The biggest takeaway for us? Search has gone social. And the more mainstream channels like Facebook and Twitter are only the beginning.

We’re excited to apply what we’ve learned to the hospitality industry and to share some advanced techniques that will help to ensure your online presence is optimized to its fullest potential. Keep an eye on our blog in the coming weeks for some fresh ideas in the areas of social media, keyword research and retargeting. We’ll be sharing case studies from our current hotel clients and offering advice about the best ways to implement the latest SEO strategies.

To learn more about the speakers and sessions offered at Pro SEO Boston, visit www.distilledlive.com.

“If a picture’s worth a thousand words, the new Spruce Point Inn website’s worth a library,” said innkeeper Angelo DiGiulian. “Over this past winter, we have invested in makeovers for our guestrooms, an upgrade of the Main Inn reception area, new poolside and waterfront amenities and the creation of an oceanside deck café – Azure – that will bring a new option for waterfront lunch to Boothbay Harbor. We wanted our online presence to tell that story with the facts and the images that captured what we think the Inn is all about. O’Rourke has caught the timeless feel of a classic Maine summer vacation and the informal warmth of the Inn that keeps bringing people back, generation after generation.”

From spacious guestrooms to cozy Maine cottages, Spruce Point Inn Resort & Spa accommodates romantic getaways, family vacations and special events from weddings to executive retreats with a diverse selection of accommodations, including traditional and contemporary Maine lodges, guestrooms and suites in the historic Main Inn, classic Maine summer cottages and modern townhouses. During the renovations, the innkeepers have addressed the smallest details throughout the property, replacing wall and floor-coverings, adding new bedding, Keurig coffeemakers, plasma screen televisions and Green Natura bath products. Different color palettes accent the seaside cottage style or contemporary warmth of the furnishings. Each guestroom also now features photographs from the Inn’s storied past, including famous guests from astronaut John Glenn to the Kennedys as well as snapshots from the diningroom, dock and waterfront.

About Spruce Point Inn
In operation for more than 100 years, Spruce Point Inn is a distinctive and historic vacation destination for travelers from all over the United States. Its relaxing facilities have long been a part of the summer community and a backdrop for delightful “oceanside memories made in Maine.” Located in the seafaring village of Boothbay Harbor, Maine (an hour north of Portland) and situated on 57 acres of stunning oceanfront and sheltering pine forest, the Inn is a retreat of 56 modern rooms in eight lodges, 16 classic cottages and rooms, 9 historic inn rooms and 4 townhomes. The convenient location, peaceful setting and spectacular coastal views have made the Inn a premier resort for families, reunions, weddings and business events. For reservations, call 800-553-0289 or visit http://www.sprucepointinn.com.

Even though you are not directly promoting your hotel in the video, your brand will still be associated with the content, and you could have a link back to your hotel website. Once you discover and create the content your target audience is searching for, you must also take steps to promote your video online, and optimize it with keywords so it will appear in the search engine results pages.

Why should brands create online videos?

Video plays a significant part in internet marketing, and brands can use video to increase their online presence, engage viewers, and direct more traffic to their websites. Internet users enjoy watching videos, which is proven by the statistics that YouTube receives over a billion views a day, and that 20 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Corporations are starting to see the importance of using online videos and the great opportunities it provides them. Online video is considered ‘lean forward’ content because it is something the viewer has searched for, and elected to watch. The traditional T.V. ad is more ‘lean back’ content because the viewer didn’t choose to watch it, and often considers it to be an interruption of their television program.

It is also less expensive to create internet videos than T.V. spots. There are many sites where a corporation could place their videos, and many of them are free. There is also a chance that a video could go ‘viral’ which means other sites may pick it up, and people may forward it to each other.

How are brands using video?

Brands should create content specifically for the internet, and not just re-purpose television ads. Online videos are different than T.V. ads, and they should contain more authentic content with real people and real situations. One brand that works well with online video is Victoria’s Secret. Yes, perhaps this is no surprise, and they may have an upper hand here. However, they have created a fantastic Facebook page for Victoria’s Secret PINK line and have posted 16 videos. They have more than 1 million fans.

Sears was not as successful, and simply re-purposed their television ads and placed them on their facebook page. It is obvious to the viewer that they are watching an ad, and most people instinctively loose interest when they feel they are being sold to.

Brands shouldn’t rely on just one video, but should create a whole portfolio of videos. Red Bull has a video section on their website with videos that were produced years ago but are still getting views.

The Home Depot publishes educational how-to videos which indirectly promote their products without pitching them. The content of the video is focused on providing the viewer with information on how to make small repairs. Therefore, if someone is searching on ‘how to fix a toilet,’ a Home Depot video may come up. If the viewer watches that video they will see some of the Home Depot tools that they may then want to purchase.

