Tucson, February 3, 2012 - The Greater St. Charles Convention and Visitors Bureau launched the new historicstcharles.com last week after receiving a website makeover from simpleview.

Immersed in the Deep South, St. Charles is nestled next to the mighty Missouri River and is chock-full of history and culture. St. Charles was first established in 1769 by a fur trader and later served as the departing point for Lewis and Clark on their adventure west. Today, St. Charles's is a friendly community dedicated to preserving its historical past. 
 
The new site highlights St. Charles's historical beginnings and quaint elegance with images from the area seen at the top of nearly every page. The new design features an aged background with a brick border towards the top. Their new media gallery is already full of images from around the area, sure to entice visitors to experience St. Charles's culture and way of life. 

Let St. Charles's take you back to the beginning of United States history at www.historicstcharles.com

Before	After

Tucson, February 3, 2012 - Lake Chelan Chamber of Commerce launched their new website earlier this week with a redesign and CMS platform from simpleview.

Before	After

Lake Chelan is a 50.5 mile glacier-fed lake located in northern Washington State. The lake is 1.5 miles at its widest and 1486 ft at its deepest point.

The finished website is the combination of two sites, molded with spectacular photography from the area that spans across the entire page of the site. The Lake Chelan Chamber of Commerce wanted to give their site the wow factor of incredible imagery that changes with the season. Their site features both summer and winter seasons that the visitor can change at any time.

Enjoy the pristine beauty of Mother Nature in Lake Chelan or visit one of the many local wineries in the area at www.lakechelan.com.

"ATLANTA, Ga. (Feb. 2, 2012) - A tourism association headquartered in Atlanta wants to identify young travel and tourism industry leaders nationwide and put them in the spotlight

The goal: Keeping that professional leadership and enthusiasm in travel and tourism.

"Forty for the Future: Travel‟s Leading Talent" is a project of the 12-state Southeast Tourism Society (STS). It will honor 40 travel and tourism leaders under the age of 40.

Nominations, due March 31, are sought from throughout the nation. A cross-section of senior travel and tourism industry executives will evaluate the nominees, and those chosen will be recognized at an event in June.

"Travel and tourism is an exciting industry that is extremely important to the local, state and national economies, but we often see young stars lured into other industries," said Bill Hardman, president and CEO of STS.

"We want 'Forty for the Future' to become an annual recognition of some of the best and brightest we have, and we want that recognition to encourage them to stay in tourism," he said.

STS is casting its net widely and defines travel and tourism workplaces broadly.

STS anticipates nominees from direct-service providers such as lodging properties, transportation companies and attractions, from industry organizations such as convention and visitors bureaus and tourism authorities, and from travel industry research institutions, including colleges, universities and research firms.

"A secondary reason to create „Forty for the Future‟ is to drive public awareness of how big the tourism industry actually is and how deeply it reaches into the economy," Hardman said, noting that tourism is among the top three industries in all of its member states.

Another STS effort to encourage tourism professionalism is the STS Marketing College, an educational program that leads to designation as a Tourism Marketing Professional (TMP). The STS Marketing College has certified more than 700 TMPs since starting in 1992.

The "Forty for the Future" nomination process is online at www.SoutheastTourism.org."

PRESS RELEASE REPOSTED FROM: SoutheastTourism.Net

"Tiffany Tauscheck's job is to market Des Moines - to spotlight the city as a tourist destination and bring in revenue. It's her job to make sure - through websites, information packets and other marketing tools - that visitors know where to eat, stay and shop while they're here."

NEWS ARTICLE: DMJuice.com

The Search Engine Marketing (SEM) department completed an analysis of organic website traffic of current simpleview clients.  In this analysis, we compared 2011 traffic to 2010 traffic to determine how well websites performed year-over-year. The comparison was split almost evenly between clients currently receiving search engine optimization (SEO) services and clients not being serviced by the SEM department. On average, all of the websites compared experienced growth in organic traffic; however, clients serviced by the SEM department had a higher percent increase in visits.

Other statistics, such as pages per visit, average time on site and bounce rate were also reviewed. These statistics took a little bit of a hit across most of the websites, although SEM clients fared better on average.

CRM & CMS leader formalizes mobile development services to offer DMOs more features and a true one-stop solution for online destination marketing

TUCSON, January 26, 2012 - simpleview, the leading provider of CRM, CMS and web-based marketing solutions for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) now offers complete in-house development for mobile devices through its newly formalized mobile marketing division.

