Building your Community

Compete in today’s modern internet with dynamic content generated by your staff

Search engine optimization and dynamic content creation for today’s modern internet

In today’s modern travel industry, the internet is crucial to a hotel’s sales and marketing efforts. Hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms are booked online every month. But most of that traffic is generated through third parties instead of a property’s own website. The problem is that hundreds of reseller websites clutter up search engine results. If you enter the name of a hotel in Google or Yahoo you’ll likely get dozens of web pages where you can book a room in that hotel. But in many instances you won’t see the actual hotel’s website until the second or third page of results! Which means the hotel is losing thousands of dollars in commissions a week to those sites.

So how should hotels respond to this challenge? The answer is content. Hotel websites, for the most part, are static. Sometimes referred to as brochure-ware, hoteliers typically spend tens of thousands of dollars to create appealing web sites. Professionally created photographs of pools, meeting rooms, spas combined with sophisticated interactive homepages and brand integrated booking software all look great. But in today’s modern internet, static websites are a thing of the past.

To compete today hotels need a way to generate dynamic, ever-growing and changing, content for their websites. It’s called web 2.0 or social networking. And Target Net allows hotels to do just this. With community tools select members of the hotel staff can generate dynamic content for your website. Content that includes photos, videos, blogs and more.

Dynamic content: good for more than just search engine optimization

This content serves a number of purposes; first and foremost, when combined with Knowland University training on keyword and reciprocal link usage, it can dramatically improve a hotel’s search engine rankings (see sidebar). Secondly, it is a powerful way to engage clients and potential clients in your hotel’s lifestyle and branding messages. A few examples of the way community tools could be used include: A sales manager uploading photos of powerful speaker from a conference at your hotel; a pastry chef sharing images of his latest mouth watering creation, a concierge sharing a video of a smiling couple returning from a night at the theater with the hard to find ticket stubs he provided them, or a general manager blogging on tricks to avoid traffic for attendees of an upcoming city-wide convention. The possibilities are endless.

Finally, community tools are designed to make Target Net easy to use and a little bit fun. Not all content uploaded in the community module needs to be displayed on a hotel’s website. Sales managers can use this space to personalize their environment. Much like happy employees place pictures and mementos in their cubicles or offices, community module allows users to personalize Target Net. And why is this important? It’s easy, because easy to use and engaging software products get used. And used correctly.