InterContinental Hotels produced over 700 online videos about the cities where their hotels are located and posted them on their In The Know website. These videos are narrated by the concierge of the hotel who takes the viewer on a tour of the city and points out the monuments, restaurants, and points of interest. The videos were produced for relatively the same amount of money it would have cost to produce one T.V. ad. The videos were also picked up by numerous sites and were shown on an in-flight program. InterContinental Hotels thought about what the consumer would want to know and created content around it. To read more about the InterContinental videos see our blog.

How will your video be found?

Once you have discovered what travelers may be searching for, and have created video content around that, it is time to ‘seed’ your videos so they will be found by your target audience. Do some keyword research to find out what terms your target audience may be searching on. For example if you created a video about restaurants in Chicago brainstorm the various ways a person may search for that term such as; restaurants in Chicago, places to eat in Chicago, or Best Restaurants Chicago.

You should strive to have your video appear on the first few pages of Google for your selected keywords. Videos can appear organically in the search engine results pages and they can also appear in the videos tab on the navigation bar at the top left of a results page.

There is no cut and dry formula to ensure your video will appear in organic search, but there are some steps you can take that will increase its position in the search engine results pages. When you upload your video to a site such as YouTube, make sure to put your main keywords in the title of the video. You must also place your keywords in the ‘tag’ box and include them in the description of your video. Your video ranking is also affected by the number of views and votes your video has received.

Google has also just announced two YouTube features this month that could help your videos appear in organic search. The first is a preliminary roll-out of automatic captioning or auto-caps. YouTube will be able to create captions for videos using the current automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. Auto-caps was developed mostly to allow videos to be accessible to the hearing-impaired, and to enable people around the world to access the content in 51 languages. However, the captions will also help your video appear in the search engine results pages for relevant keyword searches. Auto-caps is a work in progress, and sometimes the captions are correct, and other times they are not so good, but as Google says, it is better than nothing.

The second feature Google is launching is called automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, which will make it easier for people uploading video to create captions manually. In the past it was a bit difficult and time-consuming to add captions so most people avoided it. With auto-timing you just need to create a text file of your transcript and Google will use ASR technology to match up the captions to your video. For more information, see the Google blog post on Automatic captions.

Other video hosting services are looking for ways to incorporate Search Engine Optimization tactics as a feature of their site. One such company is Fliqz.com which just released SearchSuccess this month, which is a set of tools and applications for video search engine optimization. One of their clients, Design World Online, has submitted 1,000 videos and 700 of them are already on the first page of the search engine results.

Apart from having your video appear in the search engine results pages, you should also promote your video on other sites. Place your video on your website and facebook account. Send tweets on Twitter that link to your video. Find similar videos on the same topic and post a video response with your video. Join discussion groups and post your video with your thoughts. You can also tag your video on social bookmarking sites such as delicious and StumbleUpon. Submit articles to travel-related magazines and embed your video.

Upload your video to video-sharing sites. There are hundreds of video sites available but some of the most popular ones are YouTube, Yahoo video, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, Veoh, and Blip.tv.

A good free tool to help you upload your videos is called Tubemogul. All you have to do is upload your video once, and Tubemogul can distribute it to over 20 different sites. You have to spend some initial time setting up accounts in the various video-sharing sites, but after that it can save you a lot of time. You will also be able to see the analytics of your video and learn what keywords viewers used to find your video.

We recently met up with Brett Wilson, CEO and co-founder of TubeMogul, at Ad Tech New York and conducted a brief interview. Tom O’Rourke CEO/Founder of O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing asked Brett what his advice would be to hotels in terms of creating content and then optimizing the content to appear in the search engine results pages.

Brett responded that hotels need to be thinking about what their target audience is searching for, and create content around that. He believes that video is the best medium to engage guests with your hotel. Although Brett stated he wasn’t an SEO expert, he stressed that Google looks for relevancy so your keywords must be relevant to the content. He also suggested that hotels post a video and then observe what happens. Look at the keyword reports to see which terms viewers used to find your video and then go back and iterate the keywords that are most effective.

If you would like to learn more about creating videos for your hotel please see our blog post Create Videos for Your Hotel

It’s been two months since Google introduced Sidewiki on September 23, but it hasn’t really caught fire . . . yet. When it was first announced, there was a lot of buzz on blogs and news sites, and it felt that the internet would be taken over by user-generated comments and opinions, but so far it hasn’t gained that much traction. We believe it will catch on soon, and that your hotel should be prepared for when it does.

What is Google Sidewiki and will it go mainstream?

