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Devision launch Online Accommodation & Tourism Marketing Service

March 10th, 2010

Devision today launched new accommodation and tourism marketing service, Smartfish.

Devision’s web designers have been developing award winning accommodation and tourism websites since 1996, and have now combined their knowledge of web with traditional accommodation marketing to provide tourism and accommodation operators with the complete range of services to promote their specific business type.

Smartfish provides dedicated online marketing tools for the Accommodation & Tourism industry in Australia.

Smartfish offers all the tools to successfully propel your brand awareness, online bookings, and business earnings, through even the toughest economic climate, utilizing the power of successful online and traditional marketing.

Smartfish Accommodation and Tourism marketing services include:

• Custom Secure Online Booking Systems
• Email Newsletter Marketing Campaigns
• Online Banner Advertising Design and Placement
• Accommodation specific search engine optimisation
• Online marketing using Social Network Marketing, such as Twitter, Myspace and Facebook
• Custom website development
•Tourism based Affiliate Marketing Programs
•Tourism Branding
•Press Advertisments
•Stationery Design
•Brochures, Postcards, Calendars
•Business Card Design and Print
•Posters and Point-of-Sale Marketing
•Signage Design
•Uniform Design and Print

A number of Australian accommodation-based websites have already been trialling the Smartfish range of services, and even through an apparent global recession, confirm that the Smartfish accommodation marketing services have helped retain a good level of business with both local and international business.

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For more details on Smartfish Accommodation and Tourism Marketing, visit the website

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12 Ways To Use Social Media Marketing With Twitter

March 1st, 2010

Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It involves writing Tweets, which are short updates of a maximum of 140 characters that tell your followers what you are up to. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question, “What are you doing?” Twitter has moved far beyond that. Tweets are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content, break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals. Here are 12 ways in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.

1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest

As soon as you read something online that you think is interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people. You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around that haven’t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not to mainstream media.

2. Building Your Network

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect with their network during events like conferences.

4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog. For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn’t get old.

5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging conferences to fame. Live Tweeting events are great because they are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current discussions in your community.

6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicating with Your Team

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this regard if you have a virtual business with employees in different geographical locations. You can set your updates to private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using Twitter.

8. Brand Monitoring

Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter. If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make your site design even better.

9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites

If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission to try to score more votes from your followers. If your followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your content.

10. Hiring People

Looking for a programmer, designer, or writer? Whatever type of professional you seek, try finding them on Twitter. Simply send your followers a tweet telling them you are looking for someone for a job. They can either recommend someone to you or offer themselves for the job. Using Twitter in this way is ideal for finding qualified freelancers. It is much more convenient than putting out a classified ad.

11. Build Your Personal Brand

When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight, you make your followers feel like you are casual and approachable. Even those with running a company that has a cold, corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.

12. Streamline Electronic Communications

When you use Twitter, you’re likely to find yourself using IM, email, and other electronic communication methods less. Twitter not only provides public chatting through Tweets, it also allows you to send direct messages. Twitter will help you streamline your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back online.

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Attract more business with your Twitter branding

February 20th, 2010

Twitter is a great way of promoting your business services and products online, but to really attract followers you need to look professional.

Did you know you can totally customise the look and feel of your Twitter account to reflect your business or existing website design?

A custom Twitter Background and matching Twitter Icon combined with the correct Twitter Bio text description optimised for the search engines will help you attract a huge Twitter following.

Simple additions to your Twitter background design such as your website link, the services you provide, and phone number, will greatly help the changes of your Twitter followers wanting to find out more about your business.

Devision can help you setup your Twitter account with a professional corporate image to really promote your business online through Twitter.

Devision have recently completed the rebranding of the Whitsunday Apartments website and Twitter account, giving it a professional edge over most of the other Whitsunday accommodation websites and Twitter sites.

Check it out online at http://www.twitter.com/whitsundayaccom

www.WhitsundayApartments.com.au

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What the latest buzz…Google Buzz!

February 18th, 2010

For all the fans of social networking out there, Google have recently launched a very cool new application to keep you up to date with all your Google Gmail buddies.

Google Buzz is like a social networking tool made especially for Google users.

