The Web has changed the power relationship in marketing, tipping the balance to consumers who are looking for customized products and who want them “yesterday”, according to Edward A. Cespedes, CEO of the .travel domain name.
And they also increasingly want to access them on their mobile devices what Cespedes calls Web 3.0, which adds yet another layer of complexity to e marketing, namely how an agency Web site appears on a mobile device.
“Your online presence is very important to your business,” Cespedes told travel agents in a presentation recently. The agency’s Web site can’t be static but rather must continually present fresh content, which is critical not only to consumer appeal but also perhaps more importantly to search engine optimization (SEO), noted Cespedes.
These days video content is key to successfully marketing on the Web because placing lots of media on your Web site video and pictures influences the results presented by Google. “And when you talk about Web searches, you are talking about Google.”
Search engine optimization is the only way your agency’s Web site is going to be found, by consumers in a market with 80 million dot com names, the ubiquitous generic in Web world.
Search engines want to find the appropriate sites to present in their results, noted Cespedes, and to make sure your agency’s site is found, it has to be visible to the search engine.
To optimize results for your agency’s Web site, the architecture of the site has to be correct and backlinks, or links pointing to the agency’s Web site, are also critical to SEO.
“Content is most important,” said Cespedes. “Is it relevant to what people are looking for? Search engines want relevant results.”
He explained that the domain name is a critical element of your site’s content and search engine optimization, because search engines tokenize Web site names that is, they break them down into smaller parts and the domain, such as .travel, appears as a word to the search engine.
So having a .travel domain name improves the SEO for an agency’s Web site, especially among consumers searching for travel topics.
Cespedes said that there are billions of travel searches annually and travel search is the largest search category, even surpassing adult sites.
“Travel is the biggest industry in the world. It should have its own Web domain and the biggest players in the industry have realized it,” he said.
“Big travel marketers know about SEO and thus use .travel as their domain name. We tell people to point their dot com names to their .travel domain names because .travel does better in the search engines.”
These major marketers, including destinations like Utah, Egypt, Colombia and Philadelphia, along with travel industry associations and companies, have adopted the .travel domain and significantly improved their visibility on the Web, said Cespedes.
He added that consumers now research all products on the Internet before they buy, and that includes travel.
“You have to go where the customers are and you have to be on the Internet.” But with 80 million dot com names out there, how does an agency’s site stand out on the Web?
Cespedes said the solution for a travel entity is to adopt a .travel name and one quarter million names are still outstanding in .travel. He added that .travel is “real and relevant and we do very well in the search engines.” Great names are available for travel agency sites in the .travel domain.
“So go get them. Have a Web address that tells everybody what business you’re in travel. People don’t know what dot com means but they do know .travel. It says what you do.”
