01 September 2010 7:17 AM
By Jeff Higley
Editorial Director
jeff@hotelnewsnow.com

OMG! I OH @ the bar that my BFF is now on FB! LOL—I’m JK! BTW, I just sent you a DM that you can RT. L8R!

Translation: Oh my gosh! I overheard at the bar that my best friend forever is now on Facebook! Laughing out loud—I’m just kidding! By the way, I just sent you a direct message that you can re-Tweet. Later!

OK, so I’m a dweeb. I admit I have trouble reading the first paragraph of this blog with a straight face. I also admit that I have a little bit of a social media phobia. It’s not the concept of it or the advantages of using it that I don’t get. No, my problem revolves around not being able to get my arms around it. Social media is a huge universe these days—and it can be intimidating. It’s like learning an alien language.

I got a huge dose of reality while moderating a panel about social media during the Southern Lodging Summit @ Memphis a couple of weeks ago. The panelists—John Fareed of Fareed Zapala Koepke, Michelle Lapierre of Marriott International, Kerry Crawford Trisler of the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau and Corey Trautvetter ofHotel SystemsPro—were so knowledgeable that the session quickly turned into a classroom for the 150 of us who were there.

The session could have lasted much longer than the hour and 15 minutes that it did. It wasn’t just the US$1,000 cash drawing sponsored by Elvis Presley Enterprises that kept fannies in the seats. It was a desire to learn.

The panelists shared a lot of info, and in those 75 minutes we were able to establish 33 tips to develop an effective social media platform for hotels. The best part about the panel is that each of the four panelists was quite knowledgeable—and very willing to share their experiences. Kerry, the mover and shaker behind the popular ilovememphisblog.com, added a touch of youth and exuberance that often is missing from panels. The other three offered youth and experience!

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New Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing (AML/CTF) laws were passed in Australia in December 2006 and have been gradually phased in since then. The introduction of the laws are aimed at bringing Australia into line with international AML/CTF standards which are designed to combat money laundering and terrorism financing, and assist law enforcement to identify criminals.

The laws impact all financial institutions (including PayPal Australia), as well as other sectors such as the gambling sector, real estate agents, jewellers, solicitors, accountants and bullion dealers.

How is PayPal Australia affected?

PayPal is required to obtain Proof of Identity documents from certain account holders. This is similar to the 100 point check banks do when you open a bank account; the difference is that for the majority of customers PayPal collects this information only when your account balance reaches a certain level.

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AUGUST 20, 2010
Marketers are challenged to stay up to date on the latest developments

Social media is no longer new, but it’s still a turbulent space. Just a couple years ago MySpace was on top of the world, only to be ousted unceremoniously by crowds flocking to Facebook. Twitter crept onto the scene and then exploded with growth in 2009, putting itself on every marketer’s radar. New trends are developing in the social location-based area, and that’s not counting the seemingly constant mergers, acquisitions, startups and failures.

Little wonder that marketers find it difficult to stay on top of the hottest social media trends. A May 2010 survey from staffing firmThe Creative Group found that 65% of US marketing executives considered it at least somewhat challenging to keep up.

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Google dominated the search market by Hitwise’s measure.

Aug 19, 2010

Brafton reported yesterday comScore’s July 2010 search engine rankings indicated Google was losing market share, and the search giant’s loss was Yahoo’s gain. It seems Hitwise’s data tells a different search story. Hitwise released its July 2010 search rankings today, revealing that Google has held steady in overall search share and gained ground in most verticals.

The data shows that Google accounted for 71.43 percent of U.S. searches last month, showing 0 percent difference from June 2010. Meanwhile, Hitwise says yahoo.com culled 14.43 percent of queries in July, demonstrating no change from June. ComScore reported that Yahoo gained ground in July.

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There are now approximately 1.8 billion users throughout the world. They are located in many countries and speak multiple languages. Many of them could be potential customers. But how do you reach them? Not only do you have to speak their language, you have to ensure your website appears where they are searching.

Website globalization can be achieved through market research, translation, localization and optimization. Following this 10 step process will help you rapidly increase site traffic from international search results.