Not only does Google Buzz allow you to post messages to your friends in a similar way that Twitter does, but Google takes it to the next level, allowing you to share locations tagged with geographical information, show where you are on a map, share photos, updates and more.
It also allows you to link directly to images or play videos online all within the Google system rather than having to jump from one website to another like other social networking tools.

You can choose to share your posts with everyone, or just your selected Google network buddies, and integrated with Gmail, you can share directly through your Gmail account. It’s really so simple!

Google Buzz is also available for mobile, so you can keep in contact with those that matter most, 24 hours a day!

Google Buzz opens huge opportunities for businesses to promote marketing products and services to your online business partners and client database, allowing you to viral market to a huge global audience.

Want to know more about online viral marketing? Talk to Devision Design – the experts in online social business networking.

Check it out at buzz.google.com

Author: Chris Bourke – Senior web developer at Devision Australia and professional web SEO coach at Web SEO Coach

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Google’s Free Tools for Online Success

February 16th, 2010

Google’s Free Tools for Search Engine Optimisation and Profit

By now, if you didn’t know who or what Google is you would have to have been living under a rock!

Not only is it the most popular search engine on the planet, but what many people don’t realise is that Google provides an array of free user-friendly tools it can turn your online presence into a money making success!

For instance, did you know you can make money directly from Google Maps?
Ah..now I have your attention.! We’ll get to that further in this post, but for now I’d like to share with you some of Google’s great tools and how they can help your online business prosper.

To access most of Google’s tools you will first need to create a free Google user account. Simply go to Google.com and in the right hand corner you will see a menu appear with iGoogle | Search Settings | Sign In. Click the ‘Sign In’ link and click on Create an Account Now.

One you have set up your account and signed in, you can then go back to that same menu in the top corner and click once on Settings and then go down the menu to Google Account Settings.
This is your own membership area where you can add a number of great Google Webmaster Tools, such as custom Google Maps, Add your business to Google Local Business, Customize your Google browsing screen with iGoogle, and manage your Gmail account, which are just some of the features Google provides.

I will go through each of the basic tools shortly, but firstly lets get to the serious stuff, how to use Google to optimise your website and get you to the top of the search engines for fame and fortune!…

Google Webmaster Tools
Google’s webmaster tools rock! Not only can they your new website to the front page of Google in a day, but they also allow you to see exactly what your competitors are up to so you can outrank them.
Google Webmaster Tools provide you with the following solutions:

Get Google’s view of your site and diagnose problems

See how Google crawls and indexes your site and learn about specific problems we’re having accessing it.

Discover your link and query traffic

View, classify, and download comprehensive data about internal and external links to your site with new link reporting tools. Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there.

Share information about your site

Tell us about your pages with Sitemaps: which ones are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also let us know how you would like the URLs we index to appear.
Adding a sitemap to your website is one of the quickest ways to get a good listing on the search engines as they use this information to
determine the structure of your website and the relevance in where your website listing belongs. Ideally both a html sitemap and an XML sitemap should be added to your website, and the xml sitemap submitted to your Google webmaster account. Once submitted it can take just a couple of hours to see a great result. For larger websites make sure your web developer installs a sitemap generator which will automatically resubmit the sitemap each time new content is added to the website.

Google’s webmaster tools also can provide information about what people are searching for and how they found your website through different keywords and key phrases. You can even compare pages by the relevance of popularity, allowing you to review these results and tweak your website for better results.

Google Trends
Google Trends is a handy tool if you are a big fan of promoting yourself through social networks, or run a news blog. Google Trends shows you the hot topics being shared on the web that particular day, allowing you to use this information and write articles about the hot topics, gaining new followers also interested in these topics.

Google Insights
But the really powerful tool for achieving maximum results on the search engines is Google Insights.
Google Insights lets you search the web for the most popular search terms either globally or by location, and will also show you the most popular similar search words people are searching for for a particular period of time. You can search Categories, Seasonality, Geographically and even compare key properties. This makes it so simple to ensure you have the best possible keywords throughout your website that people really want to search for. Use this information, submit your XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, and then finetune your keyword density and submit your website using SEO optimisation software, WebCEO. If done correctly you will get the top spots on the search engines! It’s no big secret, it’s just using the right technique and the right tools!

