised it is said to be search engine friendly.
Q But do I need to be search engine friendly?
A If you are selling something, you most definitely DO need to be search engine friendly. If you want to attract customers or visitors to your website you cannot afford not to be. Remember this, every visitor that finds your website via a search engine referral costs you nothing! So unless you intend to have visitors to your website by invitation only, or by advertising it in the local paper, then you do need to do your best to ensure that it is optimised.
Q OK but a friend told me that I need to submit my website to the search engines regularly in order to get search engine rankings, and I know someone that can do that for just a few pounds.
A This is definitely a bad idea - submitting your website to search engines only needs to be done when your website first goes live, just to "invite" them to spider it.
And when you have done major changes to it, once a search engine has listed your site it will , without any prompting, spider it regularly. Over submitting your website to the search engines could be regarded as spamming and consequently removed from the engines database, that can prove disastrous to your business as it could prove difficult to regain your entry. There are only a handful of search engines handling the great majority of searches, the main players are Google, Yahoo and MSN most of the other smaller search engines rely on these for their data.
Equally important is submission to the Directories, notably ODP which is free and Yahoo, they require payment for inclusion. Search engines, even the major ones rely heavily on directory information. Submission to directories needs great care so as to get it right. Website submissions to directories are reviewed by humans, and submission is no guarantee of inclusion, this is why directory listings carry a lot of weight with search engines, because of the human element.
Q I have paid a lot of money for my website, so can I expect to get lots of business?
A Unfortunately for you, no, the cost of a website has little bearing on the way search engines rank it. We know of sites that have cost BIG money that receive little in the way of search engine traffic. In fact many large organisations totally overlook website optimisation and rely heavily on traditional advertising methods, and use their website merely as a showpiece for image only. That is good news for small business and particularly in the tourism sector, a small B&B or self catering business can very often out shine the some of the major players on the internet. The world of search engine marketing is "a level playing field" where anyone with the good sense to learn the game, has an equal opportunity to sell their product online worldwide.
A word of warning here, as in all business these days, there are people out there that will promise much and deliver little, so many scams and fraudulent types just waiting to relieve you of your hard earned cash. Word of mouth is always the best recommendation, in the absence of that choose a reputable business to do your optimising, submitting, web designing etc. Always beware of unsolicited email spam promising the earth, they almost always end in tears.
Q I have a new website, or am thinking of having a website for my business, how do I know it is optimised, or how can I ensure it is optimised for maximising search engine traffic?
A Tourism-Site-Fix will give you a free website assessment and give you a totally honest report on the status of your website, without obligation we will tell you what you need to do, if anything to put your site on the road to internet success.
If we design a website for you it will be fully optimised as the design and development progresses, guaranteed to do your business justice on the search engines from day one.