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Tue 17 Aug 2010

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by Steve Shaw |  Published in: Business/ECommerce

If you ask your target readers what types of articles they would like you to write, I’m sure that they would all say they are looking for an article that will give them something that they need, offer a solution to a problem that they have, and give them information that would make their lives better.

No matter what your niche is, your target readers all want the same thing — they want to read your article and say, “Ah-Ha! That’s a great idea! I’m going to try what this article suggests.”

Your goal as the author is to create that “Ah-Ha!” article.
But how in the world are you supposed to know what your target readers really need?

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WinSnap is a clean, fast, simple and user-friendly utility for taking and editing screenshots. It can easily capture windows of non-rectangular form with customized and transparent backgrounds, including Aero Glass on Windows 7 and Vista. WinSnap adds eye-candy drop shadows, reflections, rotations, watermarks and other effects on the fly. It supports a variety of image formats and provides advanced auto-save features.
http://www.ntwind.com/software/winsnap.html

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By Jill Whalen (c) 2010

Looking at the latest search marketing conference agendas, articles, and online news in the SEM space, it certainly appears that social media marketing and networking are the wave of the future.
To a certain extent, they are.

Social media, and social networking in particular, create a back-and-forth conversation with your target audience, so you can virally market your website through the “buzz” that can be created. When something interesting, cool, or unique is being talked about in “all the right places,” it can certainly provide a boost in website traffic.

We search marketers tend to hang out in numerous online and offline communities where it’s easy to promote our own products and services, yet I can’t help wondering if our view of Web marketing is skewed because of this.

Are potential B2B clients and even B2C customers spending time at Digg? Do they attend SEM conferences in order to hire a company, or are they just trying to learn to do it themselves? And what about other industries? Is there a Sphinn equivalent for developers of product lifecycle management software? Are there groups of people online comparing the various brands of auto parts? Are there really people seeking out articles on these topics?

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by Steve Shaw |  Published in: Business/ECommerce

Are you looking for tricks for getting more publishers to pick up your articles for publication? Have you been looking at your article views and thinking, “What am I doing wrong?”

I’ve got 5 article marketing tips that will help you create articles that work at maximum efficiency for you:

Article Marketing Tip #1: Remember that the quality of your articles matters.

Each article that you write must be written to help your target readers. Your articles must be useful, easy to read, grammatically correct, and on the same general topic as your website.
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By Clinton R. Lanier (c) 2010

Font type and size. What boring elements, but what important ingredients in any written communication. We often don’t notice font, even when we can’t read it: it’s almost completely transparent.

Writing for the web however forces us to use a completely different set of rules, and those rules created for hard copy writing don’t really apply any more. For example, when writing for print you should really use a Times-like font when writing, because the slight serifs (the small marks at the end of each leg of a letter) allow the reader to quickly separate and identify the letters more quickly than any other letter. This is part of the meta-information of a document: it facilitates meaning without meaning something itself.

However, the rule is different for the web. Researchers have found that sans-serif fonts, specifically Verdana or Helvetica, work the best. People can more easily read on the screen when using these fonts. Thus, when setting font type, these are perhaps the best used.

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IN-DEPTH: Interview with Anil Aggarwal, CEO of Milestone Internet Marketing

By Ritesh Gupta August 2010 Social Media continues to grow in importance. It has not only become a critical tool to interact with customers, but is also a key element that impacts organic search rankings for your hotel.  Hotels that take advantage of this hot trend are seeing significant benefits in terms of online placement and revenue. “The most common question that we get asked in the hospitality industry is why I should be concerned about social media and how will I benefit from social media elements.  An essential follow-up to these questions is how should I go about optimising for social media and measure ROI?  In this article, we give tips about some of the key initiatives that you could undertake to maximise the gain on social media channels.  The content in this article is gathered from several years of practical experience working on social media optimisation strategies for our clients,” says Anil Aggarwal, CEO of Milestone Internet Marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

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By Wendy Suto (c) 2010

Since its debut in 1996, Google’s search engine has experienced countless updates and revisions. But none of those revisions have fundamentally changed the architecture of the Google search algorithm as much as Google’s latest update, codenamed Caffeine.

While recent reports put Google’s market share at around 65 percent, a massive update to its search engine technology makes sense at this point. Microsoft’s new Bing search engine showed some resiliency in late 2009, while Web 2.0 services like Facebook and Twitter have done a lot to change the way people search for content on the Internet.

