Monday, July 16, 2007

Review Community System

This is a system meant to promote an entire destination. It works well for a DMO (destination marketing organization) or an individual business working to develop their website into an authority portal.

This system requires considerable effort, creativity and energy. Potential Benefits include:
  • High Quality Links that help you in SERP (search engine results placement).
  • Improved SERS (Search Engine Results Saturation)
  • Improved Recognition, Reputation and Branding
  • Drive Quality Traffic directly to your website
  • Seeding (the phenomenon where once the first post is made, people are more likely to add follow-up reviews)
Four Step System:

Pick a community-driven travel portal
  • Choose one that lets you add links, photos, reviews.
  • Choose one that lets you add new businesses.
  • Become aware of how much you should contribute to be considered legit.
  • Look for one that is more focused on the users that contribute than the individual businesses being reviewed.

Create a Profile
  • Be Honest about who you are and your business interest.
  • Talk about your plans to add value to your local business.
  • Link to your own homepage from your profile.
  • Goal: get a high-quality link to your homepage from your profile page.

Create Posts for specific topics
  • Use your Posts as deep-linking opportunities... when possible, link to valuable interior pages of your website that support the topics you post about.
  • Write helpful, insightful posts. Be original, funny and useful. Show your personality.
  • Review local businesses, activities, attractions, etc.
  • Goal: get some high-quality deep-links

Link to your profile and individual posts from additional sites
  • Use social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or Magnolia.
  • Use free blogging, wiki and page-creationg sites that let you set up your own little mini-websites.
  • Goal: Help search engines find and index the pages that you created and give them a bit of Page Rank.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Mapping Community System

This is a system meant to get your local businesses and your website "on the map." It works well for a DMO (destination marketing organization) or an individual business working to develop their website into an authority portal.

It is relatively easy to accomplish. Potential Benefits include:
  • High Quality Links that help you in SERP (search engine results placement).
  • Improved SERS (Search Engine Results Saturation)
  • Improved "local search" results and "image search" results.
  • Drive Quality Traffic directly to your website
Add your attractions to Community Walk
  • Write SEO friendly text, upload photos. Allow comments.
  • Link your main map page to your homepage and deeplink each attraction page to an interior page on your website.
  • Pull photos from Flickr (below) instead of uploading directly.

Upload photos to Flickr
  • Create Galleries that link to your homepage.
  • Write SEO friendly and meaningful descriptions and tags; add deep-link hyperlinks.
  • Learn how to do Long/Lat and add your photos to the Flickr Map area.
  • Setup a Flickr Group and add your photos to it.

Upload to Google Earth's Keyhole System
  • Create an account in Google's Keyhole system
  • Upload the KML file created by CommunityWalk

Link to your CommunityWalk and Flickr Pages using Secondary Linking Strategy.
  • Use social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or Magnolia.
  • Use free blogging, wiki and page-creationg sites that let you set up your own little mini-websites.
  • If possible, embed your CommunityWalk maps into your website (using Iframe)