After all, Google provide all these great tools because they want your website on their search engine so they can make profit with Google Adwords.

Google Adwords
For those not familiar with it, Adwords has been Google’s ‘money-machine’, providing an online advertising system which allows you to create online advertisements and feature them on Google’s sponsored links and other websites using Google’s Adsense program.
Google Adwords is a pay-per-click service which allows you to set up your own advertising campaigns, targeting the exact audience you would like for your products. Be warned though, do your research first or setting up the advertisements incorrectly will see your advertising charges spiral quickly! Stay tuned…I will be doing a major post of successful Adwords campaign management in a future post very soon, which will show you how to actually beat the system and easily make more than you spend, without even needing your own product to sell!

Adsense
Adsense is a great service for those that want to make a little extra cash from their websites.
Adsense is the other end of Adwords, where you can place Adsense customers’ ads on your website. These ads are designed to reflect the content in your website, enticing people to click the advertisements, and when they do you make a profit from each click thru! Simple as that! It can also be very profitable if done well.
You simply sign up for an Adsense account through your Google account, go through a few simple steps which allow you to customize the colours, target content, size of the ads, etc and the system generates a small piece of code that you paste into your website page. You may need your web developer to do this for you if you are not familiar, but it seriously will only take them a couple of minutes.
It takes a few minutes for the script to become live, and from then on, you have a mini Google money making machine on your website!

Google Adwords Keyword Tool
As I have mentioned on a number of occasions, the key to your website achieving a top listing on the search engines is strongly due to great keywords. If you’re not sure about the best keywords for your website, Google have provided the perfect little helper, the Adwords Keyword tool, which allows you to enter gyour website, or the main keywords you think are best, and it will provide a list of alternative commonly searched keywords and key phrases to suit your website. The perfect tool to help you get ahead of your competitors websites! As the name suggests, it’s main purpose is also to help you get the best possible results in Adwords campaigns.

Google Friend Connect
Google Friend Connect allows you to stay in contact with friends through your website. Kind of like a mini Facebook! Once you sign up to Friend Connect you simply add the snippet of code into your webpage and as your friends sign up and add themselves, their avatar will appear on your page, making it easy to stay connected to them. This works great as a business tool as well, creating a business network with related clients/businesses.

You can also use the Google Friend Connect to integrate to Google Talk

Google Talk
Google Talk is Google’s own version of a chat app similar to MSN or iChat. again, you use your Google account, Friend Connect or Gmail account to subscribe and join friends up, allowing you to easily connect either via text, audio or video chat. You can also generate a Google Gadget to add into your webpage so people can simply start typing from your website and they can Live Chat with you. Great for attracting clients, especially if they are international. Saves on those phone calls!

Google Translate
Google offers a range of Language Tools, allowing you to easily translate your website into a number of languages without the hard work of having to actually do each page in a different language.
The benefits of this are obviously great for businesses such as tourism websites or other international relations are involved. The visitor can simply click a graphic and the website text will translate to their own language of choice.

Google Alerts
If you want to keep your ears open for information on a particular product, service, topic or business, Google has a nifty service called Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you to simply set up alerts for particular keywords so when they appear, either in Google, either from a website, blog, or even Twitter, you will receive an email containing a link to that alert. Great way to track a particular industry or service, or even a news story.

Google Local Business Listing
Ever wondered how the business listings get up the top of Google’s listings next to that Google map? Well that my friends is a Google Local Business listing. To set up a Local Business Listing you obviously need a business, a physical location, and a phone (preferably next to your computer). Log in to your Google account and then click here and you will be prompted to enter your business details for the free listing. Once you have entered your details you will be prompted to enter a number on the screen, which Google will phone you with, to verify you are the actual business. Once verified you will soon appear in the Local Business section next to that map, if someone searches for a particular type of business in your local area. The key to getting a good listing in local business is to make sure when you provide a business description in your listing you add all the main keywords that people may search for for your product or service.

Google Blogs: Bloggger and Blogspot
A great way of spreading your business services and to gain new followers is to create a Blog. But without web development experience, this may be a bit daunting. Google come to the rescue again with their service, Blogger. Blogger is a simple easy to use, but very powerful, free online blogging system allowing you to set up your own blog in a matter of minutes. The great thing about Blogger is that once you get an understanding of the system you can easily customize it exactly as you would like, add extra plugins, set it up for search engine optimization, link it to Twitter, you name it! You can even add in a Google Adsense script so you can make $$$ for simply writing posts (like this one I am writing now!)