Sidewiki is part of a Google Toolbar browser plug-in that allows users to open a sidebar on any website they are visiting and comment freely on anything they like; the website, the content, how they feel about the topic or the brand, or what they had for breakfast. These comments can then be seen by other visitors to the site (provided they have downloaded the Sidewiki toolbar) and they can leave comments as well. Users can also add links and videos, and share their comments through E-mail, Twitter or Facebook.

Will Google Sidewiki go mainstream?  We cannot predict the future, but given the success of other user-generated sites such as Trip Advisor, Yelp, You Tube and Wikipedia, we have reason to believe that it may.  As it is now, users have to sign up for a Google account and install the Google Toolbar to be able to see and write comments, and many people simply don’t know it exists.

However, Google has made an API available, which means that third party developers can access Sidewiki data and integrate it into their own applications or on their websites. Surely some tool will be developed soon that will catch the public eye and bring Sidewiki into the limelight.

People aren’t quite sure how to use Google Sidewiki yet, or what kind of comments they should be leaving. Really it all depends on the purpose and content of the website. Google recently wrote a blog post reviewing the first 50 days of Sidewiki, and shared 10 examples of ways users have written comments that will benefit others who visit the same site. For example Jason Young gave his own tips on how to tune a bass guitar on a guitar website, Matt Cutts from Google warned visitors about a deceptive website that claimed that Google is hiring people to work at home, and Jesse Poe added his personal reviews to a review of an iPhone application.

In a perfect world, the idea is great! If users can supply informative, relevant, quality comments that add knowledge and insight to the website content then that’s fantastic. We believe there will be some quality commentaries with useful information. People like to share their knowledge, or experience, on a topic they feel passionate about. We can just look at Wikipedia to see that.

However we don’t live in a perfect world and many companies see Google Sidewiki as a reputation management nightmare that will open up a new channel for malicious comments and reviews, or just create nonsense clutter. It could also be used by spammers. The companies and website owners have no control whatsoever over the comments. They do not have the right to approve or delete comments, as they can with blog comments, so they are really defenseless in a sense.

We also feel the temptation is too high and it’s too easy to write. Anyone could write anything just to be heard or to vent. What’s to stop people from airing dirty laundry, or bringing up personal information? I read one comment from a woman who owned a company and was concerned that as soon as her ex-boyfriend learns about Sidewiki he will surely try to bring her company down with his comments.

What about jaded employees, competitors? Sure they can write negative things about you on external sites but these will not likely be seen by the masses. To me, it is similar to a heckler during a speech. Who is to stop the Joe Wilsons of the world yelling ‘You Lie!’ everywhere.

Google is trying to control this, and has set up a voting system that allows users to vote if a comment is useful or not. There is also an option to report abuse where users can report a policy violation such as spam, illegal content, or any post that advocates hate or violence.

Google Sidewiki also has an algorithm in place that will put the highest quality, most relevant entries first, taking into account the votes, previous entries by author, and relevance to page.

Can I block Google Sidewiki?

There is currently no opt-out option for Google Sidewiki, but given all the controversy it has caused I would not be surprised if Google considers adding the option in the future.

Many companies have found ways to block Sidewiki, and they are selling their script. Google has actually found a way around some of these sidewiki blockers.

Some companies have even modified their server settings to block any user who even has the Google toolbar installed. This is probably not the best idea if you have a commercial website.

Other companies have elected to redirect visitors to a secure page. So when visitors type in http://www.yourhotel.com they would get redirected to an https site with the same name. Sidewiki cannot run on the secure site.

Less extreme, some third party developers have created tools that can block spam from the sidewiki.

How will Google Sidewiki affect my Hotel?

In regards to hotel websites, we believe users will begin to leave reviews of the hotel right on Google Sidewiki. This should not scare hotels, as they have been dealing with user-generated reviews for years on popular sites such as TripAdvisor and Expedia. The main difference is that these reviews will be closer to home, and visitors will be able to see reviews without navigating away from your site.

As is the case with other review sites, Google sidewiki could be an asset to your hotel or detrimental, depending on the types of reviews your hotel receives. And as we discussed in a previous post about TripAdvisor, negative reviews can actually be helpful at times.

Let’s look at the positives, the negatives, and how your hotel should manage these reviews.

The Positives

• Good reviews will encourage visitors on your site to make a reservation

• You will be able to respond to these reviews unlike some of the external review sites

• Visitors who read the reviews won’t be distracted by ads from your competitors

•  Sidewiki content can rank in the Search Engines, which can drive more traffic to your site

• Visitors who comment on your site can also share their comments through social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook which can also rank in the Search Engines and contribute to your web presence

The Negatives

• Similar to any review sites there is an opportunity for a guest to leave a negative or unfair review which you will be unable to remove

• It is just one more place you must monitor every day

• Comments may be too general or unstructured. On a standard review site there are different areas that the guest has to review such as cleanliness or service. Sometimes a guest will give a top rating to one area and a lower rating to another, which will often balance it out. On sidewiki, a guest may just mention what they didn’t like. There may also be reviews mixed in with other comments or perhaps even questions.