For Google to remain the most popular search service, it will have to counter Bing’s claims of technical superiority. It would also have to more effectively incorporate “real-time search,” the term used for finding information and content – like tweets from Twitter and breaking news stories – that have just been posted.

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Jul 25, 2010 at 2:46pm ET by Chris Sherman

Virtually all of the famous print travel guides have online counterparts. Most are just as packed with information, photos and maps as their print versions. Most also have planning tools, community, deals and other online-specific features. Surprisingly, for sites that offer information about travel and moving around the world, many don’t have mobile versions of their websites, though some do have apps or iBook versions.

If you’ve ever browsed the print versions of many of these travel guides, you know that they’re largely similar, and the one that works best for you is largely a matter of subjective taste. That’s true online, as well. I’d recommend sampling what each has to offer before picking out a few favorites to return to as trusted resources.

Arrivalguides.com

Billing itself as “the world’s largest network of free travel guides,” Arrivalguides.com is unique in that it’s entirely web-based, and all of its guides are available as free, high-quality PDF downloads. Although the website is available in either English or Swedish, if you click through to individual destination cities you’ll often find options to download the guide in different languages, including the local language spoken at the destination. Arrivalguides.com doesn’t have a mobile version, but does offer free downloads of its most popular guides in the iTunes app store.

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By Titus Hoskins (c) 2010

No less than CNN is reporting rumors that Google does indeed have a social networking site in the works which could give Facebook some competition. This new social site/program is supposed to be called GoogleMe or Google Me.

Only Google knows the truth.

However, creating such a site would be a smart move on Google’s part since they do need to compéte with Facebook, mainly because Facebook is turning into a real search engine, one that could possibly give Google a run for all those lucrative search dollars. Ridiculous you say – not really, especially when you consider Facebook’s recent move towards “Open Graph Search” and its use of the “Like” button and box. is the number of plugins which you can add to your blog.

Unless the surfing public changes overnight, Bing/Yahoo is not going to give Google any real search competition, but Facebook with its massive number of users and rating system could present a true contender.

We also might see a complete change in how the surfing public sees online search. Google and the other search engines are quickly becoming one big “joke” in regards to organic search with big companies buying and selling their way into the top 10 spots and the search engines are helpless to stop it.

Link buying and selling has made organic search a joke and more and more web users are catching on to this fact. Once this becomes common knowledge, search engines will be appropriately viewed as corporate billboards rather than anything of true relevance or importance – even the mighty Google could fall.

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By Ryan Singel, Wired

July 21, 2010

(Wired) — Facebook is primed to announce this week that it’s amassed a half billion active friends, a milestone reinforcing its status as the king of social networks — a company to be regarded with the seriousness and power (if not revenue) of Google, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Five hundred million and rising also makes it clear to anyone not paying attention that Facebook is no fad, that it is a cultural force shaping our collective culture. Even if you have no desire to ever set up a profile, you can’t ignore it and you are now oddly defined in the negative and left out of the zeitgeist.

A service of that size won’t disappear anytime soon, even if Facebook has hit its plateau in the U.S. But net users are fickle and the web’s short history includes dozens of sites that were once high-flying that have either since died (Geocities), lost their luster (Yahoo) or faded into irrelevance (Friendster).

So how could Facebook lose its place at the center of the web?
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By Mark Nunney (c) 2010

Your website’s content will get noticed, get read, and get customers if you use your headline and first paragraph to let readers know what is in it for them. Here, I’ll introduce you to some techniques you can use to make that happen.

This article is an edited version of a chapter of Wordtracker’s The Website Content Recipe Book – 21 irresistible content ideas to wow visitors and boost your search engine optimization.

Don’t Stop Marketing – Every Page is a Marketing Page

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By George Muha (c) 2010

The people at Google are truly inspired! They are evolving their search engine into something that can be an incredibly powerful tool for business. There are a zillion things that Google can do for different parts of your business and in this post, I will highlight the top 10 Google search tools that will help your supply chain.

