Building links to your hotel’s website is a critical step in promoting your online business, especially if you are a company such as a hotel who depends upon people from outside your community for business.
Link Building is a generic Internet term used to describe the building of links from other websites to your own, it’s the single most important part of establishing an online reputation and often ignored by business owners. Let’s take a look at several methods for building links to hotels and how you can make the most of free online marketing solutions.
Ask Other Hotels for Links
Many people would never consider asking other similar hotels or bed & breakfasts for a link but why not? One of the best ways to generate links in your industry is to trade links with other similar establishments across the country. Add a page to your website and list 20 hotels across the country that you’ve stayed at or enjoyed, then ask each of them to do the same. Each link acts as a vote for each other, so remember to only link to businesses you want to promote!
Tourism Operator Trades
If your hotel has nearby tourism operators such as whale watching or fishing, place a list of nearby ‘things to do’ on your website linking to each of them and ask each local tourism operator to do the same back to you. Often websites forget to swap links to compliment each other but adding local restaurants and hotels to a tour operator website is a wonderful way to increase business and traffic for both sites.
Associations and regional authority links
Does your town run a local tourism website? Make sure that you’re listed on it with a link back to your own website! Also look around at the associations and business groups you’re a member of to make sure that you have a profile on their website and that your business is linked back to your own website. These free listings are vital to building your authority through links but they’re also often well placed and promoted themselves, so driving business to your website from them is a bonus!
Operate localized and specialized tourism blogs
An often over looked resource for high quality links is to become a directory service yourself! Take the time to register a domain name using specific keywords in your area, for example I run a website about the best interior design schools called http://best-interior-design-schools.com/ where I promote the best design schools. You can easily run a similar website for your local travel and tourism professionals, giving you easy access to a high quality link!
Add your website to directories and list websites
Add your website to services such as dmoz.org and yahoo.com, these services offer high quality links as well as a constant stream of web surfers looking for specific information.
Wikipedia and other Wiki Websites
Online encyclopedia giant wikipedia.org is a fantastic place to link your business from, as long as you remember to follow their guidelines. Wiki’s are user controlled so be aware that anything you post there may be altered by other users and also keep in mind that your business should have some relevance to the service you’re posting details on. Wikipedia for example is first and foremost an encyclopedia, so make sure your business deserves a listing before posting one on the service or it will be deleted.
Article Syndication
Post articles on services such as EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare to reach more of an audience, article marketing is an easy way to quickly post your articles to thousands of web sites, best of all they all love to post back to you!