Google has been making changes. Lots of changes. 
And not just to how their regular search engine results show - you should notice that Google Maps listings are now ranking according to more than just location proximity and industry categories.


The Google ten pack is a very coveted place to be. Your listing is on the first page and appears above the normal (organic) listings. This works (almost) completely independent of your website Google ranking - businesses without a website can rank in Google Maps. 

The ten pack (or five pack, or however many listings Google decides to display) used to be based on a few things like proximity and your industry categories. Now we are seeing that Google is paying attention to more than just that.  As Google Maps gets crowded with more and more listings, they are paying less attention to what you tell them about your business and more attention to what others are saying.

So how can your Google Local Business Listing rank higher on Google Maps?

1. Verify your listing and make sure that your information is correct. If there are two locations or phone numbers listed for one actual business, Google will discredit this. Only make one listing per business entity or per physical business location.

2. Increase your citations and inbound links from major data providers.  Google wants to see that your listing information matches other well known and trustworthy sources. They are no longer relying on just the business owner supplied information anymore. What are the major data providers?

3. Add user reviews. User reviews are now a necessity. These can be good and bad for your business. You have no control over what people write and a bad review can be read by everyone. Alternate Image has created handouts for you to customize and send out to your customers. Create a landing page on your website that has a direct link to your Google map listing (find yourself on Google Maps, click "more information" to see your listing. This is the link you will want people to click to write a review).  Be sure to give this link out to your favorite customers who will write great things about you. DO NOT write a fake review, you should have at least two or three great customers who would be happy to do this for you.  A higher volume of good reviews will help you rank higher on Google Maps.

4. Add proper category associations. Make sure that you have used all 5 of the categories that Google offers. You have the ability to create your own categories if they do not have your industry listed. Make sure that the first category, your primary category, is the best suited for your business. Ex: Hotel, or Realtor. The secondary categories should include your key words and be general but with location specific qualifiers, ex: daytona beach hotel, daytona beach realtor.

5. Put your full business address on contact page. Make sure your contact page information is up to date and correct. Alternate Image website clients: update your location address in your site settings - at the top right hand corner of the admin area.  Google will check that your website contact page is consistent with your Google Maps listing information.

6. Increase your quality of inbound links. This goes along with having your information submitted to major data providers.  Having links from other high ranking websites to your website will increase Google's "trust" in your listing. Great examples would be your local Chamber website directory, the CVB websites like Daytona Beach or New Smyrna, and other major directory sites like Urbanspoon for restaurants and Merchant Circle for all types of businesses. BikeWeek.com also offers directory listings.  Most good sites will require a fee for a directory listing, but some are free.  This is a great advertising investment as we see a large portion of our Daytona hoteliers traffic come from the Daytona CVB website.  Rearrange your marketing budget to allocate less to that Yellowpage ad and more on Internet advertising.

7. Have location keywords in anchor text for inbound links. Make sure that all those high quality inbound links include actual keywords that are location specific. Instead of it saying "click here" to visit website, have it say "Visit the Daytona Beach Holiday Inn".

8. Include keywords in your listing description.  Your Google Maps description has to be short (they impose a character limit) but needs to include your keywords. Instead of writing "We are a great oceanfront hotel with a pool..." say something like "Great Daytona Beach oceanfront hotel with pool".

Negative factors affecting your ranking:
Using a 1-800 phone number. Google wants to see local area codes that match your location address.
Having multiple addresses on the contact page. Don't confuse Google.Have your contact page info be consistent with your Google Maps info.
Negative customer ratings on your reviews. You can't remove these, but you can bury them with good reviews.
Multiple listings with the same business name. If you are a franchise or have more than one location, identify it with a city, ex: Holiday Inn Daytona Beach instead of naming it Holiday Inn.
Multiple listings with the same address or phone number

Google is much more advanced than we will ever know. There is a reason they do not release their formula for ranking websites and Google Map listings: they are trying to prevent people from unfairly ranking. Alternate Image is always researching and testing the best ways to optimize websites for search engines because this is what we do. We provide this knowledge as a service to clients because if you do well, we do well.
Don't just be online, compete online.

Morgan Seedarnee
Internet Marketing Specialist,
Alternate Image
Daytona Beach Website Development and Search Engine Optimization Services

In addition to hotels and custom websites, we also do websites for Realtors. Our real estate website applications include the listing of properties from the Multiple Listing Service, a customer Wish List and more. Previously, we had to develop and host the Realtor's website for them to make use of our Realtor applications. With the advent of WorldRETS and SnipApps technology, that is no longer necessary. If you have a website already but would like to add a RETS feed, we can help.