Since Google is just a click away, I think it’s a very useful for everybody involved in the supply chain to be aware of how much easier it can make their lives. Everybody from traffic managers, to purchasing people, to accounting people and customer service will likely need to reference what Google can do during the course of the week. There are a lot of people who don’t even know all of Google’s capabilities. So without further ado, here is your:

Top 10 Google Search Tools That Will Help Your Supply Chain

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Please click on link below to see a copy of the inaugural Travel Daily Airline Business Class Guide, a free supplement for TD readers giving an overview of the business class products offered by major airlines marketing flights in Australia.

Click here to download Travel Daily’s 2010 Business Class Guide

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El blog de Mirai para hoteleros
On May 6^th 2010 in its press release Tripadvisor announced that over 12 000 hotels around the world had subscribed to its Business Listings service and added their urls, emails and telephone numbers.  Five months after the launch Paris has taken the leader position wih 13% slice of the total listings with urls, followed by Rome, Florence and Venice.

It looks like a great business for Tripadvisor! According to cautious estimates, the above numbers can mean at least 5 million euros in revenue generated by the new feature. But is it really worth for a hotelier to pay from 400 up to 10 000 Euros per year? Since TripAdvisor launched the service we have received many enquiries from numerous hoteliers, keen to boost their direct sales by placing a link, asking whether it pays off. We decided to check it.

So what is exactly a Business Listing on TripAdvisor?

It is a service that enables a hotelier to place a simple link containing hotel’s telephone number, URL and email on a search results page (Screen 1) and on a hotel’s sub-page on TripAdvisor (Screen 2).

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JULY 12, 2010

The main reason? They just lost interest

There’s no question of Facebook’s position at the top of the social networking space, and one thing that makes the site so powerful is that when it comes to social networking, a user’s friends must be users too. But among some teens, Facebook may be losing its stickiness.

According to a study from OTX and virtual fashion siteRoiworld, nearly one in five teens with a Facebook profile had decreased or discontinued their use of the site as of April 2010.

What’s more, the decreases seemed to speed up in recent months, with two-thirds of the lapsed users having turned away from the site in the past six months.

In addition, 9% of teen internet users said they had a Facebook profile but had completely abandoned it.

This turnover does not approach the level of MySpace, where 22% of teens had completely stopped using a profile. YouTube and Twitter both sported relatively high 15% abandonment rates.

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By Elyse Tager (c) 2010

Most business professionals are on LinkedIn at this point. LinkedIn tells us that:

• LinkedIn has over 70 million members in over 200 countries.
• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and  about half of our members are outside the U.S.
• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

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By Tinu AbayomiPaul (c) 2010

There are about ten common Facebook marketing tactics. (You can probably think of more, but most are a derivative of one of these ten.) It may surprise you to learn that five of these tactics don’t even work — that’s fully half! Now, no Fire God will suddenly appear to smite you if you happen to have done one of the following things. They are definitely mistakes, but they aren’t irreversible. In fact, they’re really only mistakes in one sense of the word.

My perception of these as “mistakes” isn’t about breaches of the unwritten Facebook etiquette either – I dance on those lines myself from time to time.

Rather, I’m calling them mistakes from a perspective of effectiveness, versus the alternative behavior. Whether they’re wrong in terms of just coming across as rude or politically incorrect is another matter altogether.

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• July 02, 2010
• By: Ruthanne Terrero
• TravelAgentCentral

Want to know what the top consumer trends are when it comes to searching for travel? We got some great statistics from JaneButler, Google’s industry director for travel.

Here are some some general trends and percentages that will help you know what your clients are looking for….(we’ll give you a hint, it’s deals!)

All statistics reflect a year-over-year change from 2009 to 2010:

Searches for “summer vacations” are up by 5 percent.

Searches for “all inclusive vacations” are up by 20 percent.

Searches for “travel packages” are up by more than 10 percent.

Searches for “train tickets” are up by 10 percent.

Searches for “cheap plane tickets” are up by nearly 10 percent.

Searches for “package deals” are up by nearly 20 percent.

Searches for “last minute flights” are up by 9 percent, year over year — as are searches for “last minute cruises.”

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By Jeffrey L. Smith (c) 2010

The only thing better than one search result in the top 3 positions in Google is two search results from a double ranking. This SEO tip works by pushing a competitor off the first page, broadening your websites keyword funnel and thereby doubling traffic and conversions.

