Newsletter : June 2012
Written by Steph Kendall
Welcome to the New Zealand Tourism Guide www.tourism.net.nz June 2012 issue. If you have news or comments, please email us news@tourism.net.nz.
In this June newsletter:
Drive to Get Visitors to Stay Longer
Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) Chief Executive, Kevin Bowler, recently outlined Tourism New Zealand's key areas of focus: longer visits/more stay days, quality targeting – to increase visitor quality and spend – and greater focus on the US and French visitor markets. TNZ's next three-year marketing plan is upcoming and the NZ tourist industry will have the opportunity to offer input.
Bowler also highlighted Statistic New Zealand's recently released figures which confirmed that international visitor arrivals have continued to grow year-on-year, with total arrivals up 3.9 per cent for the year ended April 2012, and holiday arrivals up 2.9 per cent. However, visitor stay days increased just 0.9 per cent for the same period, representing 50.8 million stay days in New Zealand - a figure that has stayed relatively flat since 2008. Interestingly the large Chinese tourism market tend to prefer dual destination group tours and on average stay in New Zealand just 6.2 days.
More marketing is planned around the next two Hobbit movies, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (release December 2012) and The Hobbit: There and Back Again (release December 2014) and the planned arrival of American Airlines.
First Hand Experience of Middle Earth
Tourism New Zealand's campaign to promote new Zealand as a visitor destination through its association with the upcoming Hobbit movies is underpinned by “100% Middle-earth, 100% Pure New Zealand”. Tourism New Zealand's Chief Executive Kevin Bowler says the films will once again put New Zealand's spectacular landscapes in front of movie lovers world-wide, "Our aim is to take advantage of that global profile by showing how easily the fantasy of The Hobbit movies can become reality in the form of a New Zealand holiday."
Tourism New Zealand's displays at TRENZ demonstrated how scenes and events from The Lord of the Rings movies translated into actual experiences within New Zealand landscapes. Through the 100% Middle-earth, 100% Pure New Zealand marketing activity TNZ will show how easy it is to come to New Zealand, see Middle-earth first-hand, and enjoy all the exciting and fun experiences the country has to offer.
Success of Lord of the Rings Marketing for NZ Tourism
Film Tourism in Action – Case Study of Lord of the Rings v Harry Potter Movie Tourism
Well worth a read, this article outlines some of the marketing work and success of Tourism New Zealand in increasing visitor numbers to New Zealand during the filming, production, promotion and release of the three Lord of the Rings movies. This included:
- Developing tourism partnerships
- Briefing the travel trade (including front line staff)
- Media coverage of the premieres
- Actor endorsements and credits
- Advertising ("Two years to film the trilogy, millions of years to build the set.")
- Websites
- Media relations
- Creative promotions
- Promoting film locations
- Tours and tour operators
Optimise Your Website With Meta Data
Written by Steph Kendall
Getting your website found, indexed and ranked by search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing is an essential part of marketing any tourism business through a website. Simply put, if search engine users cannot see a website in search engine results pages, they will not visit it and that website misses out on the opportunity to pitch for business.
Website optimisation (or search engine optimisation as it is also referred too) is the practise of editing websites to ensure that search engines can index them effectively. Once indexed, the search engines can then display websites' details to searchers.
In order to create their global index of websites, search engines require certain information about each and every website and web page. Their 'spiders' or 'crawlers' can be regarded as a team of librarians who 'read' certain details/data about the websites before they index them. If these details are missing, this indexing can only be partial and therefore not as useful or successful.
Details / Data Required by Search Engine 'Librarians'
Search engine spiders look for data (information) about a website and web page in its textual content. They do not 'read' images, flash or video footage particularly well. Instead, as any reader would do, they look for key pieces of text to tell them what each website and web page is about. As with any publication, the most useful details for search engines are the title, sub-heading, jacket blurb or description, chapter headings, opening paragraphs and highlighted text. In a web page, the data most needed by search engines is as follows:
- Meta Title – Located in the header text (in the source code) and seen at the top of the page in a web browser and as the first line of bold text in a search engine result.
- Meta Description – Again, located in the header text's source code, this short description describes what the web page is about. Generally consists of one or two grammatically correct sentences. (Similar to a book jacket blurb).
- Meta Keywords – Once this tag was extremely useful to search engines but nowadays has less importance, nonetheless, this tag in the header text source code lists 'keywords' relevant to the website's business.
- Header Text – As in any piece of writing, the heading is considered by search engines to be an important clue as to what the page content is about. The most important heading is known as the H1, with H2, H3 and H4 denoting other headings of lesser concern. The H1 is marked up in the source code (the behind the page coding) as <h1>Heading</h1>.
- Bold Text and Hyperlinks – Search engines also pay slightly more attention, as does a human reader, to text in bold format <strong></strong> or used as hyperlinks.