• Some review sites require proof that a guest has stayed at your hotel before they can write a review. This is not controlled with Google Sidewiki.

• Some review sites threaten to blacklist competitors if they are found out writing false negative comments about your hotel. Again this is not controlled with Google Sidewiki.

• On the flip side some review sites threaten to blacklist companies that write positive reviews about their own company. What is in place to stop you from enlisting people to write positive comments on your site, or voting on all the positive comments? Your competitors could be doing the same on their sites. Users may begin to distrust the comments altogether.

• Who is to stop a competitor from writing a comment on your site trying to lure visitors away with their own offer?

What We Recommend Your Hotel Do

• First of all install Google Sidewiki. It’s free and it only takes a couple of seconds. You must have the latest Internet Explorer or Firefox. For Google Chrome and other browsers you can use the sidewiki bookmarklet.

• Experiment using Google Sidewiki. Once installed, you will see a blue box with arrows on the top left of the page. Click on this to open the sidewiki bar to see any comments. There is a ‘Write an entry’ option at the bottom of the bar which will allow you to write your own comment. Below is an example of sidewiki written on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Website. The commenter highlighted the content on the website he was adding to.

• Look at other examples of comments. As Sidewiki is still new there are not a lot of websites that have comments yet. You can see a list of 10 examples from a recent Google Blog post. You can tell if posts have been written on a page or not by the color of the sidewiki icon in your toolbar. If the icon is yellow there are posts about that webpage. If it is white with a pencil image no posts have been written.

• Take ownership of Sidewiki by being the first to comment on your own site, and set the tone for future comments. Google allows the website owner to write a comment that will always appear first at the top of the Sidewiki page, and it will be highlighted in a green box. To do this follow the instructions in this webmaster sidewiki post.

• Monitor comments on your site as you would any review site. You most likely do not have any comments yet as Sidewiki is still new, however you need to be on the lookout for comments in case they do come in. You aren’t alerted when there are comments, however Google has introduced an API feature where you can subscribe to have comments sent to you on your site, or any website, via an RSS feed. A third party developer vedovini.net has already created a site which makes this easier. http://www.sidewikirss.com/ You just need to enter in the URL of the website and it will give you a feed to subscribe to. You can then see when new comments are written.

You subscribe to sidewiki comments the same way you would for any RSS feed. I subscribe with my iGoogle. As an example, I subscribed the Mayo clinic sidewiki comments seen below. If you would like to learn more about how to set up an RSS feed we have described it in detail in our post on how to subscribe to blogs.

• Think about setting up your own system on your website for guests to enter reviews. This could be more structured and allow them to comment on all aspects of your hotel, not just freely write anything.

In conclusion, what will happen with Google Sidewiki is a bit of a mystery at the moment. There have been other attempts from other companies to let people annotate websites which never caught on. However, those other companies were not Google.

There are many positives and negatives to Google Sidewiki, and a lot of controversy.

Most companies do not like the idea of giving up control of what is seen on their website. However, the public likes to read ‘real’ comments and reviews of products and services, and that isn’t going to change. Perhaps Google Sidewiki will catch on, perhaps it won’t. Either way, Google Sidewiki is here right now, with no opt-out, and it is up to your hotel to start monitoring your comments.

If you would like more information about Google Sidewiki please feel free to call us at 978-465-5955 or write to us at info@orourkehospitality.com.

We would like to hear your opinion on Google Sidewiki. Have you tried it? Do you think it’s a good idea or a bad idea? Please feel free to respond below:

Rather than produce one television spot, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts chose to produce online videos which showcase more than 150 cities where their hotels are located. Working with TurnHere, they were able to produce more than 700 stunning videos for the same price it would have cost to produce just one television spot.

These intriguing videos are narrated by the concierge of the hotel who takes the viewer on a tour of the city. The videos have been extremely successful and have been used across the brand’s online marketing initiatives. The videos have also been picked up by numerous editorial sites which is free publicity for InterContinental. Below is a video clip where Jared talks about the concept, process, and result of this innovative video project.

Tom O’Rourke, Founder/CEO of O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing, encourages his clients in the Hotel Industry to use online video because it is a very powerful and inexpensive sales tool that can build a hotel brand and attract new business. Tom wanted to share Jared’s insight on internet videos with the hotel industry and asked him to discuss the InterContinental Hotels & Resorts case study.

