1. Daintree Marketing Co-operative (DMC) will be open to members with an active interest in tourism promotion and marketing of the Greater Daintree Region.

2. The role of the co-operative is to identify and create marketing opportunities for tourism businesses operating within the Greater Daintree Region.

3. Membership will not be restricted by geographical limitation.

4. The ultimate aim is to increase visitation to the region.

BACKGROUND TO THE FORMATION OF THE CO-OPERATIVE:

Tourism Daintree Coast (TDC) and Daintree Village Tourism Association (DVTA) are both limited by geographical boundaries – they each promote their bit of the Daintree – either north or south of the Daintree River.

To be a member of either association, it is necessary to have a business within the relevant geographical area. Businesses bringing visitors to the Daintree from Port Douglas are not eligible to join or participate in marketing opportunities. Kuku Yalanji Dreamtime Tours or example cannot be a member, because they are south of the boundary of the DVTA.

The realisation that the Daintree needed to be promoted as ONE region and ONE brand, was developed in 2008, during the three workshops held by Gaye Scott, for members of both associations, to look at possible joint projects. These workshops were funded by Blueprint for the Bush and the Dept of Communities. About 30 possible joint marketing projects were proposed.

It became obvious that the best way to move forward and drive these projects was to create a new organisation which focused on the WHOLE Daintree and ALL of the businesses who have an interest in marketing it. Having two organisations, limited by geographical boundaries, was in many cases hindering, rather than helping holistic marketing and promotion of the region.

THE CONCEPT:

The aim of DMC is to bring together ALL businesses with an interest in the Daintree brand – this includes those who may be located outside the geographical boundaries of both small associations. This will create the opportunity for all businesses with an interest in the Daintree to work together to facilitate marketing opportunities to promote the region. It does not matter whether members are day tour operators, or based in the Daintree; the key issue is that members must be focused on increasing visitation to the region.

DMC is about thinking smart, maximizing opportunities, and using the skills of members. We see DMC as facilitating opportunities, not doing the all the work ourselves. An online think tank is planned for discussion of marketing possibilities – many PR opportunities are there for the taking for FREE – it’s just a matter of grabbing them. Some opportunities may not suit all members. DMC may facilitate a group of members who wish to advertise in a series of backpacker publications, or a group who wish to target the adventure travel market, or a group of ecotourism businesses who want to work together. Any project that generates sufficient interest and is about marketing the Daintree Region will be considered.

It is anticipated that each member will contribute at least 15 hours of work per year (many will contribute more), or a financial contribution in lieu, which will harness at least the equivalent of a full time staff member, a great benefit in marketing the region. 

MEMBERSHIP:

The basic membership fee is $100 per year. Membership is by approval from the Board, and members have the choice of contributing 15 hours of their own time to tourism promotion and/or marketing activities or paying a further $300 pa. Active membership provisions are included in Section 6 shown below:

A person is not qualified to be admitted to membership of the cooperative unless there are reasonable grounds for believing the person will be an active member of the cooperative [s 61].

To qualify for membership the person must demonstrate an active interest in tourism promotion and marketing in the Greater Daintree region.

The person does not need to reside in the Greater Daintree region to demonstrate this interest. There are no geographical limitations on membership.

Please forward the membership application form to the Secretary, Daintree Marketing Cooperative Ltd
Mail: CMA4 Cape Tribulation QLD 4873 or Fax: 40980026 or Email: secretary@destinationdaintree.com

Now that Google dominates the search world all we really need to do is follow some fairly basic guidelines, that are freely available, and also practice a bit of common sense.

Here’s the link to the Google Webmaster Guidelines Page

To fully adhere to the rules most of you will still need help from you web developer/master, but most of them are quite straight forward.

I have added notes in green to try and explain some of the terms used and how they are relevant to North Queensland web site owners.

Webmaster guidelines
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

When your site is ready:

Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.

Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

A sitemap is basically a text file listing all the pages on your website. Google can access this file to find and add your pages to the google index.  Site maps are most valuable for large websites (100′s++ pages) that change frequently.  Ask your web developer if they think it will be beneficial for your site.

Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

Design and content guidelines

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

This “Site Map” they are referring to is an actual section on your website where visitors can see the structure of the site and link to each page.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Don’t go overboard with this. “cairns accommodation apartments in cairns offering holiday accommodation for visitors to Cairns” won’t win you any brownie points with Google and will make your site look a bit silly.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Check for broken links and correct HTML.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great way to keep your site in check. It’s also free and quite easy to understand.
Click here to go to Google Webmaster Tools

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.