What is Keyword-Rich (or Optimised) Data?
Keyword-rich or optimised Meta Data is specifically contrived to include the keywords (or permutations of these keywords) that search engine users enter into search engines to find websites offering businesses and services relevant to those words (e.g. 'accommodation for the tongariro crossing' is a keyword search. The user is looking for accommodation, specifically near the Tongariro Crossing. 'Backpacker accommodation tongariro crossing' is an even more specific keyword search from a user looking for hostel type accommodation in the same region).
By editing the website content to mirror the text or language that the 'search market' is actually using, any website can improve its chances of gaining more visitors – especially 'qualified' visitors (i.e. people really looking for that type of website).
Ideally every web page of a website should be optimised so the website includes as many keywords as possible in important optimisation locations. If nothing else, a website should always include optimised Meta Data from the moment it is published. The most important location for keywords on any website is within the Meta Data on the home page.
About Optimised Meta Data
Example of Non-Optimised / Not Keyword-Rich Meta Data
<title>Discovery Lodge Tongariro Crossing</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Discovery Lodge is the closest accommodation & shuttle bus service to the start of the Tongariro Crossing. Join us for this experience of a lifetime." />
<meta name="Keywords" content="" />
- The order of keywords is important – usually a business's geographic location + core service should be in pole position.
- The proximity of keywords to each other is important. If your keywords are geographic location and core service, they need to be within a few characters of each other, or better still next to each other.
- The inclusion of the company name is not as important as you might think as it appears in so many other locations throughout a website.
Optimised / Keyword Rich Meta Data
The revised Meta Data for the same web page includes keywords such as: accommodation, motel apartment/s, backpackers, chalets, camping, campsites, tongariro national park, tongariro crossing, discovery lodge, nz/new zealand, bus, shuttle service. It also takes into account placement, priority and proximity.
<title>Tongariro Crossing Accommodation: Motel Apartments, Backpackers, Chalets & Camping at Discovery Lodge NZ</title>
<meta name="Description" content="For accommodation close to the Tongariro National Park, choose Discovery Lodge. Offering motel apartment accommodation, backpacking hostel, chalets and campsites, plus a shuttle bus service to the Tongariro Crossing." />
<meta name="Keywords" content="tongariro, crossing, national, park, accommodation, motel, motel apartments, apartment, chalets, chalet, backpackers, hostel, backpac king, camping, campsite, shuttle, buses" />
Upgrade from Free Listings on NZTG
Nearly all businesses relating to New Zealand tourism with a base in New Zealand can obtain a free listing on the New Zealand Tourism Guide website. What's more, it's free to have a listing in a second category if it's relevant. Your listing is a free link, which may help search engines take a closer look at your website and it may even send website visitors your way.
However, the free listings are only hypertext links, which look like this:
Nevill Bullock Tour New Zealand
Located above these free listings on almost every directory page are upgraded listings which tell website viewers much more about businesses at a single glance via photographs, headings, business descriptions and USPs. View the example of an upgraded listing below:
If you want your listing on New Zealand Tourism Guide to bring you bookings, then you do need invest in the page real estate as soon as possible - not next month, not next year and not next decade... location, information, location is everything NOW! For more information on promoting your business with New Zealand Tourism Guide, please email or call us toll free on 0800 14 65 49.
Your Listing Options
- Gold Listing
- Silver Listing
- Bronze Listing
View more advertising options on NZTG.
Top Tourism Site of the Month
This month's Top Tourism Site Award goes to Dart Stables
Dart Stables based in Glenorchy (near Queenstown on the South Island) offers horse trekking and guided horse rides in some of New Zealand's most stunning scenery. The website does a great job of capturing the 'real experience' with very authentic photography and video footage of the riders' experience and of the countryside. The website navigation is well-defined and pages have a very clear layout. It is a pity that the site is rather slow to load and, alongside other websites competing for this month's award, it fails to make the most of optimisation opportunities in its page Meta Data.
Nominate a Site
If you think a New Zealand travel or tourism website deserves a 'Top Tourism Site Award', let us know about it. (View further information about the award criteria).
About the Top Tourism Site Award
The New Zealand Tourism Guide confers a Top Tourism Site Award to websites that:
- Enhance New Zealand as a travel destination
- Publish useful and informative content
- Are laid out in a professional and aesthetically-pleasing manner
- Are designed effectively for the World Wide Web
- May demonstrate easy functionality, interactivity, originality, outstanding graphic quality and marketing reach.
We welcome any feedback — send your comments to: news@tourism.net.nz
Kind regards,
The Team
Ph 0800 14 65 49
www.tourism.net.nz
New Zealand Tourism Guide
Head Office: Level One, 534 Colombo Street, Christchurch