Often, Realtor websites are pretty simple or have limited functionality due to the sheer cost. WorldRETS specializes in providing enterprise-level functionality to Realtors that don't want to pay development costs for a new website and deal with the pain of switching webmasters.



To do this, WorldRETS utilizes SnipApps technology. What is SnipApps? A SnipApp is simply a single snippet of html code. Put this code anywhere on your site and it can generate customized property listings, forms or whatever else we offer. No need to switch webmasters, no need to install anything complicated, no need to change the look, feel or functionality of your existing website. A SnipApp is completely standalone.

What Can SnipApps Do?

We have created SnipApps that perform a wide variety of Realtor functions. There are SnipApps that list properties in an interactive Data Grid or a Carousel, SnipApps that create search boxes and wishlist boxes and so on.

The Listings Snippet  is the central WorldRETS SnipApp. It is a customizable list of properties pulling from the MLS (Multiple Listing Service). A Listings Snippet can be a standard Data-Grid or a Carousel. A Data-Grid is a straight list of properties that can be sorted or searched. For our current realtor clients, you would recognize the Data Grid as what you currently have on your property.cfm page. A Carousel is simply a slide show of properties.

Data-Grids are a central part to any realtor website. They stand alone, but can also interact with search boxes and wishlist boxes on the same page. All you have to do is put a Data-Grid Listings Snippet and a search box on the same page and they will work together as though they were made specifically for your site. No extra fuss necessary!

The best part about SnipApps is that they can be customized in look and feel. If you want a Data Grid that only shows commercial properties, you can create a SnipApp that does just that through our Listings Builder. From there, you can customize the look and feel by selecting one of our predefined skins, to make the SnipApp more closely match your site.

- John Peron
Sr. Programmer,
Alternate Image


 

Alternate Image is excited to put the new content management system live on ALL admin areas of your website. The next step will be to apply this new CMS to the client side of the website (this CMS is currently accessed by pressing ESC three times on your website pages). Please send us any feedback as we are working to improve this CMS system for our users.

What is different about this new CMS?
It has a sleek new look and feel, with added features, an HTML cleaner, and best of all it is compatible with Safari and Firefox! MAC users rejoice!
Take a minute to read more about these new features and how to use them.

Photo Gallery Features

Find Images Fast

Type in your image name and click "Go" in the search box. Organize your files by pictures files, documents, or othery file types, and see thumbnails of your images. Click the page arrows to view the next page of images. A great idea is to organize your images into libraries. You can add a new library (click on the library drop down menu and select "Add Library") and keep your images organized by your specific library names.

Upload Multiple Images at a Time

Just click Upload>Browse - and click all the images in the folder that you want to upload. Once the images are all uploaded, click on media to return to your media page. You may also upload large sized images! No more 200k file size limit. And yes - we are very excited about this.

Resize Photos Instantly

Select your photo thumbail, a new screen will appear. The photo gallery will automatically offer you three sizes for your image, small, medium and large. You even have the choice to make a custom size image in the area to the right. Click submit and your photo will be inserted into your content.

Add Image Alt Tags
Need some Google juice? Once way to help Google identify the images you have is to add an Alt -Tag. This is visible to the user (when you hover your mouse over the image, your alt-tag will appear) and will help score you some points with search engines. We always recommend adding alt-tags to your images. Our new photo gallery allows you to add your alt-tags when inserting your image. What are some great examples of alt-tags? If you are inserting a lifestyle photo and you are Daytona Beach hotel, name the image "Daytona Beach Vacations" or "Daytona Beach Oceanfront Hotel".

General Content Management Features

HTML Cleaner
Copying and pasting text from Word documents or other websites used to copy over a lot of messy HTML code, which can cause problems later on when you are trying to format your text. The new HTML cleaner will remove bad HTML code, clean up any messy code, and make your text overall easier to format.

How will this affect the way you use the content management system?
To format text you will have to use the formatting tool on the new content management system. Copying and pasting formatted text over from another document or website will paste the text but will not retain the original formatting. This keeps the HTML code cleaner and makes it much easier to re-formatt, insert more text and pictures, without causing some of the annoying "un-formatting" of your text associated with the old content management system. Give it a try and tell us what you think!