Technical guidelines

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.

If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

This is a very important point. If you try to use tricky SEO techniques like buying links for page rank or participate in reciprocal linking schemes it will most likely have a negative effect on your rankings.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines – basic principles

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Don’t send automated queries to Google.

Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you determine that your site doesn’t meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.

 [Jodi] That’s it. The fundamental are quite clear. Just create a great site for your users and ask your developer to implement what is suggested in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

In North Queensland there are two companies I recommend for this type of development:

Echo Zulu
Erick is very knowledgeable in the Search Engine arena

City Of Cairns
Kaj & Nicky are excellent web developers and are very familiar with Google Guidelines.

You can now upload your brochures, menus, flyer’s or any other files you would like to make available to the public to your product listing for all our visitors to see!

If you have a PDF version of your brochure just login to your account:

Click on “Edit Listing”

Then click ”Downloads” in the right hand menu

Click the “Upload” button and a window will pop up.

Give your file a title eg: “2009 – 2010 Brochure” 

Click “Browse” to find the file on you computer then click add to upload it.

That’s it. Now you brochure is available on the downloads tab on your product listing page.

You can upload as many files as you like. You can even link to them from your e-mail campaigns etc.

• Cairns Today.com
• Daintree Rainforest.com
• Tableands.org
• Port Douglas Directory.com

The Local Tourism Network website will also  be where you can login and manage your listings.

The lure of reducing the phone bill is great but the downside is just not worth it. I doubt that we saved much on our bill at all as we had to call back on the traditional landlines half the time because call quality was so poor.

Usually I would have given up on this sooner but the possible savings were to big to ignore. We worked closely with the provider to test and tweak the system. In the end we had the best possible setup with a dedicated ADSL2 “Voiptail” connection and Cisco router. As the supplier said many times “It should be working”..

So, it’s back on the backburner for the Voip in our office. I’m sure our suppliers will be glad to hear it.

It would be great to get some feedback from anyone else who has used or is using voip for business.

Firstly, this article discounts viral marketing (which is free). This is when someone signs up to a group on Facebook, or a person discusses your product and you see a big explosion in traffic and sales. The Reason is this is free. Rather I will be comparing Apples to Apples, Social Marketing PAID marketing to Google AdWords.

This is meant to be a thought provoking article, so I will not even use one statistic so I can illustrate a point and you can think about it and make your own conclusion based on my reasoning.

The Nitty Gritty

Okay in “Bringing Down The House” a point is made that statistics can sometimes be variable, like in the famous gameshow where you have three doors. After you choose a door (one of which has a prize and two which do not) the Host (knowing the doors that have prizes) reveals a door without a prize and offers you to switch or stay.

If you stay with your choice, you will lose two out of every three times, if you switch you will only lose one in three times. That is because once the host showed you a case the odds changed

What About Social Marketing

Well the point is when someone goes on to FaceBook they are actually there to do something else, whether it is see how a friend is doing, send a message, or anything else you can do on FaceBook, they are not primarily there to look for a product.

Conversely, when someone types “Red Widget” into Google they are actively looking for Red Widgets, so if you have an ad offering Red Widgets you have a very high likelihood (1 in 20) that someone will click on your listing!

The Odds Have Changed! On FaceBook, there are millions of things any one user can do the chance of them picking your ad are very little, but on AdWords they start off with billions of choices they are changing the odds of picking your ad by limiting their own options by choice!

While you can target people’s interests on Social Media advertising, you are not changing the odds of them selecting your add, because they are not ACTIVELY SEEKING YOUR PRODUCT

That’s it I hope this is as sensible to you as it seems to me, and believe me there are plenty of stats others have compiled that showcase this all you have to do is Actively Seek them!

If you want to voice your opinion feel free to use the contact form and weigh in, I will be posting all responses as they come in!    Contact Page

Ever wonder why some of your internal site pages have less PageRank (PR) than your homepage?  Ever wonder who searches for a keyphrase you may be interested and adds about us at the end?  I will help you out then.

Firstly, it is important to realise that this is pretty new ground and subject to change at any time so talk to a pro before doing anything rash.  Seriously, I warned you!

I have been working in the internet marketing industry as a stand alone profession for nearly six years now, so the epiphanies that I used to experience on a daily basis are becoming more seldom.  But I had a great one about six months ago.  Why do I care if a contact us page ranks in the search engines? As a consumer who visits many websites every I really don’t care how to contact any given website, unless I really need to, then I know where the contact us link is.  The point is I do not really care at Google level.

