My blog posts run aggressively long at times. So… I gave the instructions and “how-to” in the last post, but all you skeptics might want a “WHY” section to refer to…. and we shall call this the “meat” of the discussion. As I have made it late to lunch due to this post, it will not only entice me to end it, but will provide the bulk of the point of this discussion.
The reason this is important for business:
The more places we are active online, and the more places we exist online, helps us significantly. The more places we are talked about or our media is represented, the more relevant our brand and hotel is online, and the higher we will be ranked in search engines.
Search engines are changing and will be looking for content (media, graphics, organic conversation) and normal “keyword indexing†will be at the back of the bus. So as these changes start happening, we need to increase our online footprint as much as possible to grab as much “land†online before our competitors do. It is like the Oklahoma Sooners…those first to arrive ended up with the most land. Land in this case is content… personal photos on personal accounts (FB, flickr, shutterfly, etc) that casually mention work, or personal twitter accounts that engage people in conversation about your brand, or professional accounts for work. If guests, meeting planners, restaurant clients all post photos on their personal Flickr accounts, or youtube videos of their stays, or review (good or bad) on sites…. it benefits us greatly. The more content we have online, the more relevant we become. I know it seems like a lot of content, often empty or meaningless, but the more content the wider our footprint will be.
So get to it! =) Don’t hesitate to shout or scream or bemusedly confusedly ask questions. I am happy to talk about it, and today something clicked in on how important it is for EVERYONE to be talking about the brand or hotel, not just the social media guy. One smart person is good to get the ball rolling, but it takes the help of a whole network to get it up that hill.
Go.. learn… experiment.. have fun. The online world has forever impacted our business, and it promises to get even weirder. When these search engines start engaging content and media more than before…. successfull SEO will be a minour part of the overall picture. So go create an account or two!
Some relevant articles to this discussion?
Brands in searching saving the internet from being the “cesspool” it is:
https://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/10/08/this-cesspool-we-call-the-internet
This is a link to my blog, but it has some great “future of SEO” articles:
https://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2009/01/23/keywords-will-step-to-the-back-of-the-search-engine-line-or-how-consumers-will-find-hotels-in-the-future/