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To market your website effectively you have to start with a good website - optimised for people and for the search engines.

Once you have a good website, marketing it online essentially involves four things: (1) registering with search engines and directories, (2) getting as many quality links to your website as possible, (3) promoting your website in all your existing offline marketing and customer relations and (4) online advertising, particularly pay-per-click advertising.

Registering with search engines and directories
According to a GVU users survey, search engines account for up to 85% of all new visitors to a web site. In addition, only 7% of Internet users will surf beyond the first 20 listings of a search engine. This means that getting a good placement in the major search engines under the most popular keywords and phrases for your hotel and destination is vital. Much of the work in getting a good search engine ranking involves optimising your website, but once that's done you have to submit or register with them.

The most important search engines, accounting for nearly 80% of search engine traffic are Google, MSN and Yahoo!. Submissions to Yahoo! are managed by their subsidiary Overture, who also provide search results to search engines like MSN Search, AOL Search and HotBot). You can submit your website to Google and AltaVista for free at http://www.google.com/addurl.html (Google) and http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new (AltaVista).

Overture (which includes Yahoo!) will charge you for the privilege of submitting your site. Overture charges $49 and you can get more information or sign up here. However Yahoo!/Overture have recently revised their search engine system (now called 'Site Match') and will now also charge commercial websites for each click through to their website with the cost-per-click ranging from $0.15 to $1. This is a brand new service and full details of it aren't yet available. See Overture's website for more details.

It can also be a good idea to add your site to the Open Directory Project as this will not only provide hits by itself, but will help improve your ranking in Google. You can submit your site to the Open Directory Project at http://www.dmoz.com/add.html

When submitting or registering your website with search engines you'll have to fill in an online form which asks for details of your site, including title, keywords, and a brief description. These details are very important, and you should take the time to get them right. Finally, you'll have to be patient after submitting your site, as getting listed can take weeks and even months.

Getting links to your website
Getting links from other websites to your own website is another very important part of marketing your website online. People follow links like traffic follows signposts, so the more signposts that point to you, the better. But links from other websites not only bring you traffic themselves, but also help move your website up the rankings of the main search engines.

To get more links to your website, see who links to your competitors, but doesn't link to you. Then approach them to ask for a link!

But not all links are the same. A good quality link to your website is one that brings you traffic that is interested in accommodation at your destination. A good quality link is also one from a website that ranks highly in the search engines itself. Both Google and Yahoo!/Overture use the 'rank' of the websites that link to you to help determine the rank of your own website.

Of course, the best thing that you can do to attract links to your website is to have a website worth linking to. But you also have to ask for them. Start with local websites concerned with your destination. You might also approach websites that focus on some aspect of a service or facility that you offer - for example wedding websites, sport websites, etc. It would be a good idea to ask suppliers for links to your site from theirs.

It is also useful to find out what sites already link to you and to your competitors. You can engage a professional link-building service that will use specialised software to give you an accurate and comprehensive list of links. Hotel Sales Online offers this service. Once you have this information you can approach websites that link to your competitors but not to you and ask them for a link. You can also examine your website statistics to see what existing links bring you the most traffic, then look for similar sites that don't yet link to you and ask them to do so.

Finally, for search engine ranking purposes the text of the link to your website is important. The ideal text is, of course, your main keywords. For this reason, when you contact websites asking for a link you might want to include a 'suggested text' or even give them the HTML code that they can just copy and paste when adding your link.

Promoting your website in offline marketing and customer relations
One of the most important ways to promote your website and to encourage people to use it for reservations and booking is to include your website address in all of your ongoing marketing.

Include your website address in all print media and broadcast media advertisements and press releases. First capture the readers` attention with the ad, then refer them to your website where they can get more information and perhaps make a booking. Make sure that all of your staff are aware of your website and its facilities (e.g. can a customer book online?). In particular, all staff who are in contact with your public should be fully aware of your website address and the general email address for your hotel. You should also include your website address and general contact email address on all brochures, pens, business cards, stationery, comment cards, signs etc. In other words, look at all possible opportunities for the promotion of your web address.

Advertising your website online
There are several ways that you can advertise and promote your hotel and its website on the Internet, the most effective of which is pay-per-click or keyword advertising using the top keywords for your hotel and destination. You can get more information about online advertising from our article Using Keyword and other Online Advertising.

1. Make sure that your website has good, useful content about your hotel and destination and that it is fully optimised for search engines. 2. Register your website for free with Google and Altavista and pay to list with Overture (including Yahoo!). 3. Begin a comprehensive link building campaign - or engage Hotel Sales Online to do it for you. 4. Review all of your offline marketing material for opportunities to promote your website. 4. Engage Hotel Sales Online to fully optimise your website and market it on the Internet.

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