• It’s better to blog regularly with less-than-perfect posts than to be so concerned about writing perfect posts that you don’t blog at all.
• The goal of your blog is to attract search traffic, especially from people who don’t yet know you exist and who aren’t necessarily looking for a place to stay.
• Keep a blogging calendar to remind yourself to blog about specific holidays and events.
• Write several posts at once during your down times and schedule them to be posted during your busy times.

Decide on a topic

• When you decide what to write about, ask yourself, “What are people searching for?”
• What questions do guests often ask you?
• What is your town known for?
• Give an “insider’s scoop” on local attractions and businesses. You’re already a concierge for your guests – you’re an expert on your area.
• Let your blog become a recognized resource on a niche topic. Here are some ideas:
• Walking/driving tours
• Festivals and holidays
• Cultural events: music, art, theater.
• Cultural attractions: Amish communities, historic districts.
• Local businesses: antique shops, restaurants, Amish furniture, wineries, universities.
• Nature: birding, national parks, fall colors.
• Outdoor activities: hiking, snowshoeing, boating, fly fishing, horseback riding, geocaching.
• Recipes and cuisine.

Write a title

• Be specific and descriptive. A title like “Beautiful November” is less useful than “Preparing for the 2010 Sequim Thanksgiving Turkeyfest.”
• Use a maximum of 65-70 characters.
• Don’t include your inn’s name or “bed and breakfast” unless the post is about your inn.

Write the content

• Aim to write 300-500 words.
• It’s also okay, on occasion, to post a single nice photo with a few lines of text.
• Include one or two links back to your main website.
• If you want to paste from Microsoft Word or another text editor, use the Paste from Word or Paste as Plain Text tool.

Add images

• Include at least one image in each post. Upload a photo from your computer, use an image in your site’s Media Library, or add a publicly available image through the Insights tool.
• If you use an image on your computer, rename the image with a descriptive file name.

Categories

• Categories usually appear as a list in the sidebar of your blog.
• Assign one category to each post.
• Stick to 6-12 categories.
• Here are some suggestions for useful categories:
• Sample Inn News
• (make this the default category, not “Uncategorized”)
• Sequim Events / Happenings
• Sequim Attractions
• Breakfast and Recipes
• History of the Inn
• Restaurants / Dining
• Shopping / Antiquing (or other local businesses)
• Outdoor activities
• Seasons at the Inn (or in your city/town)
• Inn Specials
• Elope in Sequim / Sequim weddings
• Birding
• Anything else you might write about often

Tags

• Tags often appear as a “tag cloud” in the sidebar of your blog.
• Assign several tags to each post.
• Be descriptive; don’t keyword stuff. For example, don’t add the tag “bed and breakfast” to your post unless you’re writing specifically about bed and breakfasts. Search engines already know that your site is about your bed and breakfast.

Happy blogging!
(Information compiled by Rachel Covault and Laura Alisanne).

Check out the video to learn more.

Northwest Inns is now becoming an important page on the web. The massive amount of content we have included on the site about our inns and the Northwest area is starting to pay off! Northwest Inns now has a page rank of 4, making it an authority site!

This site is designed in PHP, (or Hypertext preprocesser, if you want to get confusing). It is a popular and growing development language, open source (which means it is free and available for modification by different web developers, like our Jack) and uses HTML embedded scripting language to create dynamic web pages. This is the content management language system we use to create our State Bed and Breakfast Association sites, such as the Accredited Inns and Bed and Breakfasts of Florida.

So, if you are looking for a Northwest Lodging, look no further! InsideOut has your online vacation research covered again!

Outpace the competition with search engine marketing

With the economy in flux, many in the travel industry are understandably wondering how to identify and reach customers who are still planning vacations and business trips. We know how to do that! For more than twelve years, InsideOut Solutions has been creating and marketing some of the most successful, highly-visible websites in the travel industry. Over time we have quietly increased the SEO promotional tools that we offer to bed and breakfasts and hospitality and travel organizations, based on newly available search engine optimization tools and techniques.

Now, for 2009, we are proud to introduce a whole new level of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) promotional packages to help your website perform better in the search engines, find new and more qualified visitors, and increase your online bookings. AdWords? Return on Investment tracking? Link Building? Blogging? Search Engine Optimization? We can do that, and more.

Marketing on the web gives you unique opportunities to track your return on investment, and to change your approach based on data gathered from real visitors to your site. Early in 2009 we will be rolling out new custom reporting tools that will give you real-time feedback on your website’s online visibility, and how our SEO promotion techniques have improved your site’s performance.

If your competition is tightening their belts and scaling back, now is the perfect time to increase your brand presence online through targeted web marketing. Click through to the Search Engine Marketing page to find out how we can help you identify and attract the many people who will pack a suitcase and hit the road in the new year. Or call us for details on how we have helped our customers build websites that attract and engage the right kind of web traffic — the kind that leads to reservations.

You know hospitality, we know web marketing. Let us help you make 2009 a year to celebrate.