Nowadays every B&B seems to have a website. It’s essential in the travel and tourism industry. People shop online for their holiday accommodation and to ignore that is to ignore a large percentage of potential customers. Once the website is running though, what can a B&B do to start achieving more visitors from the web?

- Make sure your site contains the right keywords in the right places. If you run a B&B in Crieff, make sure that B&B Crieff is in the Title, in an H1 heading, and mentioned a few times in the content of your home page any other pages where it is appropriate.

- Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find other similar search terms that people use to find accommodation in Crieff too. Incorporate those search terms into appropriate pages in your site, again putting them in the Title, H1 and body content positions.

- Signup to Google Webmaster Tools and create and submit a sitemap for your website. Register the same sitemap with Yahoo through Yahoo Site Explorer.

There are loads of other on-site SEO tips to get stuck into but those basics will at least help get your site found. In addition there are loads of off-site actions you can undertake to help boost your search rankings.

- Claim your listing on Google Local. Google Local results are showing up at the top of searches for loads of geographical searches. If I do a search for B&B Crieff in Google the first 10 listings are those who have claimed their Google Local listing for their B&B.

- Make sure your B&B is listed on Trip Advisor and encourage all your visitors to leave a review there (perhaps by emailing them a day or two after they’ve gone home with a link to your tripadvisor page). The Trip Advisor reviews are being displayed with the Google Local results mentioned above so it would be worth pursuing even if Trip Advisor wasn’t already one of the biggest travel sites to get listed on.

- If you’re not bad at writing, you might consider running a blog on your B&B site. News of what’s happening in the B&B is bound to be of interest to your repeat visitors and may attract new ones. A blog is also an easy way to update a site regularly to keep search engine spiders coming to your site.

- Get into social media. Twitter and Facebook are great ways to connect with guests who’ve already stayed with you and possibly find new guests. A full run-down on social media networking is outside the remit of this article but I’ll try and follow up with some tips in a later article.

- Find some travel forums, join and take part. Put your website link in your profile and signature where allowed and then get active. Try and give useful information to as many people as you can and use the forum regularly. Aardvark Travel forums are a good place to get started with this.

Those are just a few hints to help a B&B get listed a bit better on Google. Obviously a full SEO strategy will go into more depth and address more areas than this but hopefully it will help a few people get started down the path to better rankings.

This is one of those niggling little problems I had this week. I usually build a Joomla site in a temporary directory of the domain it is going live on then move it to the root directory once the site launches. The normal process involves changing the temporary location in the Joomla configuration file and if you’re running Virtuemart e-commerce, change the directories in Virtuemart’s configuration file too, then move the site to the root directory.

However this week when I thought it had all gone smoothly, it appeared that secondary and additional product images were not showing up when enlarged. It turns out they were still being referenced in the old directory.

A look at the database told me that the full URL for the large version of secondary images/files had been coded into the database for every image meaning that when I moved the site, the URL’s were then pointing at empty locations.

There were two ways I could think of to solve this:

1. Use a redirect on the images directory. I just added this line at the end of the .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /temp_dir/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/ http://www.domain.com/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/

2. Use phpMyAdmin on your server and go through each row in the jos_vm_product_files table and edit to put the new location in the file_url field. If you’ve got a lot of images, this can take a while.

For the moment, both ways seem to work.

Here’s something to watch out for if you have the Skype browser button. If you use a content management system to edit your website and happen to have phone numbers on the page you are editing, it’s possible that a whole bunch of Skype code will be injected in around each phone number.

It’s not a big deal to strip it out if you’ve only got one or two numbers on a page, but if you have a page full of worldwide agents and each of their phone numbers get the Skype code treatment it’s a real headache to get rid of. So before editing any pages containing phone numbers, switch off the Skype browser button.

Personally it find the idea of an application taking control of web pages and inserting it’s own code before displaying them to be a bit intrusive. Surely web pages should be displayed the way the site owner wants them to be shown.

If you’re just not getting enough visitors from Google, here’s a few other ways to get more people to your site. Most of these methods are part of a good SEO strategy anyway, so you’ll find that by implementing them you will probably do better in Google as a natural progression.

