February 2006

The Internet is becoming more and more saturated with great websites every day. You can’t just create a website about your specialty and expect it to receive a large volume of search engine traffic unless you advertise or publicize it somehow. The quality of search results is also improving. The results on the second page are usually just as good as the results on the first page.

We are also not just competing against our Hawaii Island neighbors. We are more often competing against mainland webmasters who also see an opportunity to profit from being in our space.

The search engines like Google, Yahoo! & NSN are adding more personalization features to their services that users must log into to receive. This allows them to gather actual user data from web surfing history and bookmarks. They also factor in the age of website and the age of the links pointing to them.

It’s already very unlikely that a new website will show up anywhere on the radar especially in Google because there is no historical user data to support it.

The first step is always to create a great website worthy of occupying the number one spot. You must identify the problem your visitor is coming to your website to solve and then solve it quickly. If the visitor doesn’t find what they are looking for in a few seconds they will hit the Back Button and your advertising dollar will be wasted. Online advertising and publicity can drive traffic to your website but you must be prepared to retain that visitor’s interest and convert them to a paying customer.

Over time, quality graphic design, content, search engine friendly site structure and user-friendly navigation will create a solid foundation to build your online marketing efforts upon. Search engine advertising and publicity can help create and raise awareness that your website exists. Over time, this will help create a snowball effect where people will naturally begin to link to your website and the search engines will have the historical data needed to properly evaluate your new website.

How soon is now?

I had the great pleasure to spend some time with the kind folks at Travelocity today. One of the people I met was Travelocity’s CEO, Michelle Peluso. What a wonderful, humble and genuinely nice person. I had no idea who she was when I first met her. She was by the table with the nametags and asked my name as I approached, helped me find my name badge, and then she asked if I needed my parking validated. Wow! How many CEO’s of major brands will act like an ordinary person? Michelle and the rest of her team at Travelocity are truly the nicest people you’ll ever meet. They all work very hard to promote Hawaii as a destination.

There are so many other tropical destinations but Hawaii remains the place at the top of the list of desirable destinations to visit.

Hawaii is such a special place, but what makes it so special?

Not everyone who would like to visit actually does. More people actually visit Las Vegas. Ironically though, whenever you see travel ads on the Internet, you almost never see Las Vegas or slot machines pictured in the ads. You always see Hawaii imagery because Hawaii is where people actually want to go. When people think about a vacation dream come true, they visualize themselves in Hawaii.

So how do you close the sale?

What is unique about your Hawaii based business that can’t be found anywhere else in the world? What differentiates you from all other global competitors? Understanding how to sell to a website visitor’s emotions, is just as important as it is in any other medium.

Our scenic beauty and unmatched reputation for hospitality help create a very strong desire. It’s up to us to help the potential visitor realize that they can achieve this goal. The best time to visit Hawaii is always now.

Too many good people learn a little bit about SEO, but only enough to be a danger to them selves.

They learn links are good so they sign up for a service that creates hundreds of junk links that ultimately cause the search engines to penalize their website.

They learn a bit about keyword research and stuff the page with the target keyword until it’s unreadable and they get penalized. They create terrible domains like www.Hawaii-Hawaii-Hawaii.com not realizing that this doesn’t do anything but make you look silly. I made that one up just now because it was the most ridiculous URL I could think of, but it’s actually a real website that also has a real keyword stuffing problem. If you want to buy the domain name, it’s only $349.

It’s easy to stuff the copy with text links as well. Too many will get you in trouble. The same with H1 formatted text. It looks fine at the top if you use it like a newspaper headline but don’t stuff huge text all over your page. It looks terrible and makes you look terrible.

Basically, the word you need to keep in mind is nuance. Everything in moderation. Your best bet is to just make great content and give it some time. It looks like a web master spent some time on the Hawaii-Hawaii-Hawaii.com website. Unfortunately, it was just a waste of time and energy.