What to Look For in Your Adventure Travel Website

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The adventure travel market is an intriguing 1-- it is an really competitive environment dominated by a few substantial players (National Geographic Expeditions, for example) and hundreds of smaller fish. With dozens of one of a kind niche markets and hundreds of boutique adventure destinations, it is definitely crucial that your web page stands out from the crowd and that your trips can be found in the search engines.

When I very first got involved in the adventure travel market, I was a software advertising guy from the Seattle boom times. I had worked with some of the biggest and the perfect in internet development and software program marketing, and I was utilized to finding a solid product at a fair (though reasonably high) cost.

My 1st foray into the adventure travel marketing market floored me. The smaller "mom and pop" travel providers are in quite a few situations receiving completely taken advantage of by unscrupulous "experts" in Search engine optimization/SEM and site promoting. I've seen these struggling, low margin firms paying leading dollar for completely shoddy sites and services, and just accepting it due to the fact they do not have the technical information to argue the point.

1 of our clients was paying hundreds of dollars a month for a static HTML website with an amateur style and minimal Search engine optimization services. They were made use of to waiting weeks, if not months for their provider to update the web page for them, essential variables when you're adding or removing trips and destinations or gearing up for a new season. And though they expressed amazing confidence in the Search engine optimization expertise of their provider, I found that they had quite possibly been taken for a ride-- they had identical meta descriptions and in a number of situations, meta keyword tags on every single page of the website, and their "consultant" had taken little, if any thought to the content material of the page.

So-- following that lengthy-winded tirade, you could be asking your self "Well, what really should I anticipate as a modest-to-midsized adventure travel firm who just wants a respectable and functional internet presence?"

I'm glad you asked!

1) Make sure you get a CMS (Content material Management System).

There is no earthly reason why you want to be struggling with a painfully useless tool like Frontpage, or even worse, waiting for your provider to update your web-site and then charging you for the privilege. Modern day CMS frameworks allow you to go to a "backend" section of your web site and just fill out a form with the info you want, in an interface that looks and feels like Microsoft Word. The data is all maintained in a database, so there's not hundreds of pages of static content that all want to be modified when you change your telephone number or update your logo. And it is very straightforward to publish or unpublish content based on calendar dates or a user's access level.

2) Take advantage of Google.

Google has tons of excellent tools that can aid your web-site and promoting efforts succeed. Google Webmaster Tools enable you to maintain tabs on how frequently your web page is getting crawled by Google, how a large number of URLs are indexed, what keywords consumers are obtaining your web page by, and they'll even point out concerns with your web site that might possibly be hurting your Search engine optimization performance.

Google Analytics is the best factor going for webmasters to see specifically how their web-site is performing. There's way too significantly to go into here, but if you are not employing Google Analytics, you will need to be!

Google Sitemaps-- make certain you are generating an XML sitemap with all your web site content material readily accessible. Google loves these issues, and it makes your web site that a lot easier for the Google spiders to traverse. Rather simple to do, and if done correct, will dynamically update itself so it is always present.

three) Be organized.

One of the worst factors we see on the tiny-to-midsized adventure travel company web sites is badly organized page content. Part of this is due to point number one, above: since there is no CMS, and no beneficial way to edit content material (or for the reason that the provider editing the content is incompetent!), content just gets tossed all into one lengthy page, or gets broken up with no actual rhyme or reason.

Believe just before you sort! Try this-- make a grid, with geographic locations on 1 axis and adventure kinds (eg. fishing, camping, hiking, boating, etc.) on the other. Then, populate the grid with your individual trips, and subcategorize them by any demographics you might use (eg. family members trips, children's trips, women only, etc.).

When you have got this strategy worked out, you'll see that it's much easier to discover a "slot" for each and every individual trip-- and your users (and the search engines!) will thank you for it.

4) Keep in mind: Content material is KING!

I'll go ahead and say it-- I believe that a lot of the Search engine optimization practitioners out there are snake oil salesmen. They send confusing reports with ambiguous info, then claim that it was their fiddling with a couple of meta tags that resulted in a amazing jump in rankings or in superior site visitors, and then they charge you $100/month.

Though a fine Search engine optimization guy can genuinely make an impact, the reality is that this type of dramatic alter from basic meta tag management is increasingly unlikely. The best thing you can do to support your search engine ranking is to have well written, topical content! If you are the world's finest fly fishing outfitter, prove it-- with detailed, intriguing and expert articles about all the cool stuff you do.

Augment this with blogs, press releases, articles about you from publications and newspapers, and so on. Get it in writing and get it on your web-site!

Very good luck.