New Tool Bar for Editing & Formatting

The new toolbar does everything the old one did, it just looks much nicer! You may notice a difference in the way you format colors and your fonts. The basic editing functions are always important. Anytime time you want to edit the font you will have to be sure to highlight the text. Once the text is highlighted click on the "A" viewer, which is now a combination of three options in one; the Color, Size, and Type of font. When choosing the color, click on the check box next to color and a color wheel will appear. There is a small cursor in the bottom left corner you drag into the color choice. You can also move the vertical cursor up and down. Once you have chosen the color click on the rainbow wheel at the bottom to activate and Submit. You can also Bold, Italic, or Underline in the "A" viewer, for one less step.

If you are in Firefox you can hightlight your text, then hold down "CNTRL" and highlight other text throughout your content and click the "A" to format it all at once. This is a great way to format your subheadings so that they all appear with the same color and style.

We hope you enjoy the new CMS and we look forward to applying this to the client side website pages very soon.

- Alternate Image Staff

What's New with your Open Hotel Booking Engine?

New Dashboard

The New Dashboard allows you quickly view or add new rates, extras, and wholesalers. This also has as link to view reservations and displays your daily arrivals and the amount of reservations placed through the website for that day.

Have a question?
The green "Instructions" button will expand to show you help articles and video tutorials.

Your dashboard will also display your recent reservations and arrivals.

Underneath will display the new availability calendar. This new calendar will display your rooms down the left hand side with this month's dates from left to right. A number will display so that you can quickly view the amount of rooms you have available for each room type on a specific date. Red means unavailable, yellow means limited availability, and green means completely available.

New Rates & Inventory Page

The new rates page has all the same information as the current version, except it will be displaying differently. To shorten the page and eliminate excess scrolling, your discounts, descriptions and policies are on separate tabs within your "Add New Rate Period" page. The info is the same but will be displaying in the new layout, which can be seen below.

New Reservations Details Pages
Your new reservations details page will show any customer comments and important notices at the top in a yellow box. If the customer cancels a reservation or adds comments this will appear at the top. At the top right hand corner there is the option to print a long or short version of this reservation. The short version will not include credit card information, the long version will.

New Wholesaler & Wholesaler Rates Pages
The new wholesaler form has the same exact information but as with the other changes, it is now displayed in tabs. The wholesaler rates page is similar to the new rates and inventory page shown above. Tabs are used to fit all the information on the page. Nothing has been changed that will affect the functionality of the Wholesaler feature.

New Rates Overview Page
The rates overview page is now easier to read so you can quickly scan through to see which rate periods are active for each day, and your inventory and rates for each room. This new format will allow for our future features which will include the ability to quickly add extra room inventory for specific rooms and days without creating a new rate period. This will all be done from the rates overview page. At this time, the only changes you will see are visual.

New Rooms Page
To create new room types, your rooms page has been altered to display your room description, pictures, and policy settings across the page in tabs. Below, you can apply your discounts, applicable amenities and room options by selecting the options that apply. Once selected these options will turn blue. This layout provides an easier way to quickly see all features applied to this room type.
*Note that the GDS portal tab will not be visible and is for Alternate Image admin staff.

New Discounts Page
The new discounts page has tabs going across the page where you will enter in your restrictions, rooms that the discount will apply to, your discount description, and policy. This form is much shorter then current version and will eliminate excess scrolling. None of your discount information has been modified, just a new look.
*Note that the GDS portal tab will not be visible and is for Alternate Image admin staff.

New Quick Close Page
The new quick close page works just as before, simply add your Quick Close name, where it applies to, the dates, and the rooms you wish to close.

Have a Suggestion?
Tell us what you want to see happen in our Forum.

We appreciate your business and look forward to showing you the new changes in our highly anticipated Open Hotel Software upgrade. If you have any questions about these visual enhancements you may join our webinar training on Wednesday, April 7th at 2pm.

We recommend having your staff and management attend this short webinar.

Register Here for the Open Hotel Webinar

Phase 1 of our new mailer application has been completed and is now live in the admin area. Your mailer has the same look but some new features that will help you with your email marketing. Phase 2 will include great features like the ability to save drafts, create a template from your email, create DRIP marketing campaigns and more.


Easy Template Loader - for customers who have had Alternate Image create a custom template for their mailer, you can now load that template into the email editor and edit your email text and pictures directly. Be sure to load your template first, or else any content you create will be deleted upon loading the template. Simply click on the "Load Template" box and select your template from the drop down menu.

