Posts Tagged ‘YouTube’
Central Motel in Port Fairy gets a Website Makeover
Peter and Linda from the Central Motel in Port Fairy recently engaged us to give their old website a makeover. The usual goals:
- Make a Good Presentation of their Accommodation, Central Motel is an attractive accommodation with a great location in Port Fairy. It was easy to make improvements to the old website simply using new images and layout.
- Improve Search Engine Results, keywords like Great Ocean Road and Port Fairy have been emphasized along with basic terms like accommodation and motel.
- A Flexible Website that can be easily Managed, we’ve used BurgundySky again to make this website as it consistently provides great results. We’ve used Google Maps, embedded video hosted on YouTube and Online Booking to simplify sales.
At the same time we updated their website, we also looked at inbound links, additional sales channels and opportunities to improve online bookings.
Tags: accommodation, BurgundySky CMS, Google Maps, motel, SEO, websites, YouTube
New Website for Goulburn Motel – Lilac City Motor Inn
Lilac City Motor Inn – a motel in Goulburn NSW; has just added a new website using Burgundysky’s latest free-form template. This template is slightly different from the others because you have a wider array of design options. You can set backgrounds, widths, navigation styles, banner images and site images.
Lilac City Motor Inn has engaged us to build a website, as well as working on local search optimization – hope to see it coming up soon at the top of search results. With any new website, it requires some work to develop links and get the Search Engines to index pages and rank them in results.
I just happened to be passing Goulburn, so I made a ‘quick and dirty’ video with my camera. The sound could be a lot better. We’ll probably upload a better video when we get one. I’ve both embedded this video object on the home page and linked it to the motels Local Business Centre. Adding an embedded element is said to give a web page better search results and certainly it helps wth ranking in Google Maps. I’ve also Geo-located the video in YouTube so that it will display for Google Earth.
Tags: accommodation, Goulburn NSW, Lilac City Motor Inn, Motel Website, YouTube
Is there a Duplicate Content Penalty from Google?
Duplicate Content is when the same words are repeated on multiple pages or urls. The problem with Duplicate Content is that Google tries to eliminate these repeated pages so that users get a variety of results rather than a lot of repeats. On one hand that is good, but for people who need their content to be ranked highly it could be bad. When a page is considered by Google to be a duplicate, it does not display in the natural result. Instead, you must click a link to ‘view omitted results’.
I’ve linked to a video below with Greg Grothaus, an Engineer at Google Search Quality. Greg says Google does not ‘penalize’ websites for duplicate content, but not displaying is a form of penalty. Worse, he makes some vague statements about whether content that is a duplicate of another website is spam. He gives examples such as Wikipedia. I wonder how they know where the original content came from because a lot of people updating Wikipedia would just cut and paste snippets from other people’s websites.
Interestingly enough, we find many Motel Owners demand that we use duplicate content. Let me explain. Motels often have snippets of official descriptions that they want to use on every website. They think it keeps their message consistent – sort of like a branding statement. If you didn’t care about Search Engines that might be good logic.
Our goal as search optimizers is to display as many different web results as possible for each motel we service. So, if we add a listing to a regional website it is necessary to mix up the text so that it reads well and keywords are employed. We want search engines to display every instance of the motel’s web advertising as unique and relevant to users. Making something different for every website is tricky. How different is also a question that can be hard to determine. Certainly, if you are adding new listings, try to say something that is fresh.
Here is Greg Grothaus’ video on Duplicate Content. It’s a bit technical at times, but interesting.
Tags: duplicate content, google search results, YouTube
Using YouTube for Viral Marketing
Viral Marketing – sounds like you could get sick.
No seriously, how can you play the social media game and get exposure to your website for a small investment? YouTube is turning into an interesting option.
Here’s an example where the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam made a humorous video poking fun at their facilities. This video has turned out to be very popular with over 25,000 views.
Does this help you sell more accommodation?
I guess humor is always a risky proposition – but if you’re lucky enough to catch people’s attention it can certainly work. Despite the video, Hans Brinker has a lot of guests checking in because they want to stay with people that have a good sense of humour. If nothing else, they’ve done something worthy of a post and got an inbound link. I think they are brilliant!
You may find that just a simple video about your property and location is good enough. It gets you listed in a new type of distribution with links back to your website. Your videos start to display in Google Earth and more.
Making and uploading videos to YouTube are not that hard. I highly recommend it!
Tags: accommodation, hotel, Marketing, YouTube
Using YouTube to Make a Big Impression
YouTube is really an interesting way to extend the marketing of a website. On the one hand, video can make a website stand out and it delivers really interesting impressions of your accommodation or surrounding area. On the other hand, it creates new ways for customers to find you.
When you use Google, you can search for websites, maps, images and videos. You may also find your video linked in Google Earth. You can also link videos to your Local Listing in Google, which in theory could boost the ranking you get with maps. YouTube also seems to show up as a website with an inbound link to where videos are embedded.
No matter how you look at it, uploading video to YouTube is a winner.
Making a good video may not be easy, but the actual part of uploading and linking a video is easy. YouTube takes out all the hassles of hosting and bandwidth. They also provide simple steps to embed the video in your web pages.
Here’s an excellent example from Lamplighter Motels in Melbourne’s Oakleigh suburb. We’ve linked it on the main website as well as on their Golden Chain Melbourne Motels listing.
Here’s the embedded video.
Tags: accommodation, Embedded Video, Lamplighter Motel, Melbourne, motel, Oakleigh, Video, YouTube