Yes, we know that a truly good SEO campaign can be time consuming. There is no way around that. If expensive software would be enough to do the trick we would all be on top of the search engine listings. But if the average human brain organises 60.000 thoughts per day, why not focus just 10 of them on SEO? Only 10. That is nothing. Just one minute per day. That will get you further than only one week full time (and then forget about it again).

Names are Out?
If we would have started this website some years ago, the name would most probably not have been Bernardus.Biz.

It would have been marketingtips.com or something along those lines.

Because at that time, the rumor was that the actual website name was good to attract traffic via the search engines.

It is still good, by the way, no doubt about that, but the grapevine of the SEO community starts to tell a different story.

That the search engines might still be quick to prefer a very SEO name; but that the visitors do not.

That should not come as a surprise. What sounds more attractive to you, Mercedes or reliablecar.com? Kempinsky or luxuryhotel.com?

If you know how quickly the search engines can change their algorithms (their set of rules), then you know what a thin line you are walking on when deciding on the domain name of your website.

This is one of the reasons why we preferred Bernardus.Biz over any perhaps more SEO alternative. Because optimization should be about long term thinking. We would not want to start from scratch in a couple of years, just because the algorithms changed again.

Blogging is Out?
We hear it more and more. "Blogging is so 2004".

Any Blogger will get a fit so let us hurry to say that true, serious bloggers have nothing to worry about.

If Bagdad is on fire and you do not only live the situation, but have something to tell about it, then it goes without saying that your Blog is a contribution and will be interesting read. Or your way of thinking or style of writing is original; if you are one of the few to tell about a situation many are curious about... keep blogging!

Obviously we refer to Blogging as a marketing tool. So many hotels have been told that a blog is the next big thing... and you can be pretty sure that when marketing companies start to sell an idea, it is no longer the NEXT big thing, but a thing that already works pretty well, and has turned into a product to sell.

Hotels and Blogging

So you decide to start with a Blog? Good for you.

That is if your decision is to actually work on the blog, day after day or at least every week, to tell about your location or background in a way that is very interesting for readers, if you can write compelling copy, drag your readers with you, enthuse them and actually make them want to return and return to your Blog.

In this respect it can be that hotels have a problem. After all, what can you tell about? What can you contribute to the one trillion pages on the world wide Web?

It might be risky to tell about everything that goes wrong behind the curtains... that is funny for you, but it might give the impression that the hotel is not that professional.

You can not mock customers, nor tell about the perhaps amazing or sad or funny stories of your staff, ... so what can you tell about? Future travelers might have little interest in the whereabouts of the hotel industry, just as a buyer of cell phones has no interest whatsoever in the details of the technology.

So there is little material left. You can write about the location. But if that is Costa del Sol or Agadir, will anyone be interested? Unless you have a truly unique voice?