Imagine the travel and tourism industry without the Internet.

Hard to conceive, isn't it? The travel industry was amongst the first to be transformed by the WWW. The Internet as a channel of distribution has become one of the most successful channels used by consumers to research travel options, compare prices and make reservations for airline tickets, hotel rooms and car rentals.

Is your website providing what travellers are looking for?

Recent research in Queensland has proven that even though tourism is one of the most successful application areas on the World Wide Web, small and medium tourism websites are not optimised for search engines. This signifies that unfortunately the traveller cannot find what he is looking for about your property because it is not properly referenced for its key terms on search engines.

How can I tell if my tourism website is optimised?

Try Googling your tourism product by putting yourself in your customer's shoes on Google.You might also recognise the following common web design mistakes:

• The title of each page of the website is exactly or almost the same and does not tell you (nor the search engines) what the page is about
• All the keywords for the page have been added in the meta tag
• There are too many links on a page
• Javascript, Images and Flash menus are being used instead of text menus.
• Sites built in Flash and sites using Frames are not search engine friendly and will not get indexed properly in search engines

How much is it going to cost to optimise my tourism website?

If your website is not search engine optimised its is just like having a phone number but not being listed in the phone book.Can you afford to be paying for something that is being kept hidden from your target customers?

Search engine optimisation is not a costly exercise but a smart move. The revenue you will get from travellers now finding your website and being able to book your product will quickly cover our cost.

The other beauty of the online world is that everything we do is measurable  and you will be able to, by yourself, realise that the changes we made were well worth it for your ROI.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sepblog/3657122566/