HTML Cleaner - Are you cutting and pasting text from another source? Our new HTML cleaner will straighten out bad HTML and remove formatting. This is especially helpful in removing that pesky formatting code that is hard to manage or edit in the design view of your mailer. The HTML cleaner will clean it up for you, allowing you to copy and paste text from a Word document or other website.

Link Checker- if you have cut and pasted content from your landing pages, your mailer will not create full length links that will work in your email. Currently, our landing pages create links that are just "/landingpage" instead of "www.yourwebsite.com/landingpage". This is fine until you send the partial link out in an email - once that link leaves the website and is in an email blast it will not work without the complete web address. Our new link checker will find incomplete links and fix them for you! No more broken links!*
* Always check each link in your preview email to make sure that you have the correct web address, the link checker cannot fix typos!

Preview Button - this feature was actually added last month but it is included in our Phase 1 features. Click the preview button and a window will appear. At the top you have the ability to send a quick and easy email test to yourself (or your staff, whoever and however many people you want). This way you can view a real live preview that has gone through the mail server, HTML cleaners, and Link checker.

Cancel Email Button!!!- Wait! Stop that email! Now you can cancel an email blast from sending, even if it has already entered the mail queue. Simply click on the Pending email details and click "Cancel Email". You will lose your HTML source code so please be sure to save this to a text file somewhere as a back up on your computer.

Enjoy your new email mailer features and contact Alternate Image about creating custom email templates for your next email blast.

Have you had a recent change in staff?

Often times no one bothers to tell the new manager about the company website, how to access it, or who to contact for updates and support. Information on the website goes stale and people are sending emails to an employee who is no longer at your company. More importantly, marketing opportunities are missed because the new staff member does not know about your website features and email blast capabilities. Many of our hotel clients have issues with their booking engines no longer displaying their rates because no one has entered them in for the next year.

If your business has had a recent change in staff members, particularly in your management staff, front desk staff, or your marketing department, please follow these simple steps below.

1. Most importantly login to your administration page of your website, go to the security tab and click on usergroup. There will be a usergroup called Admin. This usergroup indicates what employees have administration access to make updates or changes to your website. Be sure the employee is removed from the usergroup preferable before you release the employee.

2. Send in a support ticket to have the employees old email address forwarded to another manager. Email help@aisupportdesk.com and include the former employee's email address and the address you would like it to forward to.

3. Check your website to make sure that the old email address is removed from any contact information.

4. Schedule a date to have your new staff member complete a training session on using the website.

Additional information about using your Alternate Image website can be found in the Wiki.

Has your company changed ownership?

Contact Valerie Herrin for information on transferring domain names and additional paperwork.
386-760-1774, ext: 1000

Does your company have a Facebook page or Twitter profile? Do you want people to be able to find you on Linked In? Add your social media icons to your website and give users a fast and easy way to friend, become a fan, or follow you on the Internet.

Simply send in a support ticket to help@aisupportdesk.com.Alternate Image's graphics department will update your website free of charge.

In your support ticket be sure to include:
1. Your website domain. ex: www.alternateimage.com
2. Your social media profile url. ex: www.twitter.com/alternateimage
3. Where you want this icon to go. Please be specific. ex: Top left hand side of home page, above the main body.
4. Double check your links. Make sure you are giving the url for your profile that you would view if you are not logged in. Facebook has two different Fan Page urls. The easiest way to find your Fan Page is to search for your fan page by it's title. Once you click on the fan page icon copy and paste that url into the support ticket.*

*Always double check to make sure your url is correct by copying into the address bar and seeing what page it goes to. Often times when you click it will take you to Facebook's login page and not the actual Fan Page. Make sure your Fan Page is viewable to the public.

Please allow 48 business hours for our graphics department to make these updates.

Spending on online advertising and marketing will surpass print in 2010 for the first time, according to a new report from Outsell.

Companies will spend $119.6 billion on online and digital strategies, from search engine keywords to webinars, while committing $111.5 billion to print such as newspapers and magazine ads. Overall, U.S. spending on advertising and marketing will increase in 2010, but only by 1.2 percent to $368 billion.

Outsell forecasts spending, share, and growth for five media categories including online, events, print, TV/radio and PR/other.


"Advertisers are directing dollars toward the channels which generate the most qualified leads and most effective branding," said Chuck Richard, Vice President and Lead Analyst, Outsell.


"As they emerge from the recession, they need more accountability, and they're spreading their spending over a widening set of options."

Print magazine advertising will be up 1.9 percent to $9.4 billion even with the popularity of online channels.

