Dragonfly Media Curacao

Only five days ago I wrote about how proud we were about the 4/10 pagerank for ekvandoorne.com and now I see that dgfmedia.net also received a PR4 from Google. The big difference is that ekvandoorne.com has been up for almost a year now and dgfmedia.net for less than six months.

We don’t want to put too much stock in pagerank or obsess about it, but we feel that it does show you’re doing something right if you have a high pagerank. Besides this; would you trust a webdesign company to do a good job, SEO-wise, if it takes them 12 years to get a PR4 on their homepage?

Last week Lisa Barone attended Ad:Tech San Francisco and blogged about it on bruceclay.com. I think their blog is a must-read for anyone who’s serious about search, but that’s another story. One of the sessions she blogs about is the one entitled “The Next Big Thing: Is Advertising Really The Solution?“. The main focus of this session was community and user engagement and how companies should deal with these concepts. There are two reasons why I think this is particularly relevant for us.

Number one is the fact that here on Curacao most of the companies (99.9%) are afraid to let the consumer talk freely and it is a small personal crusade of ours to get CEO’s to change their mind about this. At the Ad:Tech session Tip Rose of Resource Interactive gave the perfect reason why you should empower consumers to talk freely about your product: “Consumers are already talking about you whether you’re facilitating the conversation or not. You may as well join the conversation that’s already in progress and take in the insights”.

The second reason is one of blatant self-promotion (and promotion of a fellow blogger). This week an article of ours will be featured on a blog about small market marketing. This article is about how the internet has put small market marketing in the world market through the use of social media.

Anyway; read Lisa Barone’s post. It’s good.

To keep ourselves informed of everything that is new in internet marketing, we read a lot at Dragonfly Media. Every morning we browse the web for new information and we test that information, we do not just accept that it is true.
It amazes me each day how much information is shared through the World Wide Web.

This morning I noticed an article that takes us back to the basics: Why Is Internet Marketing Important?

Internet marketing is a business imperative because the Internet is an irrevocable and unstoppable trend.
Even if you have a traditional “brick-and-mortar” business, you’ll lose valuable customers without an online presence. People routinely search for goods and services with their computers instead of picking up the yellow pages. If your business isn’t on the Web, customers will likely choose another company to do business with. (more…)

Every now and then we run into an article that confirms just that what we tell our clients.
Not because we want to sell something but we strongly believe in keeping our clients informed of what is new and what works in internet marketing. Whether your company sells cars, windows and doors, or roomnights, your clients want to feel comfortable:
The Importance of Credentials on the Web By Mike Clowe, Research Analyst, Marketing Experiments

How important is it to provide credentials on the Web? The Web is an essentially anonymous media. Businesses claim to be whatever they want, many times without any proof at all. (more…)

Almost all SEO projects we do start with onsite SEO. The reason for this being that a website should be set up correctly before you should start with offsite SEO (who wants to link to or recommend a website that’s no good?). So, what are the basic first steps of onsite SEO? (more…)

Source: marketingprofs.com

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. After hearing all the buzz about blogs and how popular they are becoming, your company decided to dive into the blogging waters. But that was months ago. And even though you’ve posted a few times, your blog has gotten little or no comments, and only a handful of visitors a day!

Before you give up and decide to pull the plug on your blogging experience, let’s look at some ideas for revitalizing you blog so that both you and your customers can benefit from it.

It’s Not About You

If your company blog isn’t getting the results you were expecting, start by examining your blog’s content. Consider how your blog is positioned: Are you using it as a selling tool, or as a tool to communicate with your customers and provide them with engaging information?

Many companies make the mistake of focusing almost exclusively on the products and services that they provide, thus replicating information that can be found on the company’s main website.

Blogs are powerful communication tools, so the content you provide on your company’s blog should be engaging and should encourage feedback from visitors. Instead of endlessly blogging about your products and services, give readers information that helps them with satisfy their wants and needs. (more…)

Source: Hotelmarketing.com

In today’s dynamic market where occupancy rates and ADRs depend on how well hoteliers utilize Internet marketing, it is no longer sufficient to measure basic website traffic stats like visitors, page views, or campaign stats like banner click-through rates and PPC clicks.

By Max Starkov and Jason Price

Marketing is all about results. Unlike offline marketing, we can track and analyze ROIs from our online marketing campaign results quickly and accurately over the Internet. There is no medium that allows tracking like the Internet does, yet in hospitality, we didn’t adopt these tracking technologies as soon as they were available. Instead we relied on cheap or free analytical tools to provide us with the information that management uses to make decisions. As a result, we are often basing important marketing decisions on inferior information.

We consistently receive numerous questions from hoteliers concerning how to most efficiently track and measure the ROI of online marketing efforts down to the reservation process. What metrics should hoteliers measure and pay attention to? What are the best practices in measuring ROI from the hotel’s marketing efforts? Or ROI from the hotel website? What are the best analytical tools out there? (more…)

When you’re writing copy for a website you can basically write for three different ‘groups’. These groups are your prospective clients, the search engines and yourself. If you want to sell a product or a service you should, of course, write for people that might be willing to buy from you. But then again, if you want to rank high in Google and the likes shouldn’t you write for them? And you probably also want to put something of yourself, something specifically you, in your copy.

So, who do you write for and who should you write for? (more…)

When you’re working on (the popularity of) a website there are a few moments that make you feel that all the work is worth it. One of these moments is when Google assigns the first pagerank to your website. It’s like seeing your kid walk for the first time!
If you don’t know what google pagerank is: follow this link to Google.

This weekend I was checking out some of the stuff we did for our clients and I also went by ekvandoorne.com. We have been doing off-site search engine optimization and analysis for them for some time and we are preparing on-site search engine optimization now as well. So, I thought I’d check out the current status of the website.

I always keep an eye on my search status plugin in FireFox so I glanced at it this time as well and got me a very pleasant surprise. Ekvandoorne.com jumped from an unassigned pagerank of 0 to the very decent pagerank of 4! This is the first we saw such a jump on one of the websites we maintain or made so you can imagine we’re very proud right now.

No matter how you engage with customers–-face-to-face or online, through the mail or over the phone–your brand is an essential element that differentiates your company from your competitors. A well-defined brand tells customers and prospects who you are and what you stand for.

Elements of a brand include many things. At the most basic level, brand is represented through the company logo, the colors used and tag lines employed, if any, that evoke the company’s essence. Consistent use of these elements helps build a strong brand image. For example, the “swoosh” check-mark style of the Nike mark with the accompanying tag line “Just Do It” is one of the best-recognized brands worldwide. (more…)