Feedburner
So once you have your blog up and running, you need to promote it. An easy way to do this is with Feedburner. Feedburner allows web blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and send them out to services such as Twitter and Facebook. This may be a little technical for those not familiar with any of the terms I have just mentioned in the previous sentence, but once you understand it, it can be very helpful in promoting your blog as it it allows your posts to be transferred to RSS feeds, which then can be picked up by other Blog sites.

Google Maps
Google Maps is one of the handiest and easiest ways to not only find a location online, but to also add a location map to your website. Again, using your Google account, you can sign in and enter your business details and create a map to add into your website with a handy bit of code provided by Google.
But did you know you can also use the Google Maps system to make money easily? Your Google Maps account allows you to make custom maps, so for instance if you have more than one business you can create a custom map with all those locations on the one map, even include your logo on each location, and then add into your website. You also have a choice to make this map Public, meaning that not only will it be seen on your website, but if someone is searching Google maps, they may find your business listings through Google Maps. So to make some money, simply sign yourself up with an affiliate based program such as Hotelclub, or Hotels Combined, and you can create maps listing all the properties for that area, giving them a description in the text window box and then your affiliate link for that particular hotel to the listing. So when someone finds your map listings and clicks on it and makes a booking, you receive a nice little commission for each booking. It’s not impossible to turn over a good weeks wage in a single day using this principal.

Google Mobile Device Webpage Translator
With more mobile devices now being used for the web, the changes are one day someone will want to find you using a mobile device.
without going to the expense of setting up a whole new mobile friendly website, the best solution is to have them view it through the Google Mobile option. This simply takes your existing website and restructures it into a mobile device format. It’s not always perfect, but better than nothing!
Failing that, tell your friend to get a better web-friendly phone!

For more on what Google is up to, visit the official Google blog. They always have something new happening!

Article by Chris Bourke of Devision Design & Web SEO Coach
Devision Design are a leading web design and SEO company located on the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane. Chris has built many of the Sunshine Coast and Whitsunday holiday accommodation websites, achieving top results on all major search engines with amny of the Google tools mentioned above. Chris also runs Web SEO Coach, a service providing personal training in SEO, turning beginners into professionals.

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10 Steps to Choosing the Right Web Hosting

February 3rd, 2010

Start searching online for website hosting, and you will be bombarded with literally hundreds of website hosting companies, all offering competitively priced website hosting services.

So how do you know which one is a good one for your needs?

While many of these hosting companies will look the same on the surface, and will most likely offer you incentives, such as free extras to lure you in, it pays to really check them out and compare the real difference in services they offer.

I’d like to share a little personal experience I had about 18 months ago, which will hopefully open your eyes to the benefits of fining the right hosting partner…
For a number of years I hosted all my websites with one of the big hosting companies, (which will remain unnamed), until they were hit with a server attack, leading to many of my clients websites being hacked. I attempted to contact the hosting company a number of times, which was based in the USA, and I am in Australia, so it was often very hard to even get through to a technical staff member, and sometimes I was on hold for 20 minutes!
I also tried their online support system , but the service wasn’t much better. They could not offer me any resolution, other than for me to fix the hacked sites, and change my password. Sounds easy, except I had 150 client sites to change, which would take up most of my day, and then 3 days later the hosting was hacked again.
The company would not move my site to a more secure server, they would not refund me, they even hung up the phone on me a number of times as there was apparently nothing they could do.

I decided it was time to start moving all the websites to another provider, while in the meantime the original host company began billing me renewals on the hosting, a month earlier than they were due, and without any prior consent. They just automatically billed without my authority!

I contacted the manager who promised the matter would be fixed, and I would be reimbursed, though I never was.

So after this painful and expensive lesson I decided to make sure the next website provider I chose was much better. I ended up moving all the websites to Hostgator, who have been great ever since.