Jared explained why InterContinental decided to produce the videos instead of a television spot. He said that InterContinental had a marketing budget, for example a million dollars, that they could have spent creating a really nice television spot that touted their 1000 count bed sheets as opposed to Hilton’s 1000 count bed sheets. They could have spent that money on a great spot and put it out on television where everyone would probably TiVo through it and didn’t want to see it in the first place.

InterContinental decided in a really forward thinking way to take the same money and produce videos that created a sense of their local market knowledge. So rather than tout their bed sheets, or the size of their rooms, or the quality of the hotels, they wanted to tout their market knowledge of every city where they have a hotel. The concierge of each hotel narrates the video and takes the viewer on a tour of the city and showcases the best things to do, the best things to see, and the best places to eat.

Jared then explained the production process and said TurnHere created really interesting video content around these tours, and then chopped them up into the various component pieces. So for example they have a video about a restaurant in London, a video about a nightclub in Hong Kong, and a video about a park in Dubai. They then posted the videos broadly throughout the web and meta-tagged them correctly so the videos would be found for multiple keywords in Search.

The result is that InterContinental now has thousands of pieces of content on the web which will be found by travelers searching the internet. For example, if someone is thinking about traveling to Dubai and they conduct a search on Google for great places to eat in Dubai, several results will show up – one of which may be an InterContinental video showcasing restaurants in Dubai.

Jared explains it this way:

It’s super-relevant for me as a consumer, super-relevant for InterContinental, because while they’re not talking about the hotel itself, their concierge is in there, their brand is on that content, they are associated with content that is super-valuable to their consumers without shoving down a brand message, or without selling to any of these consumers and they’ve received a remarkable bang for the buck in doing all this.

Because it’s content, because it’s not viewed as advertising, it’s been picked up on editorial sites from all across the web, it’s shown on some in-flight entertainment systems now. The content is incredible and they didn’t pay for any of that (publicity), they just paid to create the great content.

What their insight was – here’s my consumer, here’s what my consumer wants to know, and obviously if I’m thinking about traveling I want to know about that market. So I am going to create great content to give that consumer what he or she wants to know, and I’m going to associate my brand to it, rather than selling to those consumers.

As Tom said, “That makes so much sense!”  Tom also wanted Jared to speak to the hotelier at a smaller, independent property who doesn’t have a big budget for video. He asked him what he would recommend to this group as far as producing video themselves or having videos professionally shot.

Jared doesn’t promote producing user-generated videos and says for a video to be engaging and compelling it must be produced by professionals. He stressed that you want to make the content very authentic and real, not a glitzy ad spot, but if you want to make it authentic in a high-quality way that takes a talented professional. He advises hotels to figure out what people want to know, figure out a story they’d be interested in hearing, create content around it, and associate your brand with it. He states that any hotel can do that – big or small.

Here at O’Rourke, we agree with Jared that if your videos are a central component of your internet marketing plan, such as the Intercontinental Hotels & Resorts videos, then they should be professionally produced. However, we do encourage hotels to create their own videos about special events at their hotel or guest interviews that can be posted on their blog. This can give the hotel a personal touch and generate more traffic to your website.

You can see the videos at the Intercontinental Hotels & Resorts ‘In The Know’ Website, but be warned, you just may be tempted to take a vacation!

Google’s goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant, and fastest search in the world. It doesn’t get much faster than if you are including up to the minute data. Their view is that the next time you search for a hotel, you can be aided by a real-time observation.

For illustration purposes we conducted a search query on the ‘Roger Smith Hotel’ in New York. The third result in the organic section, highlighted in yellow below, returned a query related to Twitter. Admittedly, this result links back to the Roger Smith Twitter profile, and not a live tweet, but we surmise that this could happen.

What a great service that would be for the user. Not only do they get a result that will bring them to the hotel website, but they would also have the opportunity to look at a social comment like, ‘Great night stay at the Roger Smith Hotel, service was amazing and the staff was very courteous.’ Highly useful information for the end user, but equally as important to the property for organic search engine optimization.

As the saying goes, ‘There is no time like the present.’ As hoteliers, you need to be participating in social media now. Start building a network of fans, followers and friends who trust you and your hotel. If you don’t move in this direction, you may quickly become irrelevant in not just social media, but in search as well.