How does this help your rankings?

Well the reason your internal pages have lower PR is because PR itself is derived from pages which other people link to directly, which for most people is their home page.  The PR is passed from the home page to each page it is linked to.  So for example; if your home page has a PR 6 (to determine your PageRank download and install the goolge toolbar and enable the PageRank feature in the options menu) and it links to 10 other pages on the site, you are actually passing a piece of that PR to each of those linked pages. Which means you are actually taking away a piece of power from your homepage (the one that normally ranks higher than all other pages).

What to Do?

Instead of just linking to each page normally, decide which pages are most important to you (if you site has been around for awhile go into Google Analytics and check out your “top content pages” the ones that people view the most as a guideline.  For ones that are not important on your site navigation and in your footer add a piece of code to the link rel=”nofollow”.  This instructs search engines not to follow it off of your navigation, so in essence telling them that it is not important.  This will place emphasis on the correct pages you want to list, people can still see them just the search engines lose track.  If you still want the search engines to know about the pages, just not promoted as an important page, simply link to them normally within the content of one of the pages which is followed off of the home page by the search engines, this way they will see it, but realise it is not a crucial page.

Warning

This is a pretty advanced technique, consult your search engine marketing professional of choice before undertaking this. I reccommend myself (of course) www.echozulu.com.au, or www.cityofcairns.com to perform such manoeuvres.

Results

May vary, but this has the potential to take you from page 2 in the results to page one on its own depending on the competativeness of the keyphrase.

What does this mean for our existing Cairns Today members who are based in or relevant to these regions?  More Targeted exposure!

And no, it won’t cost more. If your Cairns Today product listing is relevant to these regions it will simply be added to these websites.

About DaintreeRainforest.com
Like Cairns Today, the Daintree Rainforest.com website is in #1 position for the relevant destination keyword “Daintree” on both major search engines. The Daintree Rainforest website actually gets over 1000 visitors per day. People researching their holiday in the Daintree on the web WILL end up on this website. The new version of the Daintree was launched in May so if your tourism business is located in or relevant to the Daintree call or email Bree to organise your listing on this website early.

About Tablelands.org
Tablelands.org is another high achiever in the search engine world, also in #1 position for it’s destination name. The Tableands site was also launched in May 2009 and is ready for as much content as you can throw at it.. Call Bree to secure you position on this website.

About Port Douglas Directory.com
The latest addition to our network! Port Douglas Directory ranks well on all the major search engines and has a good chance of moving to top position over the next 6 months. Currently this website will be found in the top 5 on both major search engines for the search term “Port Douglas” If you are in the tourism industry in Port Douglas call Bree to make sure your company is getting the exposure it deserves.

For More info call Bree on:
40402177

Or email:
admin@cairnstoday.com.au

You may live in Herberton and love the local walking tracks or you may be passionate about the Cairns Museum or the Sunday Markets in Port Douglas . It could be anything you think visitors to the region should know about.

“What’s in it for me?” I hear you say
Apart from promoting your tourism niche & sharing your valuable local knowledge with visitors to the region we will also give you full credit for the article with a link back to your tourism business website with a brief description of your business You can even mention your own tourism business in the copy, if it’s relevant.

What topics are available?
We will find or create a space on the websites for any articles that are relevant to tourism in North Queensland.
To make it easy for you we have a huge list of topics and locations. Just choose a location and a topic and send them to us admin@cairnstoday.com.au with the article.

Click Here to Download the Topics List [PDF Document]

Click Here to download the Locations List [PDF Document]

Send your articles to:

Bree Haigh
Customer Care Manager
bree@cairnstoday.com.au
PH: 40402177
WEB: www.cairnstoday.com.au

We now operate:

#1 site on both major search engine for keyword ‘Cairns’ www.cairnstoday.com.au (cairns.aust.com)

#1 site on Google for keyword ‘Daintree’ and ‘Daintree Rainforest’ www.daintreerainforest.com

#1 site on Google for keyword ‘Tablelands’ www.tablelands.org

#3 site on Google for keyword ‘Port Douglas’ www.portdouglasdirectory.com

These sites have a combined total of over 3500 unique visitors per day researching their North Queensland Holiday.

EVERY tourism related company in Cairns and surrounds is eligible for a Free Listing on the site most relevant to their business Location.  Once you upgrade to a Product Listing – you will be listed in ALL locations that your business services.

Want more information on upgrading from your Free Listing? Email bree@cairnstoday.com.au or phone 07 40402177.