Two Results are Better than One

I read somewhere that 87% of search engine traffic for a given keyword is allocated from occupying the Number 1 position in the search engine results page. If you understand SEO, then this post will share a quick method to double your SERP positions and to improve the likelihood of keyword conversions – once you have reached the Mecca for a specific search term.

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By Matt Jackson (c) 2010

Business blogging is a different kettle of fish to blogging for money and that, in turn, is entirely different to blogging socially. The type of blog you manage will determine the voice, design, and style of your blog as well as the efforts you’re likely to put into promoting i

A business blog needs to be professional as well as appear it. Regular posting on topics that your readers will genuinely find interesting can promote you as an expert in your field. A blog can keep the line of communication between you and potential customers open. It enables you to post relevant, keyword rich postings that encourage new traffic and help build your client base.

It’s far from an exhaustive list but below are ten tips to remember when blogging for business:

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By D M Gray (c) 2010

Social media marketing is an essential tool for any business. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are among the most popular sites regularly visited on the internet and can generate large numbers of visitors and new sales leads.

Many businesses are already utilizing social media marketing as part of their ongoing business strategy, but a large percentage of these are not aware of the essentials required to fully maximize social media to its full potential.

Here are 5 important criteria that need to be addressed in order to run a successful social media campaign.

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In addition to hotel photos, hotel videos & reviews, the new service combines Google Street View technology with Accommodation Guru hotel data to enable consumers to virtually experience the location of their selected accommodation, before purchase.

It provides unprecedented panoramic views of each property – as if walking along the street outside – and helps travel researchers to check out details such as the location of their nearest restaurant, nearby parks and bars and get a good look at the general hotel surroundings so they can book with the assurance that they know exactly what to expect when they arrive. User reviews, hotel images and rates also pop up, allowing travellers to explore their chosen hotel from all angles before purchase.

No longer will people need to trust and book on the hotel description alone because it is now possible to see exactly how far it is from local attractions and sights as well as what the surrounding area has to offer.

In addition, Accommodation Guru has also added Google Panororamio – a display of local images within a given radius of a property.

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June 14, 2010 | Online Travel

Supplementing the site’s more than 35 million reviews and opinions from real travellers around the world, the wisdom of crowds on TripAdvisor is now enhanced by the wisdom of friends, delivering personalised recommendations.

TripAdvisor today announced the launch of its “TripAdvisor Trip Friends” feature, allowing travellers to get advice from their Facebook friends on TripAdvisor to plan their next vacation.

Supplementing the site’s more than 35 million reviews and opinions from real travellers around the world, the wisdom of crowds on TripAdvisor is now enhanced by the wisdom of friends, delivering personalised recommendations.

“As the world’s largest travel site, we’re thrilled to continue revolutionising the travel industry by providing our community with exciting new access to their friends’ valuable advice about travel,” said Steve Kaufer, founder and CEO of TripAdvisor. “With TripAdvisor Trip Friends, our 34 million monthly visitors can tap into their friends’ wealth of travel knowledge with just a few clicks, making holiday planning more fun, social and personal.”

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By Titus Hoskins (c) 2010

Recent changes to Google make it seem like Google is no longer just one search engine but a combination of 6 or 7 different search engines all rolled into one. Your SEO efforts should now be geared to ranking high in these search engines as well as in traditional organic search.

A little while back, I wrote an article entitled “The Five Pillars of Google Search” and had I known how important those pillars would become, I would have paid more attention to them. What I didn’t factor into the equation was Google’s whole re-structuring of its SERPs interface or landing page. It really is a whole new Google with not just one search engine but a combination of 6 or 7 search engines all competing for your attention.

The new left side column with its new functions and displays, opens up new opportunities for webmasters to get their listings within Google on that all-important first page. There are also many new ways to view the results such as view everything, or you can view with more or less shopping links. Plus, you can also view Google results for books, maps, blogs, updates, and discussions – all new ways to get your site or links into Google. Throw in the Wonder Wheel and things are indeed looking very different within the new Google SERPs.