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To help you choose, I made a 10 point checklist to help find the best provider:

1. Review the hosting company
Do a search on Google for hosting reviews for that company and see what others have to say about them

2. Read their policy and customer guarantee in regards to the venerability of the servers to any attacks, and find out what plan they have in place if this should ever occur.

3. Review their technical support service before purchasing hosting.
Call the tech support and see how good their service really is, the case you ever require it one day. Find out if they offer local tech support and customer call back, in the even you need to leave a message.

4. Make sure you can understand your tech support staff, and vice versa.
There is nothing worse than being put through to a call centre in India and neither party can understand the problem or solution!

5. Make sure the hosting plan provides all the basic services, including plenty of hosting space, unlimited email accounts, webmail, etc

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6. Ensure the hosting package comes with MySQL and PHP capabilities,
as you will require these if your website uses a database (eg, running blogs, shopping carts, etc)

7. Does your hosting provider automatically bill you and do they give you plenty of notice when your hosting is due for renewal.

8. Make sure they do regular back ups of your website.
This is important in case anything goes wrong with their hosting, otherwise your entire website could be lost!

9. Are you paying a fair price.
Most good hosting packages are around the $9 USD monthly fee, and also offer free domain name registration/renewal as part of the standard package.

10. Find out where the hosting is based.
For instance, if your target audience is located in another country, then try and get hosting in that country as this will usually provide you a better connection/download speed for your viewers.

Follow the above advice and hopefully you will have a carefree hosting experience!

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design & Web SEO Coach

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The Magic Keyword Density Formula in SEO

January 28th, 2010

A major success of any website or online advertising campaign is your search engine optimization (SEO). By researching the best keywords and ensuring you haven’t used them too much or too little is worked out by an easy, yet very effective formula:

Step 1: Firsty, count how many words you have on your page.
Step 2: Then, count up how many times you have used your keyword

Step 3: And then apply the following formula:

Your Keyword Density = ([key word count]) * 100 / (total word count]

So, for example if you have a 400 or so page or blog post about holiday accommodation, and you are optimizing it for ‘hotel’, then the total keyword count is 400, and the example of the word ‘hotel’ is 14, then:

Density of the word ‘hotel’ would equal (14 * 100) /400
So the keyword density for ‘hotel’ on that particular page is 3.5

Too much density and you can be caught out for spamming and be blacklisted from the search engines, and too little will get you nowhere at all to start with.

Now, depending on how you set up your navigation and internal page text links (this is linking from particular words or phrases which link to a related page) you can increase your overall density by using the same method throughout the entire website, which is more powerful than the density of just one single page of the site.

If your mathematics isn’t that great, and you really want to fine tune it perfectly, then I recommend using an SEO software package such as Web CEO to do the hard work for you. This easy to use software reviews your entire website and shows you exactly where you need to fine tune your site for the best results. Easy!

Keyword Density doesn’t just cover the visual text keywords. You can actually use the same principle mentioned above for your Alt Tags on your images, which appear in Google Images and a few other major search engines.

Try out this technique for yourself. You will be amazed how a quick optimization of your density followed by a resubmission to the search engines will quickly change your listing on the search engines.

And as I mentioned in a previous post on keyword density, make sure if you decide to link your website to another website in any way, that you either set up your page to tell the search engines not to follow other pages, or fully test the keyword density of the site you are linking to first. If their website does not relate directly to your keywords or they already have a poor density, or for that matter, a density that is too high, they may damage your own website. It is well worth spending the few minutes to check.

Article by Chris Bourke: Devision Design and Web SEO Coach

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Free Domain Name Registration and Renewal

January 25th, 2010

Are you paying too much for the registration and ownership of your domain name?

Recently we had a customer approach us who was paying almost $130 for a 2 year .com.au domain name registration!

That’s a whopping $65 PER YEAR!!!

Did you know that is $65 A YEAR TOO MUCH??

Host your website with Webcrowd Website Hosting (www.WebCrowd.com.au) and your domain registration and renewal for the domain name relating to your hosting plan is 100% FREE!

You still have full ownership of the domain name, except you don’t have to pay for this privilege like other web hosting companies charge you for.

And best of all, Webcrowd Hosting plans start from as little as $7.95 a month.

You will most likely find that you are currently paying much more than this for your combined website hosting and domain registration.