1. Bookmark your most interesting, outrageous or funny content in Stumbleupon. You can get literally thousands of visitors from doing this, however not many will go further than the landing page.

2. Build up a profile on Digg. Make contacts and digg plenty of their articles before dropping in one or two of your own pages and asking your contacts to digg it.

3. As 2 above except do it on Sphinn. Sphinn works mostly for marketing related content so if you’re selling vacuum cleaners you might struggle to get content up there.

4. Blog comments. Unless you are in the most obscure niche there is, you’ll probably be able to find loads of blogs related to your site. Get active in the comments section, give valuable quality feedback on posts and include your web address in the appropriate location, not in the comment itself.

5. Twitter. Setup your account and get active. Make sure you put your web address in your profile and consider making a custom background with your web address on it. Use the search function or a third party app such as Tweetdeck to find people to follow and interact with who might be interested in the content of your site. Get your blog to automatically update your twitter account via Twitterfeed.

6. Contact other sites and swap links with them.

7. Forums - while you can’t go spamming forums with your sales message you can take part as a real member in forums and many of them allow a signature link which is displayed after every post.

8. Pay-per-click. It’s an expensive way to get visitors but it does work. If you want to avoid Google’s Adwords, give Yahoo Search Marketing a whirl.

9. Email signatures/Email Newsletters. Including your web address in every email you send to anyone will get you a few visitors. Running an email newsletter with software like Aweber or ConstantContact will get you lots of return visitors.

10. Give away content. Contact other website owners and offer to do a guest post on their blog or give them a page of content for their site in return for attribution and a link back to your own site.

There are plenty more ways to get visitors from sources other than Google but these are a few to get started with.

Today I received a parcel from an Amazon Marketplace seller. I had been looking forward to receiving it even though it took 10 days (hardly 1st class service as advertised). Upon opening it though I discovered quickly that not only was it late but they had not sent the item I had ordered. It was not only a different model but a completely different manufacturer and altogether different features.

They could have got away with calling it a mistake until I saw the accompanying letter that told me they had run out of stock of the item I had ordered so had taken the liberty of sending the one that arrived instead. They stated that this was a more expensive item with all these features so it must be better and they would absorb the cost difference. They stated this as if they were doing me a favour. Their suggestion was that the product they had supplied was much better than the one I ordered.

The problem with this practice is that they are assuming the customer has just ordered on a whim and that they know better than the customer. It’s cocky and arrogant. In my case, as with all products I buy I researched carefully to find just the product I wanted. I put time and effort into making sure I was selecting the right one. I read over a hundred reviews. I was pretty certain that I wanted the product that I ordered. In double-guessing me they are insulting my ability to choose wisely when buying. They are calling me stupid.

It wouldn’t have taken them more than a few minutes to send me an email to ask if I wanted the alternative. Certainly it would have taken less time than packaging the wrong item and posting it. I would have been able to get my item quickly elsewhere and would have been happy in the end. As it is I’m still waiting for a response from their customer service email address. My time has been wasted. Their time has been wasted. Their money in sending, refunding and processing is wasted, and the packaging materials are wasted. Oh, not to mention the negative feedback that is imminent and the resulting loss in future business to them from potential buyers who check out their seller rating.

For now I have decided not to name the seller here. With a bit of quick talking customer service they might get away with this, but the longer it takes to get a refund the higher the chances that the negative feedback will come with some really negative comments.

I guess the moral here is - don’t assume your customer is stupid, communicate with them and let them choose to be stupid if they so wish.

Update: This was resolved quickly and the seller did have good reason for acting the way they did. In the end though I went to Argos to get my product - something I usually try to avoid.

Over the years I’ve met a lot of clients who have lost contact with their web designers for whatever reason. The designers have never given the client their FTP details so that they can retrieve their own website in order to make alterations or transfer the site to another host.

Often it’s easiest to just use an offline browser or a website downloader. I’ve tried a lot of these and most run for 30 days or so before you need to pay for them. The thing is, I use one maybe twice a year and I wasn’t happy shelling out for that.

Recently though I found HTTrack which does exactly the same as all the other ones I’ve tried but it’s free. I’ve used it for a few sites now and it seems pretty solid.

Just thought I’d share.