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ASHER MOSES IN TOKYO

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By Bonnie Jo Davis (c) 2010

Almost every social networking site offers a feature called a “profile” that allows members to include their picture, a biography, live links to their websites and other detailed information. Most of us have multiple online profiles that are empty or only partially completed. It is this profile that helps other users decide if they want to work with you. Another perk of online profiles is that the live links pointing to your website may impact your search engine ranking.

It is very important that you think of these profiles as your own “Public Relations Department or Media Room”, specifically designed to sell you and your business. Imagine that you only have a few seconds to sell a new prospect on why they should want to get to know you and possibly do business with you. What is said and offered during these few seconds can make all the difference in the world. This is EXACTLY why your online profiles need to be completed to capture the attention of anyone who visits these sites.

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By Merle (c) 2010 MerlesWorld.com

If you have a brick and mortar store, and rely on walk-in traffic for your survival, you may be wondering what the Internet can do for your business. Believe it or not, a lot – and you don’t even need a website.

In the “old days”, the bulk of businesses relied on the Yellow Pages to get the phone ringing. The majority of marketing dollars were spent getting listed in this ten pound paperweight. With the popularity of the Net, less people let “their fingers do the walking” when they need something, and more are letting their mouse do the talking.

Online search has gone mainstream when it comes to searching for local businesses. Google states that 73% of searches are done for local content. Another study by BIA/Kelsey and Constat report that 97% of consumers use online resources when doing research for products/services in their local area. See www.kelseygroup.com/press/pr100310.asp.

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The Tourism e-kit is designed to assist tourism operators to make the most of opportunities the internet provides. We understand that you are all busy individuals with limited time available. So we have developed a series of simple tutorials to quickly give you the skills and knowledge to make informed decisions on this important area of your business.

The e-kit covers a wide range of subjects from the basics of developing a good web site to advanced topics like search engine marketing and online product distribution.

You’ll also:

• Get step-by-step lessons on e-marketing
• Find out what resources are available to you

Click here to download pdf

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Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist. So, from a copywriting and content marketingstandpoint, writing great headlines is a critical skill.

Here are some interesting statistics.

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of your title, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.

Remember, every element of compelling copy has just one purpose — to get the next sentence read. And then the sentence after that, and so on, all the way down to your call to action. So it’s fairly obvious that if people stop at the headline, you’re already dead in the water.

The better your headline, the better your odds of beating the averages and getting what you’ve written read by a larger percentage of people. This 11-part series will provide you with concrete guidance that’ll have you writing better headlines in no time.

1. Why You Should Always Write Your Headline First
2. The Cheater’s Guide to Writing Great Headlines
3. Do Key Words in Post Titles Really Matter?
4. How to Write a Killer “How To” Post That Gets Attention
5. 7 Reasons Why List Posts Will Always Work
6. Why Some People Almost Always Write Great Post Titles
7. 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work
8. 9 Proven Headline Formulas That Sell Like Crazy
9. 7 More Sure-Fire Headline Templates That Work
10. Warning: Use These 5 Surefire Headline Templates at Your Own Risk
11. The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines

For the other fundamental elements of writing great copy, check outCopywriting 101.

Sign up for free updates from Copyblogger for more tips on copywriting, content marketing, and writing great headlines.

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May 25, 2010 at 8:58am ET by Greg Finn

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MAY 24, 2010

Individual engagement for healthy brand relationships

The Internet and its increasingly social technologies have put more power into the hands of consumers. They can easily conduct their own product research, get advice and read reviews from peers, and broadcast their own complaints if they have a bad experience. According to the “Your Brand: At Risk or Ready for Growth” report from marketing services companyAlterian, these technological changes have led to skepticism and cynicism in consumers.

Rather than simply trusting experts or putting faith in brands, Internet users expect to do their own research and comparison shopping using many sources.

Nearly every respondent to Alterian’s survey did their own research and comparisons before a purchase at least sometimes, and 71% said they looked for as many information sources as possible to verify their findings.

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May 25, 2010 | Hospitality Industry

In April, Facebook debuted their new-and-improved “Like” button, allowing users to more easily connect with brands, services, and products across the Web.

The old Facebook “Like” function allowed users to connect only within their Facebook networks. For example, if someone posted any content, their network of friends could click a button if they enjoyed the content. The new “Like” button takes this group-excitement principle a step further by letting Facebook users click “Like” buttons on third-party websites. The user’s Facebook profile will then be connected with the company’s Facebook page.