]]> http://blog.orourkehospitality.com/2009/11/what-social-search-can-mean-to-your-hotel/feed/ 0 http://blog.orourkehospitality.com/2009/09/how-to-edit-export-and-upload-your-hotel-videos-easy-technical-tips/ http://blog.orourkehospitality.com/2009/09/how-to-edit-export-and-upload-your-hotel-videos-easy-technical-tips/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:21:49 +0000 Sara http://blog.orourkehospitality.com/?p=616

Videos are extremely popular on the internet and hotels can greatly benefit from this exciting medium. Potential guests are tired of hearing about how great a hotel is – they want to see it for themselves. Videos can strengthen your online presence, drive more traffic to your website, and help you achieve a higher ranking position in the search engine results pages.

The emergence of social media has shaken up the traditional ways of marketing and has created new channels that allow you to interact with your guests instead of just selling to them. Guests now have access to user-generated content, including review sites such as TripAdvisor, and they want a human voice and information that tells them the real deal about your hotel including the positives and negatives.

So how should videos be used today? Well the answer is in many ways. We still recommend that you have professionally shot promotional videos about your hotel and city. You should not attempt to create this type of video yourself because it could be a lower quality and have the appearance of a low-budget commercial.

However, you are no longer limited to the use of just one genre of video. With practice, you can learn to create your own videos and post them on your hotel blog. These videos should be short clips and can be about special events at your hotel, interesting shops and restaurants in your city, or interviews with people. You can post these videos on your hotel blog as well as on sites such as YouTube.

Keep in mind that your guests may already be posting videos taken at your hotel, such as wedding videos. Often they place the name of the hotel in the ‘tags’ which means that when someone searches on your hotel that video can appear.

As with any new medium, practice makes perfect! Videos may seem intimidating in the beginning but it is not as difficult as you may think. Below are some technical tips to help you start producing your own quality videos.

Buy a Camera

There are many inexpensive cameras that you can buy. The Flip Mino is only $179 and takes great videos. You can also research other cameras and look for features you may want such as microphones, weight, or high definition. Browse through sites such as C-Net, Camcorderinfo.com, B&H or Amazon to see the cameras and price ranges available.

Shoot Your Video

Try to keep your video short. It is often recommended that it be no more than 2 minutes. Use a tripod to keep the camera steady. If you are filming people remind your subjects to be relaxed, speak up, and smile. Bright clothing and an attractive background will help as well.

Use Correct Resolution

Use a minimum resolution of 640 x 480 (4:3 SD) or 1280 x 720 (16 x 9 HD) for a wider video. Most cameras will allow you to set the resolution you would like or you may have to modify the video yourself.

Edit Your Video

There are many programs you can use to edit your videos. We have outlined a few below.

•  iMovie is a basic program that allows you to crop, color correct, add music and create transition such as fade-outs. iMovie is installed in the Mac computer and is part of the Mac products, but you could you buy parallel software for a PC.

•  QuickTime Pro is another basic program that allows you crop your video and add audio.  You can also export your video to a format optimized for the internet, iPhone or iPod. QuickTime Pro is available for the Mac or PC.

•  Final Cut Express, a less expensive version of Final Cut, is designed for the Mac and allows you to create more sophisticated effects.

•  Adobe Premier Elements is a less expensive version of Adobe Premiere Pro, and is designed for a PC. This software also allows for sophisticated editing.

•  For more information, see article on Top 10 Video Editing Software. Most of these are for PCs.

Brand Your Video

Many of the editing programs allow you to create banners with your name or logo on the video. Maintain your hotel brand voice and customize your banners with your logo and colors.

Export Video File

It is recommended that you export your video as .mp4 H264. This will give you high quality with a smaller file size than the equivalent Quicktime.mov format.

Control Sound

When you export a video to be uploaded to you tube, it is recommended that you use either MP3 or AAC sound encoding, with a sample rate of 44.1kHz. Also, use stereo sound, not mono.

If possible use an external microphone which will reduce the ambient noise. If you are shooting outdoors enable a low cut or wind cut filter on the microphone.

Control Light

Try to shoot with one light source. Mixed lighting such as Tungsten lights, florescent lights, and daylight together can affect your colors.

If you are shooting outdoors try to shoot early in the morning or late afternoon to avoid the direct sunlight which can be glaring and cause harsh shadows.

Use supplemental lighting if you need to. These can be handheld objects such as white poster boards, or film by stationary objects such as light colored buildings. With practice, you can learn to control the reflected light to reduce shadows.

Upload Your Video

Now you need to post and promote your video. You need to ‘seed’ it in many different places for the most views. Of course you should put it on your website. If you have a Facebook page put it there. If you use Twitter, send tweets about it. Post it on you tube. You can also submit it to tubemogul and they can distribute it to over 20 different sites for you. Post it on stumbleupon and delicious. Place your video on travel related sites and discussion groups.

Have fun with your videos!

O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing can help your hotel create great videos. For more information on videos call us at 979-465-5955 or send an email to info@orourkehospitality.com.