Other key findings include:

*51 percent if B2B marketers rate Facebook as extremely or somewhat effective, followed by LinkedIn (45%), Twitter (35%) and MySpace (25%).

*B2B advertisers see cross-media marketing as most effective; 78% combine three or more major marketing methods.

*Methods creating the highest B2B ROI are topped by advertisers' own websites, followed by conferences, exhibitions and trade shows: direct mail; search engine keywords; and e-marketing/e-newsletters.

Alternate Image has recently upgraded the mailer application to include a "send test" button in the preview window of the mailer application. This allows you to compose your email and then click the "Preview" button. When your preview window appears there is an option at the top to send to a specified email address.

Once you click "send", the preview email will be sent immediately as it bypasses the normal mail queue and will come from the admin@yourdomainname.com email address with the subject line of "Preview". You can send as many tests as you want and we recommend this before sending any email blast.



Why are test emails so important?

Since an email browser will display emails much differently than your website browser, it is important that you DO NOT rely on the pop-up preview window to show an accurate display of your email. In all actuality, your email will display much differently in Outlook, Zimbra, Gmail, Apple Mail and other email browsers. Some email inboxes will strip out formatting, not display images, and revert your text to a standard font type and size. There is nothing you can do about this except send test emails to different email accounts to preview your email before it is sent out.

I recommend keeping your email simple with a simple layout, this leaves less room for display errors in the inbox. If you have a lot of information, put it in a landing page and link that to a "Read more" within your email. One common mistake we see is that people copy and paste form Microsoft Word documents. DO NOT paste text from a Word document or other website. Word documents will paste over messy HTML code, most of which is not viewable in many email inboxes. It will look fine on your Internet browser but once it is emailed the result can be messy.

Type your story in wordpad, text edit, notepad, or other common word editing programs that strip formatting. When you paste your text into the mailer to compose your email you will have clean, un- formatted text to work with. Add your images and from there do your text formatting. Send your test, make necessary adjustments and you will be ready to go. As always, Alternate Image is available from 9am to 5:30pm during the weekdays to assist your with any issues. We also offer custom email design services for clients, just ask!

-Morgan Seedarnee
Internet Marketing Specialist
Alternate Image

The average person visits hundreds of websites each year, if not each month. If you are online searching for something in particular, say a hotel or a new home, you'll most likely do your research online. During your research process you will come across many different websites, blog posts, and online listings which you'll quickly skim, move through and then forget. But how do you stop your website from being "forgotten" and initiate a call to action?

One way to help slow the viewer down and make your site more memorable, is to use quality visual elements and professional photography. First impressions are formed within seconds, especially on the Internet where the first elements on your website to be seen are your photographs.

Photography, especially within the digital age, can be used in several ways. Photos can be informative and direct, such as product shots for a store catalog or website, or photos can be more engaging to the viewer,like a lifestyle photo in a hotel on the beach, with peaceful blue skies coming through the windows and lighting up the room softly.


If approached professionally, your photos should make the viewer want to look around your gallery and continue to stay at your site. The longer someone is at your site, the more memorable it will be. Your overall goal should not be to fill the required spots with images but to convey a feeling through your photos that will make your viewer take action by saying "I want to go there!" or "I need to buy that".

You just can't throw up photos on your website and hope people like them; you need to have quality photos done by a professional. Why would you bring traffic to your site only to turn them away with poor pictures that are unflattering to your property? Digital photo manipulation to take away background distractions, color correcting, and purposeful cropping done by professional photographers provide effective visual representations. You need to sell the "experience" of your location. All of the photos should have consistency, showing only your very best in location and attributes. Mix in photos with people instead of the usual empty rooms to help viewers imagine themselves enjoying your location or products.

Professional photos are a great investment for your advertising and should be used to brand your company. If you have a great photo of your business or product be sure to use this on your website, print materials, and even signage, tee-shirts, or other promotional materials. Great photos add a sense of class and style to your brand, and can mean all the difference to a potential customer. Look at some of the photos in this post. Although none of the photos are "bad" and most people wouldn't think twice about using any of the images on their website, there is a distinct difference between the professional and non-professional images. The images are strikingly different and yet they are photos of the same location except using different angles, lighting, and digital enhancements.

Alternate Image offers affordable professional photography packages at cost for our current clients. We encourage our clients to consider investing in one of our professional photography packages and will automatically upload these images to your website photo gallery as part of our service. Contact us about photo packages and pricing.

-Austin Marvin
Staff Photographer
Alternate Image