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By Duncan Wierman (c) 2010

The one problem here is that most entrepreneurs look towards quantity as opposed to quality in their followers. This can prove to be a huge mistake since you don’t ever want to sacrifice quality when looking to amass Twitter followers.

How do people make such a mistake? Well, they look at volume as being the secret to their success. The problem here is that the process is not going to be a very successful one. Rather, it can prove to be disastrous more than anything else because your business ends up promoting itself to those that are really not interested in the products or services you are offering.

Yes, some people will sign on to be followers of your Twitter account with no real interest in being customers. That is why you need to develop a strong niche following as opposed to a large following.

The bottom line here is you do NOT want a large list of followers. You want an EFFECTIVE list of followers.

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Keywords are the defining element of SEO.

They help people find what they’re looking for when they perform a search — which is why you want to make sure your site is properly optimized for your best keywords.

… But will keywords always be the focus of SEO? Probably not.

Even now, the search engines place a lot of importance on the words that surround the keywords on your site. It’s not enough for you to have your best keywords embedded in strategic locations on your site. The rest of your content also has to be relevant.

Latent Semantic Indexing

For example, if you sell a diabetes cookbook and your top keyword is “healthy recipes for diabetics,” you need to optimize your site for that keyword.

… But you also need to make sure your content includes other related words and phrases, such as:

• diabetes
• cookbook
• healthy eating
• insulin
• glucose
• blood sugar
• diabetes management targets
• nutritional requirements
• carbohydrates

… and so on.

Some of these terms, such as “carbohydrates,” and “healthy eating,” aren’t specific to “healthy recipes for diabetics” at all… yet they’re terms the search engines want to find on a site that’s optimized for that keyword. They are a sign that the content on the site is relevant and useful.

… And that’s what the search engines are in the business of providing: USEFUL information to their users.

This focus on related terms is called “latent semantic indexing.” That’s just a fancy term describing how a computer determines the meaning of a body of words by looking at the relationships between those words. Instead of looking at the words and phrases individually, they look at the content as a whole.

Right now, search engines aren’t yet able to employ true latent semantic indexing– with all the information on the Internet, this job is enormously complicated! But that’s the goal they’re working toward. And when they reach that goal, your individual keywords won’t be nearly as important as the depth and breadth of your content as a whole.

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May 19, 2010

By Daniel Edward Craig

It appears that hotels are finally waking up to the importance of monitoring and responding to online reviews. TripAdvisor reports a 203% increase in hotel responses to negative reviews last year. Unfortunately, this equates to a mere 4% response rate. As reviews become ubiquitous, playing an increasingly critical role in travel decisions, hoteliers can no longer afford to let complaints go unanswered.

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By Martin Sejas (c) 2010

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 4 years, you know how popular and widely used Facebook is today.

Just a couple of years ago, you had to relentlessly encourage family and friends to join this social networking website (shortly after others had convinced you to join). Nowadays, it’s rare to find someone who hasn’t got a Facebook account.

At last count, there were over 350 million users on Facebook and this number is continuing to grow. It overtook MySpace as the number 1 social networking website on the planet last year and is just behind Google when it comes to online traffic. You can then understand how important Facebook marketing has become for websites everywhere.

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May 5, 2010 - eMarketer Staff

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TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice Awards are based on the millions of real and unbiased reviews and opinions from travelers on TripAdvisor.com. The winners were determined by a combination of travelers’ destination comments, favorite places, and overall destination popularity on TripAdvisor.

Destinations were awarded in the following categories: Top Destinations in the U.S. and World, Best for Families, Romance, Beach & Sun, Culture & Sightseeing, Food & Wine, Nightlife, Outdoor & Adventure, Relaxation & Spa, and Top Emerging Destinations.

“Millions of travelers rely on TripAdvisor for travel inspiration and have helped identify the world’s most outstanding destinations,” said Christine Petersen, chief marketing officer for TripAdvisor. “From stunningly beautiful locales to hot spots with amazing attractions, the 2010 Travelers’ Choice Destinations Award winners are truly incredible places that travelers love.”

For the complete 2010 Travelers’ Choice list, visitTripAdvisor

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