O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing, 44 Merrimac Street, Newburyport MA 01950, http://www.orourkehospitality.com

O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing attended the SEOmoz PRO Training Seminar 2009 and interviewed guest speaker, Tom Critchlow, after his talk, “The Pacman Chunk of the Piechart: Getting Links”.

O’Rourke specializes in the hospitality industry, and we aim to provide your hotel with useful tips on how you can improve your website optimization. Link building plays a major part in increasing your website’s visibility and page rank, and can help your hotel listing rise to the top of the search engine results pages.

We enjoyed Critchlow’s talk on link building, and wanted to share some of his insights with you, so we asked him his thoughts on how the hotel industry in particular could increase their page rank with link building.

Tom O’Rourke, Founder/President of O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing, interviewed Critchlow and asked him to expand upon the following question that many hotels are asking, “What advice would you give today to a hotel who is ranking somewhere between 3-4 in Google right now and have finished out all their on-page SEO? What do you think they should do moving forward?”

“Link building is the Key!” said Critchlow.

We agree with Critchlow in that hotels need to identify their USP (Unique Selling Proposition). As he states in the video, “If you haven’t got a USP – figure one out!” Perhaps your USP is that you are a boutique hotel, or an eco-friendly hotel, or conference-focused. Establish your USP and promote it through creative public relations.

Once you have your angle you can start leveraging it. You can get recommended links from people you know or have partnered with. For example if you host a conference, ask the conference organizers to post your hotel link on their website and give them instructions on how to do it.

Another point that Critchlow mentioned is that a lot of hotels and travel-related companies spend too much on paid links. Hotels should take that money and spend it in a more intelligent way which can result in building better links. He suggests growing your organic PR side of things rather than paying for links.

As Critchlow says, “The real key when you are talking about link-building is to embed it in your whole business. Don’t consider SEO separate to other activities in your business but consider SEO as a part of everything. Whatever you are doing; PR, marketing, business development, embed SEO in all those processes.”

O’Rourke suggests that your hotel experiment with new ideas, and brainstorm some of your own, on ways you can attract great links to your site. There may be many opportunities available to build links that you may have overlooked. Remember, you can also create your own opportunities!

This tool will analyze your domain, page-by-page, according to the number of linking route domains. It will provide you with valuable information about your domains and links.

With ‘Top Pages on Domain’ you can find old domains that aren’t linking anywhere and need to be re-directed (you can do this with a 301 re-direct).

You can also see what your highest value URLs are and set up internal links from those pages.

Another advantage of using ‘Top Pages on Domain’ is that you can see your competitors’ back links and strongest URLs.

For more information about this tool see the SEOmoz Blog entry on Top Pages on Domain.

Below is a complete list of the world-class speakers who will be presenting, as well as the two-day agenda:

SEOmoz PRO Training 2009 Speakers

• Seth Besmertnik, CEO and Co-Founder at Conductor, Inc.

• Matt Brown, Co-Founder and COO of Define Search Strategies

• Tom Critchlow, Head of Search Marketing at Distilled.

• Danny Dover, SEO Consultant and Program Coordinator at SEOmoz.

• Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.

• Vanessa Fox, Founder of NinebyBlue.

• Nick Gerner, Linkscape Architect at SEOmoz.

• Ben Hendrickson, Linkscap Architect at SEOmoz.

• Ben Jesson, CEO and Co-Founder of Conversion Rate Experts.

• Ken Jurina, President and Co-Founder of Epiar.

• Todd Malicoat, SEO and Social Media Marketing at Stuntdubl

• David Mihm, Founder of DavidMihm.com

• Lindsay Perkin-Wassell, Manager of SEO Consulting at SEOmoz.

• Conrad Saam, CMO of Avvo.

• Dharmesh Shah, Chief Technology Officer & Founder of HubSpot and Blogger at On Startups.

SEOmoz PRO Training 2009 Agenda

Day One
August 24, 2009

“SEO is Nothing Without Content”
Speaker: Rand Fishkin

•    Tips for Scaling SEO into Editorial Content Creation
−    How to fit SEO into content brainstorming
−    How to make content that’s produced more likely to earn search traffic
−    How to make SEO part of the content creation tasks

•    Tips for Baking a UGC & SEO Soufflé
−    How to get users to do your SEO for you
−    How to maximize/incentivize UGC
−    How to get users to link to UGC

•    Tips for Designing Content that Can Earn Links
−    How to author works that build links for you
−    How to learn from examples on the web

•    Tips for Incentivizing Natural Links
−    How to trigger psychological responses
−    How to turn a tweet into a link

