Last thursday we did a presentation in Bonaire. We were invited by the Bonaire Hospitality and Tourism Association (BonHATA) to speak about internet marketing before they had their Christmas Social event. Attendance was pretty good and we got a few good questions so people had either prepared or they listened well.
During the presentation we promised to upload the Powerpoint to the website and provide some links to useful tools. These you can find below. (more…)
Coming thursday we will be doing a presentation about internet marketing for members of the BonHATA (Bonaire Hospitality And Tourism Association). It will be a similar presentation to the one we did on Curacao, but more focused because we have less time. We will also try and make it very practical with examples that specifically apply to the hospitality companies of Bonaire.
We are really looking forward to doing this presentation. It’s good to see that people are becoming more and more interested in internet marketing and are taking steps to educate themselves. Besides this, I have never been to Bonaire and I would really like to see what everybody’s raving about.
After the presentation we will upload the powerpoint to the blog with relevant links. (more…)
Some time ago I wrote about the SEO make-over for curacao.com. We are taking things one step at a time and because the website is relatively large it takes quite some time to implement even the smallest of changes. Only yesterday was I able to put the first steps in the process live. (more…)
Yesterday’s internet marketing presentation for the HSMAI Curacao Chapter was, in our book, a success! People were hanging from the rafters and were pushing for attention (well, that’s actually not true - no rafters in the room ;) - but the room was packed to the brim).
Bo started off the presentation with an introduction to what DGF is and what we do. She talked about some of our design clients and introduced little old me. The idea of the presentation was to give people an idea of what internet marketing is and to talk about some of the basic concepts in SEO. I talked way too long and finished just in time, but it looked like people remained interested throughout the presentation (which was very cool). (more…)
Coming thursday we will give a presentation on Internet Marketing (or: How you can understand what your internet marketer is talking about) for the Curacao chapter of HSMAI.
HSMAI is an international association of sales and marketing people in the hospitality industry. The first caribbean chapter was founded last year in Curacao and the idea is that its members learn more about their profession through events (like this presentation), conferences, the main HSMAI website and their magazine.
The hospitality industry of Curacao is a real growth sector and new hotels are being built left and right. This is good for the island (provided there are enough tourists and means for them of coming here, of course), but it also means that they need to work harder on marketing their properties because of the extra competition. This is less relevant for a Marriott or a Hilton for whom much of the marketing is handled centrally from the US, but it is very relevant for the many independent hotels on Curacao (Kura Hulanda, Floris, Avila, etcetera). (more…)
For some time now I have been working on the website curacao.com. As the work I do for this site is apart from Dragonfly Media and as it is more technical in nature I never blogged about it here before. However, lately it is starting to become more interesting to blog about because the Tourist Board (owner of curacao.com) has started up an SEO make-over campaign.
The Tourist Board and I have been talking about it for some time now and they fully realize that optimizing your website is one of the most effective ways of getting more visitors (on-line AND off-line). The SEO report I made for them outlined a set of actions which would help in getting better rankings for the targeted key phrases. Once we have pruned the list of keywords and phrases to target, we will start implementing the suggestions.
The Curacao Tourist Board has graciously allowed me to report on the results in this blog so you can expect periodical updates here about the status of this campaign.
Disclaimer in the interest of full disclosure: Dragonfly Media and I have no authority whatsoever when it comes to the contents of curacao.com and associated websites. Any questions regarding the contents of and/or advertising on curacao.com should be directed to the Curacao Tourist Board or the companies/people that they have charged with authority in this respect.
The sad thing about making websites is that they are, by definition, temporary. At the speed the internet is moving, you just know that the website you made yesterday is not good enough anymore tomorrow. But then again, this is marketing and that’s the way it works. You need to move forward and renew yourself, and your company, every day to be able to stay ahead of the curve.
When you redesign, reorganize or rebuild a website the URLs of the individual pages will usually change as well. This becomes a problem when you think of all the links into your website and the link juice you’re throwing away if you don’t redirect these links in an SEO-friendly way. Sure, you can catch the errors people are getting and redirect them to the proper page or your homepage with links or JavaScript, but these methods don’t work well for the search engines. This is where 301 redirects come into play. (more…)
Dragonfly Media has been trying to promote Search Engine Optimization on Curacao for a while now. We have been talking with (potential) clients, we did our Curacao SEO Project and we have some other plans to improve the general level of SEO on our little island.
We are seeing some progress in the amount of people that know something about SEO here and more and more clients are asking us for this specific service.
Our work is far from done though when you take into account this post on SEOmoz about how Search Marketing Education still has a long way to go. And they’re talking about the US which is usually about 5 years ahead of Curacao when it comes to the internet!
One of the blogs I read regularly is garrycon.com. Last week Garry posted a somewhat panicky post about how he thought that he’d been doing all the wrong things on his website.
He wrote about how he thought schemes like Text Link Ads were bad, links without rel=”nofollow” would make him lose PageRank and how duplicate content on his own site was making pages in his site go supplemental. As Andy Beard told Garry in the comments; he was effectively the victim of Google FUD.
FUD is an abbreviation for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. The idea is that you use people’s fears to sell a product by casting doubt on the competitor’s product. IBM used it very effectively during the 70’s to discredit Amdahl. Even though Amdahl’s products were better and more cost-efficient than IBM’s products people preferred IBM computers because of the FUD.
Google FUD is slightly different though. Google uses it to spread fear in the hearts of SEOs that try to bend the rules. The method is that they tell webmasters just enough to know what is the right way to do things but they leave room for speculation. Then when people address the holes or, try to, take advantage of the apparent holes in the algorithm they hint that those tactics might get people banned. (more…)
There are several companies and organisations on Curacao that represent Curacao abroad to bring in more tourism. The two most important ones in this respect are the Curacao Tourism Board (CTB) and the Curacao Hospitality And Tourism Association (CHATA).
Today these two organisations joined hands and presented the facts and figures for 2006 and moderated a discussion about the marketing plan 2008. Bo went to this meeting in the morning and I joined the afternoon session.
We are no off-line marketing guru so we can’t say very much about the what, where and when of promoting a Caribbean destination in the US, but we do know about the internet-side of this discussion. There are two things about the on-line marketing efforts which were discussed that piqued my interest. (more…)
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