I bought a domain name and created a website that I designed myself in 2002. I approached one of the many promotional companies and paid a sum of money, and then they submitted my website to a 100 search engines, and soon after I started getting spam - I quickly learned that this was not the way to generate customers.
I started networking and joined
Ryze by personal invitation, and spent a year on the network, but was not able to get any leads from it. I joined more networks, and things did not get any better, until I realised that to get clients you have to put more information into your website, into your blogs and build a reputation. These days my strategy through networking works well.
In the hotel and catering industry we know what that's all about, don't we!
Can you remember when you picked up the keys to your first business and the rush of adrenaline you felt, before the bureaucracy hit you, and you realised there was so much red tape involved that you had to comply with, before the first customer came though the door.
I have some friends, Alan and Sue, who recently bought a hotel, which was described as a thriving business, and they redecorated the premises, only to find that it was harder than they thought to drive customers through the door.
They discovered that the previous owners did not have such a reputation, and they had to start building their business all over again. All the hotels were crying out for guests and they realised that they needed a unique selling point. They created a website and decided to call their hotel the non-smoking hotel, and through that they started to get some guests - you would be surprised at how many people are looking forward to smoke-free pubs on July 1st in the UK!
They asked us what they could do to get more profile hits, and we carried out an audit on their website, and identified a number of problems to their site that demonstrated that their site was not compliant with certain web site rules which are important to the search engines for indexing, and customers for visibility.
Unscrupulous web designers will sell any kind of website to make the extra bob, whilst not informing their client's of these cues. Their goal is to maximise their business rather than yours.
We put the interests of our clients first, and not our's. We will go to great lengths to make sure that you are well -informed about what you are buying, and aware of how you can gain maximum visibility on the web, which will help you target your customers.
Alan and Sue's website failed the
W3C Markup Validation Service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance. It had, however, three broken links, and that meant two hyperlink's were not working for them. Their source code Meta tags were lacking, and this had an impact on their web ranking and visibility.
We corrected the coding problems and adjusted the Meta tags, and optimised their site. It moved onto the first page of Google in the search engine under hotel and Bournemouth.
We added a blog to their site and daily Alan blogs about what is good about the hotel - each time he blogs, it's another press release for the hotel that now can be viewed in all the local paper's.
They were interested in the advice we gave, but did not sign up to our package - they simply did not have a budget left for it.
Currently their rank on Alexa is 8 million, which does not indicate a lot of hits. They did ask us to optimise their site and it is now in a better standing in the search engines. The position in the search engines does not reflect on Alexa, which itself is an advertiser.
I think that one of the problems that we find, is that hotel and catering managers / owners do not necessarily understand the impact that their website can have on the web, and they still rely on spending more on newspaper and magazine ads.
Your website correctly coded, properly made, search engine optimized can generate a lot of leads for your business.
Why not contact us for more information, more advice on marketing strategy and blogging strategy.....
Our support team are available on Tel. UK +44 (0) 20 8432 6450 USA (+1) 415 992 8021- Email: service@cateringpage.com
Please leave a message with your phone number. All messages are checked regularly.
Warm regards, Lawrence Perry, Managing Director of
Catering Page,
Serving the Hotelier with Image, Visibility, PR and Website Solutions. We also advise on Outsourcing.
Catering Page and Dolma Interactive are trading names used by DOLMA INTERNATIONAL LIMITED
Registered Office: 60 ROBIN HOOD WAY GREENFORD MIDDLESEX UB6 7QN, UK Company No. 05060920
