SWAT Business Consulting LLC

Web Creation Creating a Web site that stands out from the competition Author: John Montgomery The Internet has become a critical marketing channel for the lodging industry in terms of providing information, selling rooms and, most importantly, making hotels visible and accessible on the Web. For the lodging industry, having an independent Web site can be very valuable in driving online searches to your hotel. However, even if your Web site has been professionally designed and is a beautiful electronic brochure for your property, it may not be helping you increase reservations. Unless your Web site is optimized to work with search engines and directories, it’s not driving as much quality traffic to your online front door as it could be. Initial Steps When choosing an online strategy for your hotel, one of your first steps will be selecting a domain name. The following tips can prove to be helpful in building a strong Web presence. Brand Name/Franchise Name . Know your brand

Hotel and motel businesses are expanding and so is the demand for them. And, nowadays, most of the booking stuff is done online and if your property is suitably advertised or promoted, you would get more of bookings. For people, who are looking out for letting out their motels or hotel rooms, here is a good online booking engine . Such an engine will give you the flexibility of posting your property on that and to get the booking information. You would also get the confirmation for your bookings for the hotels from your website through fax or email. You would not only be able to increase your revenue but will also make your property noticed.   This is  online booking engine for hotels , which charge on a monthly rate and will help you in earning money.   And, such engines are quite easy to use and to maintain. In fact, these engines will allow the customer to do the bookings easily via mobile or PC. And, not just that, this booking engine will also give some special discounts

Learn more about the mobile web Your customers and site visitors are mobile - are you? There are 4 billion mobile phones in active use worldwide: 4 times more than PCs. In 2010, mobile web usage increased 148% globally (Source: Quantcast) and the numbers continue to rise. In fact, by the end of 2013, customers using the mobile web are projected to grow to over 5 billion. Your customers are already looking for you on their mobile phones; shopping, seeking, comparing. This is a huge opportunity for your business you don't want to miss. If your business is not on the mobile web, a significant number of your customers won't be able to find you!             How is a mobile web site different than a main or full site? Mobile websites exploit the special characteristics of mobile phones and mobile users to provide the best possible experience. Besides adapting to the smaller screen of a mobile phone, they are also easier to navigate using touch an

Statistics show that more than 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process. If your order page isn't easy to use, all other website promotion efforts will be in vain.  Here are the most important points for a successful order page: • Link from the home page and from all product and service pages to the order page. • Give the links on your order page names that your customers can easily recognize: "Order", "Buy", "Store", "Checkout", etc. • Don't hide the price for your products or services. People won't buy if they don't know what they have to pay. • Tell your visitors about shipping costs and state taxes. • Tell your visitors the final price before they have to enter the credit card number. • Tell your visitors who you are and tell them your complete company address. • Offer an unconditional money-back guarantee if at all possible.

It's important that your web pages are interesting to your visitors. Every visitor wants to get a prompt answer to the question "what's in it for me?". In the first paragraph of your web page, you should tell your visitors the following: • what you do • why people should stay on your site • what's in it for your visitors If you don't answer these questions quickly enough, people will go away. People aren't necessarily interested in your product or in your company. You must convince your website visitors with good sales copy. Before starting to write sales copy, make sure that you know your product and that you're passionate about it. You have to fully believe in your product. If you don't, you shouldn't sell it. You cannot write convincing sales copy if you don't stand behind your product. You must be sure that you're doing your customers a favor by offering them your product. 1. What's in i

Create trust       It's very important that your website visitors have trust and confidence in your company. Your customers must trust you. They won't buy from you if they don't. 1. Make sure that your web pages have a professional design Your web pages have to look perfect. If necessary, hire a professional web designer. Don't use blinking text, funny animations or flashy banners on your page. Make sure that all links on your website are intact. Don't use automatically created web pages. Some software programs allow you to automatically create pages that are "optimized" for a special keyword. These doorway pages don't work anymore on search engines (its simply spamming). In addition, human web surfers are turned away by that kind of pages. While doorway pages might look attractive to software programs, web surfers usually hate them. Automatically created doorway pages usually look ugly to human web surfers. Often, they