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NZTO Comment

by Garry Bond, General Manager, New Zealand Tourism Guide

When is a business called a tourism business? I asked myself this question the other day after reading an article about language schools. Would you call a language school a tourism operator or classify it as something else? Apparently these businesses are popping up like mushrooms and Christchurch alone now has at least 37 schools plus numerous private language providers. Nationally there are 93 registered English schools and "around" 200 more not registered with the NZQA.

New Zealand Tourism Guide has recently added language schools to its directories and the way we see it is that ultimately these schools are attracting overseas students for periods of several weeks to several months. Potential students are not only looking for a school to learn English, they are also looking at our country from a tourists point of view. These students bring in valuable spending money and extended families are also compelled to visit.

So which is it? Just another business or a tourism business? I don't entirely know but one things for sure - pure tourism operators are likely to benefit.

Search Engines 101

We've had lots of new tourism businesses join New Zealand Tourism Guide and so it's timely to reintroduce the key search engine concepts - here's a brief refresher.

Search engines are looking for text. A simple concept, but many Web designers and site owners overlook this important fact by building graphical and animated sites that contain minimal HTML text. If you want search engines to give you good traffic then keep in mind the following principles...

• Locate keyword phrases in your title, meta description and meta keywords (e.g. If you're a motel in Auckland then a useful phrase would be "Auckland Motel")
• Locate phrases in HTML headings and HTML content of your Web documents
• Building up hyperlinks into your Web site from other Web sites will make your site appear more "popular" to search engines and will greatly enhance your overall rankings

Web page components that many search engines do not like include...

• Sites that use "frames" can't be indexed properly by most search engines. You can usually spot a frames site because it's divided up into "panels". e.g. http://www.astrology-online.com/frames.htm
• The majority of search engines can't get at a lot of content that is dynamically generated. As rule, any URL that includes a "?" is dynamic. e.g. http://zoe.inomics.com/cgi/search?action=default
• Hidden text (text the same colour as your background) should be carefully avoided.

These pointers are the tip of the iceberg but will stand you in good stead. For more assistance email Mark at Avatar and mention you were refered by New Zealand Tourism Online.

New Zealand Transport Web Site Launched

New Zealand Tourism Online has just launched a brand new Web site dealing specifically with New Zealand's Tourism Transport options. This site does not detract from the main tourism Web site www.tourism.net.nz which continues to build traffic but adds to the overall Internet marketing strategy.

Visit www.nzto.co.nz and have a good look around. Listing your transport business on this site is $225 + GST for a 12 month period.

Have you seen our new accommodation Web site? Well worth a look at www.tourism.gen.nz

The Top International Search Engines

by Mark Rocket, Avatar Web Promotions

Here in order is a list of the top international search engines according to the Nielson/NetRatings (by Audience Reach as of June 2002):

1. http://search.msn.com/
2. http://www.yahoo.com/
3. http://www.google.com/
4. http://www.aol.com/
5. http://www.askjeeves.com/
6. http://www.infospace.com/
7. http://www.overture.com/
8. http://www.altavista.com/
9. http://search.netscape.com/
10. http://www.looksmart.com/

Bear in mind that the figures just cover research for the U.S. They are also skewed because the likes of Yahoo and Netscape use Google searches but these are not counted in Google's traffic.

If you measure the search engines' popularity in "search hours" then Google is way ahead, with users spending nearly 13 million hours a month searching on Google, against 5.4 million hours at second-place Yahoo.

For more info on the Nielsen/NetRatings check out: http://searchenginewatch.com/links/major.html or http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/

Here's a further lowdown on the Big 3.

http://search.msn.com/ - Microsoft's quest for world domination continues. MSN Search is now embedded in their Internet Explorer browser so that you can type a search straight into the address bar.

The MSN Search service is a LookSmart-powered directory of Web sites, with secondary results that come from Inktomi. In the advanced search options you can search for types of files such as MP3 files.

http://www.yahoo.com/ - The world's first major search directory and is still the most popular, reaching more than 200 million users in 24 countries and 12 languages. Yahoo uses actual people to edit and categorise each of the million plus sites listed. If Yahoo finds nothing in its database it shows results from Google.

Good rankings on popular phrases in Yahoo will generate significant volumes of traffic and many businesses these days pay an annual fee to be listed.

http://www.google.com/ - Fast becoming the dominant search tool on the Web, Google's secret is the speed and relevancy of its results. How do they do it? The speed springs from a clever search algorithm, text-only ads, and 10,000+ low cost PCs hooked up to create a powerful supercomputer. The relevancy comes from the one of the largest indexes of Web pages and the ground breaking use of counting links into to a site to ascertain its popularity.

A high ranking for popular keyword phrases on Google can bring visitors to your site in droves.

The Top NZ Search Engines

Some useful New Zealand search engines and directories are...

http://www.searchnz.co.nz/ - SearchNZ is a user friendly search engine with a fault tolerant ("fuzzy") search algorithm which allows you to search on words even if you are unsure of the correct spelling.

http://www.xtra.co.nz/search/ - Xtra is New Zealand's largest Internet Provider so this MSN powered search tool is well worth listing at.

http://www.newzealandsites.com/ - This is New Zealand's largest directory and the definitive map of New Zealand Web space. They are getting over 40,000 visitors a week so the traffic is on a terrific growth curve.

http://www.nzsearch.co.nz/ - This directory is a partner site to the SearchNZ search engine. Web directories are best when the topic you are looking for is likely to be the major part of the Web site. For example if you are looking for a Web site about rugby you can browse a Web directory for the keyword 'rugby'.

http://www.searchnow.co.nz/ - SearchNOW is a NZ only search engine with more than 3.5 million New Zealand Web pages indexed. SearchNOW ranks sites by relevancy but it's a bit ad-heavy.

http://www.accessnz.co.nz/ - Access New Zealand provides a searchable directory of Web sites maintained by New Zealand companies and organisations.

http://www.nzpages.co.nz/ - The Lotto results feature prominently on this searchable directory of 26,000 NZ sites.

http://www.anzwers.com.au/ - Powered by Google, Anzwers gives you the option of New Zealand, Australian or worldwide searches.

http://search.nzoom.com/ - Actually more of a content portal than a search tool, but it's got a big brand presence and is worthy of note. You can search on their directory or run a Google search on the entire Web.

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