"The mobile space is becoming more important every day, and soon traditional, mobile and tablet sites will be indistinguishable from one another," said simpleview CEO Ryan George. "We needed a way to help our customers stay ahead of that trend, and there's an ever-growing number of advanced features and products for mobile marketing that we want to offer DMOs. The best way to meet those goals was to build on our expertise in this area and bring all of mobile development in-house."

George points out that while DMOs have other providers to choose from, simpleview's mobile sites offer advantages that other companies can't match:

• A true CRM/CMS integration vs. a latent feed
• The ability to have mobile site forms feed data directly into CRM
• Real-time reporting to partners on mobile listing views, clicks and calls
• Integration with the Destination Travel Network, which generates DMO revenue through enhanced web marketing for industry partners

"With nearly 100 DMO mobile sites already deployed, simpleview now leads the destination marketing industry in mobile development," George said. "And as the leading company in the industry to offer both CRM and CMS, simpleview is now further distinguished as the only company that can provide a fully integrated, one-roof solution for a DMO's most critical areas of operation."

In addition to sophisticated sites for smartphones and basic phones, simpleview offers tablet site development, app development, mobile site packages for servicing meetings, mobile SEO and SMS marketing services.

More information on simpleview's full set of mobile marketing products and services is available online at simpleviewinc.com/what-we-do/mobile-websites-apps/

About simpleview
simpleview helps destination marketing organizations (DMOs) succeed on every front, from convention sales to tourism marketing and day-to-day operations. The company offers integrated products and services including the industry's most advanced CRM and CMS platforms, powerful forecasting and reporting tools, dynamic websites, sites for mobile web, search engine optimization and interactive marketing. Founded in 1991, simpleview employs 95+ people with offices in Tucson, Dallas and San Diego serving nearly 200 domestic and international destination marketing organizations.

Media Contact:
Cara Frank
Director of Marketing & Communications, simpleview Inc.
(520) 575-1151
cfrank@simpleviewinc.com

 

It can be easy to forget about them, but your website's backlinks are important to review regularly. Backlinks, or inbound links to your website from another website, are an important indicator to search engines on how other sites view the importance or relevance of your website. There are a number of factors that search engines use, but in general, links from quality and authoritative sites convey popularity and importance to your website's content.

So, why should you check them?  You'll want to make sure that these inbound links are pointing to existing pages on your website. Some of these links might be old, so the pages they are linking to may have been moved or even deleted from your website. The importance of that link is wasted if the search engines' spiders cannot get to that page and review the content. Maybe you were considering removing the page but find that it is being heavily linked to - you may want to reconsider the move and leave the page if other websites and users find it to be useful content.

Now that you've checked your backlinks and found links that are pointing to pages that have moved or been removed, what do you do? You have a few options. First, and best, contact the website to let them know the page moved and ask if he or she would mind changing the link to the page's new location. If the page was removed, you could suggest another page that would be relevant to their users and content of their page. What if you are unable to reach the website owner and there are a number of links pointing to the old page? Your second option is to set up a 301 redirect to point the incoming link to the new page's location so users following the link can still get to your content instead of receiving a "page not found" error.

There are many free and paid tools you can use to check your backlinks; one of our favorite tools is Open Site Explorer. Just do a search for "backlink checker" and choose the tool that works best for you!

"Frozen bikinis in six, life-size ice blocks are coming to Times Square for one day only, Tuesday, January 24.  The "Defrost Your Swimsuit" ice block campaign kicks off the winter tourism season in Greater Fort Lauderdale.  The Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau is transforming a section of Times Square into a beach oasis featuring palm trees, large ice blocks encasing colorful bikinis and swim trunks plus bikini-clad models frolicking in a beach-on-wheels Beach Mobile."

PRESS RELEASE: Sunny.Org

Or find out more about the GFLCVB "Defrost Your Swimsuit" campaign at Sunny.org/defrost/

Taken directly from The Roanoke Times online, Roanoke.com:

Residents and visitors in the Roanoke Valley can now find restaurants and lodging, search events and outdoor activities, and get directions using a website designed specifically for smartphones.

The Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau unveiled VisitRoanokeVA.mobi at a news conference Thursday.

The site uses geo-tracking on smartphones to search for nearby restaurants, events, retail offerings, museums and lodging, and then gives directions. It also highlights discounts and specials at restaurants and hotels and offers weather, photos and a history of the valley.

Part of a $50,000 grant from the Virginia Tourism Corp. paid for the website, said Landon Howard, executive director of the bureau.

"Any business can add its information to the site's database for free", Howard said. Businesses are responsible for updating their own information."

Check out additional video coverage on the Roanoke Valley CVB Mobile Site:

WSLS.com &  WDBJ7.com