Webcrowd also offers local phone and email support, so you get to speak with a REAL person locally based in Australia, who can help you with anything, from setting up your email accounts, to technical issues such as MYSQL database support.

For a limited time, when you sign up with Webcrowd hosting services you receive a 20% discount on all services, just by entering the discount code ‘websaver’ in the Promo box on the signup for, so you really save!

Visit Webcrowd today at www.Webcrowd.com.au

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Whitsunday Accommodation website scores record sales with new website

January 23rd, 2010

The recent redevelopment of the Whitsunday Apartments accommodation website by Devision only a few months ago has led to record sales for online accommodation bookings for Airlie Beach and the Whitsunday Islands holiday apartments, resorts and a hotels, turning over six figure sales of confirmed online bookings in just a few weeks for it’s parent company, Australian Holiday Resorts..

Devision used a new self-developed technique of search engine optimisation to boost the website’s number of visitors by a mind-boggling 2000% in just 8 weeks, leading to a surge of Whitsunday accommodation bookings and advertising revenue through the Whitsunday Apartments website.

This is a pretty notable result, considering many online accommodation websites continue to mention that the accommodation market is slow, blaming the economic crisis.

Devision believe that with a well developed and professionally optimised website, you will find that the bookings are still there, and more than ever people are searching online for accommodation, as in the case of Whitsunday Apartments accommodation website.

The website is hosted with local Australian hosting company, Webcrowd Website Hosting, which provides free online visitor statistics and free fortnightly resubmission to all major search engines, helping to ensure the Whitsunday Apartments website remains ranking high on the search engines.

Devision are the experts in Sunshine Coast and Whitsunday holiday accommodation website development, search engine optimisation and tourism marketing.

Talk to Devision for a free consultation and review of your current website to see how we can improve your website’s online sales with our proven search engine techniques.

Visit Whitsunday Apartments online at: www.WhitsundayApartments.com.au

Australian Holiday Resorts and the Whitsunday Apartments accommodation website content is independently owned by Chris Bourke, co-owner of Devision Design – Devision specialise in Whitsunday online accommodation marketing and search engine optimisation.

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The Importance of a Sitemap for your Website

January 21st, 2010

The Importance of a Sitemap for your Website

So, you’ve had a great looking website designed, and hopefully your web developer has search engine optimised the website for the best possible results on the search engines. After all, what is the point in spending a pile of dollars on a nice looking site if no one can find it, right?

But sadly, while many websites have a lot of effort put into the look and functionality of the website, many website developers fail to finish it off with the essentials that play the most important role in ensuring you can be found easily on the search engines, and one of the most important (and often overlooking) is the HTML and XML Sitemaps.

There are a few types of sitemap:

HTML Sitemaps – This is usually just a link on the footer of every webpage that will point you to a page with all pages of the website listed, with links to these pages. The advantage of this is for people to find your pages easily, which is important especially in larger websites. It also plays a key role in helping search engines to trawl through your website quicker.

XML Sitemaps – The XML Sitemap cannot be seen through the main website through a browser, however hopefully your web developer or webmaster has created and uploaded this for your website as it is even more relevant than the standard HTML sitemap. The XML sitemap can be easily generated using specific software designed for this purpose.
Once the XML sitemap is created it should be uploaded to Google through their Google Webmaster Tools, which you will need to create an account for. You should also do the same for Bing Webmaster Center and Yahoo Siteexplorer for the best results on all the major search engines.

If you are making frequent changes to your website, or run an online shopping cart or directory, then it is important to ensure the sitemap is recreated every time these changes take place, and then your XML sitemap is resubmitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo to ensure your new pages or changes are updated.

At Devision Design, large websites have a special automatic Sitemap Generator added which allows the site owner or the team at Devision to simply push a button and the new HTML, XML and ROR Sitemaps be recreated and submitted to all the mentioned search engine Webmaster accounts, not only saving you a heap of time-consuming work, but also generating an immediate response from the search engines, so you can often see the new pages appear in the search engines in a matter of minutes.

So, if you are unsure about if your website had an XML Sitemap or an XML Sitemap generator, then I advise you to ask your web developer as you could be missing a lot of valuable visitors to your website through a poor search engine listing.

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design & Web SEO Coach
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