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If you make it easy for your customers to find you, present yourself in an attractive way, and make it easy for your customers to book with you directly, then more and more of them will do just that. The most important thing you can do to make this happen is to make your website as good as it can be, and that means good hotel web site design. There are several characteristics of hotel websites that increase the amount of business done directly with customers:

• A good hotel website will reflect your hotel to its maximum advantage.
  
• A good hotel website will have full details of all of your hotel's services and facilities.
  
• A good hotel website will include useful information about your destination.
  
• A good hotel website will be optimised for search engines.
  
• A good hotel website will include an easy-to-use way for customers to book online.
  
• A good hotel website will give you information about how visitors find it, keywords they use, etc.

A good hotel website will reflect your hotel to its maximum advantage.
On the Internet, the image your hotel projects on your website is the only thing that customers have to go on when making a choice about whether to book your hotel or not. It is vital that this image be as good as it can possibly be. Your hotel web site design should therefore be cohesive, and attractive. Normally this would be based on your existing brand design, but it doesn't have to be. People who read online don't like long, dense blocks of text, so make sure you break up text with images, headlines, etc. You should use photographs extensively, including photographs of your rooms. However be sure that your website loads quickly as few people will wait for a minute or two to see an image.

It goes without saying that and hotel website design should be technically flawless, with no bad links or missing images. It should look perfect in all main Internet browsers, especially Internet Explorer and Netscape. It should fill the screen neatly and not require sideways scrolling to see parts of it. it is very important to have a hotel website design that you are comfortable with. Your website is the 'window to the world' of your hotel, accessible by many millions of people from around the globe, including most of your customers, your competitors, your suppliers, and even your friends and family. You should be proud of your website.

A good website hotel will have full details of all of your hotel's services and facilities.
While your website probably emphasises the accommodation that you offer, it also reflects your hotel in its entirety, and so it should include full details of all of your hotel's services and facilities. Do you do weddings? Do you offer conference facilities? Do you have a restaurant? Do you have a gym or swimming pool? Whatever your hotel offers, make sure that you have full information - with photographs - on your site. Its probably best to have at least one separate page for each service/facility.

A good hotel website will include useful information about your destination.
The most attractive feature of your hotel to the traveller is most likely your destination. A good website will have attractive, useful information about your destination and its key attractions. Destination information can be very important to attract links to your website and to attract people who use the search engines to find information about your destination. Again, use photographs and break up text with headlines, boxes, etc. to make it easy on the eye. Its worthwhile to research what information is currently available about your destination on the Internet and to try to offer something different - i.e. valuable information that nobody else has. By identifying yourself with your destination you are offering more than your hotel and can thus double your opportunities for online marketing and exposure.

A good hotel website will be optimised for search engines.
Not all of the visitors to your hotel's website will be human. Some of the most important visitors are search engine programs that report back the information that helps the search engines decide where you will rank under important keywords. This means that your website must be 'optimised' for the search engines as well as for people.

Optimising your website for search engines is not an exact science, especially as different search engines use different criteria and search engines change their criteria regularly. However there are a few basic things that you or your web designer can do that will certainly help:

• Find the keywords for your hotel and destination and use them in the 'meta-tags' of the pages of your website. Meta-tags are the hidden information on your web pages. Also, keep in mind that each of your hotel's different facilities and services will have their own keywords, and so each page of your site should ideally have its own keywords in the meta-tags. Don't overdo the number of keywords you use, since some search engines consider this 'spamming'. Try to keep the list of keywords in your meta-tags to 500-1000 characters.
• Use a colourful title and description in the key words of your web pages. These are what many search engines will display in their search results, so they should be good. You should also have different - and optimised - titles and descriptions for each page of your website. The search engines consider a good title as one contains your best keywords (especially the first few words of your title), describes your site, and is less than 80 characters long.
• Each of the images on your website has its own name, and has 'alt' tags that display a few words when people hold their cursor over it. These image names and alt tags should contain your most important keywords.
• The search engine programs (called 'bots' or 'spiders') read from the top of your web pages down. This means that you should minimise any HTML, Javascript or other code near the top of your web pages. Ask your web designer about this.
• Be aware of your most important keywords when writing text for a web page. Don't write specifically to use the keywords (overusing them can count against you with some search engines), but keep them at the back of your mind. Search engines will take note of these.
• Don't try to trick the search engines. If you help them to put your website in front of people looking for it then you are helping them as well as yourself.

A good hotel website will include an easy-to-use way for customers to book online.
Customers who use the Internet to find a hotel usually want to make a booking immediately. They don't want to wait for the morning to telephone you, possibly across time zones. They don't want to make a long distance or international phone call. They don't want another step in the process of booking a hotel room. Most of them want to book their room there and then.

This means that, to be effective and credible in marketing and selling your hotel online you must be able to take bookings directly from your website. There are a variety of hotel reservation software, systems and services that will allow you to do this. Most of them will customise the booking pages with the look and feel of your website so visitors are hardly aware that they are using a third party service.

Whichever service or system you engage to handle your online bookings, you should try not to engage them on a commission basis. After all, the ability to accept bookings from your own website without paying commissions to anybody is one of the most attractive things about online marketing and sales.

Have a look at our reviews of online booking services and software. We particularly recommend RezEasy online reservation software from Hallisoft because once it is set up you can own it outright and not have to pay commissions or regular charges to anybody.

A good hotel website will give you information about how visitors find it, keywords they use, etc.
Your website not only gives your customers information about you, it can also give you information about them. In order to find out information about how people find and use your website, you need access to your website statistics or 'logs' in a comprehensible and easy-to-understand format. There are several excellent programs that allow you to do this. At the minimum website statistics should be able to tell you:

• Who is visiting my website?
• How do they come to my website?
• What search engines do they use?
• What keywords do they use?
• What pages do my visitors look at most?
• How many pageviews, visits (sessions) and visitors are coming on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis?
• How many visitors return to the website and how often?
• How much time do they spend on the website?

The key to hotel web site design and to building a good website is to work with a web designer that you understand and who understands you. The process of building an excellent and effective website should involve both you and them. For your part, you should know what you want. You should have done your research and know something about websites and how they work. You should have reviewed other hotel websites from around the world and be able to point to ones that you like. And you should have your designs, photographs and other content ready - hiring professionals to develop it if possible. You also need to stay engaged throughout the hotel web design process and, while respecting the expertise of the web designer, retain ownership of it.

Your web designer should be capable of designing the site you want, and should be able to prove this through a portfolio of websites that they have done. They should be open with information about hosting and other technical details and be willing to take the time to explain this to you. Your website is important, and it will be there as long as your hotel exists (with changes, of course!). It is worthwhile seeing it as a real investment and spending whatever money is necessary on it. If it is well done it will pay you back dramatically.

Remember, a website is a living, breathing, ever-evolving document that is a live marketing tool and an extension of your hotel. By next year, one in five hotel bookings will be made on line. If you want these booking to be made directly with you then your website must be attractive, easy to follow and simple to use.

1. If you don't yet have a website, begin learning about what's involved and looking at the websites of other hotels. 2. If you do have a website, look through it carefully and regularly, paying attention to the points mentioned above. 3. If you don't already have one, look at installing an online booking engine on your website. 4. Commission Hotel Sales Online to do a full audit of your website.

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