Glaciers in New Zealand
Maori children
Northland, New Zealand
Queen Charlotte Sound
Routeburn Track
Boating in Taupo
Tongariro, New Zealand
Wellington, New Zealand

Newsletter : November 2005

brought to you by New Zealand Tourism Online www.tourism.net.nz

In this November Newsletter:

NZTO Comment

by Garry Bond, General Manager, New Zealand Tourism Online

Tourism has had a bit of a mixed bag of news over the last week or so. Reports tell us the compared to 2003, domestic travel expenditure fell 9.4% while in October this year visitors were down 3% compared to October 2004. On the flip side, however, the number of stay days was up 5% on the previous October, from 3.46 million to 3.62 million days, while the average length of stay was 21 days, compared with 19 days in October 2004.

And there's more good news. The Rugby World Cup is heading to our shores, our sporting teams have done remarkably well recently and The Chronicles of Narnia movie featuring New Zealand kicks off in December. Peter Jackson's new King Kong movie will even help our cause.

Overall it's looking very positive. New Zealand is punching well above its weight in many arenas - sports, business and tourism. New Zealand is a young country and we should all be proud of what we have achieved in a relatively short space of time. Many other countries look to New Zealand for inspiration and as a model of success.

As a country, however, New Zealand still needs to continue to market its unique points of difference to the world wide travelling audience. Let's continue the good ground work we've done to attract the visitor - after all, I guess not every potential visitor likes the footy.

Walking Billboards

Tourism New Zealand is turning our visitors into 'walking billboards' for the 100% Pure campaign.

A new range of clothing is being launched in December which will allow New Zealanders, and visitors, to wear the official New Zealand marketing brand for the first time.

"The idea is to create walking billboards for the campaign," says George Hickton, Tourism New Zealand Chief Executive. "We know that word of mouth is one of the most effective ways of marketing a destination. We aim for these tees to play a similar role, with both international visitors and New Zealanders wearing the brand will help reinforce all the work we are doing with the campaign."

"Over the six years of the campaign, we have had many visitors ask us where they can buy clothing that features the 100% Pure brand. If they want to help us promote our country, why not let them!"

It is also an opportunity to let New Zealanders take part in the campaign.

The 100% Pure New Zealand marketing campaign is normally only seen by potential tourists and expatriates overseas, but Tourism New Zealand has teamed up with Queentown-based 'Out There Clothing' to bring the brand to life in New Zealand.

"The 100% Pure brand is about being authentic, so it was vital that the company that we used to produce the tees was a New Zealand company. Out There Clothing is a company that is very New Zealand-proud, is based in New Zealand and makes all its products here and we look forward to working with them on this range."

The range will be launched in Queenstown on 2nd December. The clothing is being produced for a one year trial period.

Source: Tourism New Zealand Media Release

Tourism Businesses For Sale

In line with the continued Web development policy for our site, New Zealand Tourism Online is now able to offer tourism businesses the ability to advertise their business for sale. If you are selling, the Web site caters for accommodation, investment property, atttractions and activities plus tours and transport sections.

These tourism businesses for sale categories perform very well at Google.com; for example we're:

  • #1 for "Tourism Business For Sale New Zealand"
  • #1 for "Accommodation Business For Sale new Zealand"
  • #1 for "Attractions Business For Sale new Zealand"
  • #1 for "Tour Business For Sale new Zealand"
  • #1 for "Rental Car Businesses For Sale New Zealand"

If you want to advertise your business for sale, drop us a line or phone 0800 14 65 49 and we'll provide more information.

New NZTO Team Member

New Zealand Tourism Online would like to welcome Brendan Chapman to the team. Brendan is a Web Programmer and will be a busy lad designing and implementing the dozens of Web site development ideas we always come up with each week!

Brendan, a proud Southerner enjoyed the peaceful atmosphere of Invercargill throughout the majority of his youth before venturing on to undertake studies at Otago University. He emerged with the required knowledge and degrees to establish a career in Wellington. Working initially as a Microsoft software developer, he slowly saw the light of open source technologies as his adventures took him from the larger corporates to the smaller Web development shops. The lure of the south was strong and this has brought him back down to Christchurch (via Queenstown) to join the team at NZTO and settle in the mainland.

Tourism Business Centre

New Zealand Tourism Online recently revamped its Tourism Business Centre. If you haven't visited it for a while have a look. This centre provides the following:

  • Web Tools - Options to take your Web site to the next level
  • Member Shield - Have you got yours yet? (NZTO Members only)
  • Links - Link to NZTO via text links, buttons and the cool new link maps
  • Tourism Newsletter - Subscribe and read newsletterback-issues
  • Tourism Info - Links to useful tourism research, events and news sites
  • Inside Tourism - Professional subscriber only tourism industry newsletter
  • Tourism Businesses For Sale - A range of tourism businesses for sale in NZ
  • Tourism Jobs - Advertise for free if you need staff (NZTO Members only)

If you don't have your business profiled with us, drop us a line or phone 0800 14 65 49 and we'll help assess your online marketing requirements.

Search Engine FAQs

by Mark Rocket, Avatar Web Promotions

An abundance of incorrect information is circulated about search engines. Here are some frequently asked questions on the subject.

Do I need to submit my site to search engines every month?
Nope. You don't even really need to do it once. The main way that the leading search engines find new sites is via links from credible, quality sites.

How many keywords should I include in my meta keywords tag?
None. Many people are suprised when we tell them that you don't need any. You could have no meta keyword tag and still get great search engine rankings! The reality is that the keyword meta tag has been abused for many years, to a point where the top search engines simply ignore it. Put them there for aesthetics if you want to, but don't expect them to be giving you any extra search engine grunt.

Do I need to include a meta description tag?
Yes! Search engines need a snippet of text for their search engine results pages (SERPs). They'll often take the snippet from somewhere at the top of the page, but they also regularly use the meta description. Not including a meta description can contribute to your search result page listing getting a dud snippet.

Why does my site have an irrelevant description on the search engine results page?
As per the previous question, first stop is to check you have a good meta description. If you do, but are still getting inane SERP snippets, then the next thing to consider is the first few paragraphs of text that appear on your homepage. It's extremely useful to include a compelling and keyword-infested description. This technique will also often contribute to giving you better rankings.

What's the best automated link building program to sign up to?
None. Don't do it. The top search engines consider this cheating. They prefer nice natural links into a site and can penalise members of 'link farm' type networks. It gets tricky when you try to succinctly define exactly what constitutes a link farm, but for starters it's good to avoid any automated system. Ideally, you want to encourage other people to naturally link to you simply by the virtue of your unique content.

How important is keyword density?
Keyword density used to be a hot topic in search engine optimiser circles, but these days it's not as important as it used to be. There are a number of key factors that contribute to top search engine results; from our experience and research the positioning of the keywords far outweighs a simplistic keyword density percentage.

How many domains should I have?
For most companies it's best to put your resources into building and marketing one powerful domain, rather than diluting your focus. Sometimes people pick up extra domains for good reasons (e.g. www.companyx.com and www.companyx.co.nz). If you do have multiple domains pointing at the same content, then make sure that only one of these domains has sites linking to it. Ideally this will be the domain that you want to come up on the search engine results page.

We welcome any feedback or contributions for our next newsletter - just email : news@tourism.net.nz

Regards,

The Team
Ph. 0800 14 65 47
https://www.tourism.net.nz
New Zealand Tourism Online Limited
Head Office: 208 Cashel Street, Christchurch

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