One factor that has been shown to have a great part in determining how successful a business is over time is the presence or absence of a website. In order to succeed in today’s world, it is almost imperative that any business have a web presence at the very least, and ecommerce capability greatly improves chances of success. This article will take a look at increasing profits with hotel internet marketing.

There is a great deal more to hotel internet marketing than simply putting up a website. Ideally that site would have the capability of booking reservations and accepting secure credit card payments so that travelers can know they will have a room when they arrive. But, marketing is something much more.

Hotel internet marketing involves getting traffic to the website to learn more about the hotel. This can be done in several different ways. The first, and most important, is having the website optimized to keywords that are important to the hotel so that their site is among the top 10 to show up in search engine results. This is because most people never look beyond the first page of organic search results. This practice is known as SEO and should be a standard part of any website design.

Other ideas can be the use of article marketing to tell people about the city and surrounding area near the hotel and why it makes a great place to vacation. As long as articles are informative and do not sound like an ad for the hotel itself, they can be published in any article directory on the internet with a backlink to the hotel’s website in the resource box at the end of the articles.

Email marketing is still useful in some ways. There is, however, a great need to build a list of email addresses to whom to send marketing messages based on customer preferences. Unsolicited email advertising is considered spam and is illegal in many areas.

Many hotel owners are finding that there is a new world of people to reach to tell about their accommodations using web 2. 0. Social media sites, such as Facebook and MySpace allow businesses to post advertisements on their sites as long as certain rules and guidelines are followed. Another common social media site for posting advertising messages is Twitter.

A final method of internet marketing to get people to a hotel’s website is having a manager write or maintain a blog about events happening at the hotel and upcoming special happenings or holidays. A link to the main website could be included in the blog. In addition, the blog posts can be written in such a way as to catch the eyes of travelers seeking information about the hotel or the area and draw them in for a more extensive look.

Hotel internet marketing is both a complicated problem and a simple one. Having a website is a must. With that given, thought has to go into how to drive traffic to the site and convert that traffic into reservations and bookings. SEO of website, article marketing, email and social media marketing, and blogging are different strategies that can be used for this purpose.

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