“Structurally Sound: SEO for Site Architecture”
Speaker: Rand Fishkin

•    Tips to Maximize the SEO Value of Your Navigation Systems
−    How to Make Categories and Subcategories Efficient and Valuable
−    How to Employ Tags & Tag Clouds
−    How to Use HTML Sitemaps to “Get Around” Bad Site Architecture

•    Tips for Very Large Sites (50,000+ Pages)
−    How to Make Categories and Subcategories Efficient and Valuable
−    How to Make Navigation Structures that Flow the Maximum Amount of Link Juice
−    How to Apply XML & HTML Sitemaps

“First You Get the Keywords, Then You Get the Money”
Speaker: Ken Jurina

•    Tips for Competitive Keyword Analysis
−    How to Discover Keywords Your Competitors are Targeting
−    How to Find the Keywords No One is Targeting (Yet)

•    Tips for Choosing Keywords to Target
−    How to Determine if You Have a Chance at Rankings
−    How to Find Out the Keyword’s Conversion Rate

•    Tips for Building “Perfectly” Optimized Pages
−    How to Place Target Keywords on a Page
−    How to Effectively Target Multiple Keywords on a Single Page
−    How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalization (while being mindful of double listings)

“How to Make SEO Reporting Sexy”
Speaker: Lindsay Perkin-Wassell

•    Tips for Which KPIs to Use vs. Avoid

•    Tips for SEO Data Visualization

•    Tips for Analytics-Driven Action

“Make SEO Tools Work for You”
Speakers: Nick Gerner and Danny Dover

•    Tips for Getting Value from SEO Tools all over the Web – Danny Glover

•    Tips for Getting Value from SEOmoz Tools

“Sustain Verticality for 3 Rounds”
Speakers: David Mihm and Matt Brown

•    Tips for Local Search SEO – David Mihm

•    Tips for Image Search SEO – Matt Brown

•    Tips for News Search SEO – Matt Brown

•    Tips for Taking Advantage of Rich Snippets

“The Pac man Chunk of the Pie chart: Getting Links”
Speaker: Tom Critchlow

•    Tips for Manual Link Building: Finding the Right Link Sources & Converting Them
−    Hot to find worthwhile directories
−    How to find good article sites
−    How to find good sites to buy/rent links
−    How to ask for a link and get it
−    How to find/get links from social media sites & profiles (that actually pass value)
−    How to use metrics to judge a site & page

•    Tips for Embedded Content Links
−    How to design great badges that people will put on their site
−    How to design awesome widgets that people will put on their site
−    How to design compelling graphics that people will put on their site
−    Examples of great embedded content links

•    Tips for Press/Media/Blogosphere Links
−    How to architect your site to attract media links
−    How to tell a compelling story about your site/business/product
−    How to find the right sources to “pitch” with your story
−    How to issue a press release that earns links

“Good vs. Great: Why Some Startups Make the Leap and Others Don’t”
Speaker: Dharmesh Shah

Question & Answer Open Forum

Day Two
August 25, 2009

“Presentation Off: History of SEO [Todd Malicoat] vs. Future of SEO [Rand Fishkin]
Speakers: Todd Malicoat and Rand Fishkin

“Social Media Investments that Bring Real ROI”
Speakers: Todd Mailcoat and TBD

•    Tips for How to Define Business Goals & Metrics for Social Media Campaigns

•    Tips for How to Craft Successful Link bait

•    Tips for How to “Go Popular” with Viral Content

•    Tips for How to Use Twitter & Facebook for Link Generation

“Researching the Search Engine Algorithm”
Speaker: Ben Hendrickson

•    Tips for What to Pay Attention to in Google’s Algorithm

•    List of Correlations Between Data & Rankings

•    Tips for What’s Different Across the Various Engines

•    Tips for How to Conduct Your Own Search Engine Tests

“How to Win SEO Budget and Influence Your CMO”
Speaker: Seth Besmertnik

“Staying Inside Search Engine Guidelines & Dealing with Penalties”
Speaker: Vanessa Fox

•    Tips for Avoiding the Most Common Penalties and Bans

•    Tips for Identifying Penalties vs. Basic Rankings Drop

•    Tips for Fighting Your Way Out of a Google Penalty

“Conversion Rate Optimization”
Speaker: Ben Jesson

•    Tips for Designing Landing Pages that Sell

•    Tips for Designing & Pricing Promotions

•    Tips for Building Email-Signup Funnels

•    Tips for Email Marketing

“Building a Kick-Butt In-House Web Marketing Team”
Speaker: Conrad Saam

•    Tips for Focusing Everyone on the Right Metrics

•    Tips for Organizing Your Team’s Responsibilities & Personnel

•    Tips for What to Do In-House vs. Contract Out

Question & Answer Open Forum