VisitMaine.com, the Maine Office of Tourism’s online travel portal, will increase traffic to your business website, help increase your website’s search engine ranking position and advertise your travel and tourism offerings.
Digital Marketing Infrastructure, or DMI, is the technology platform that runs VisitMaine.com. The online platform and Internet marketing tool is a powerful free marketing program offered by the state of Maine.
The first benefit for your business is the website traffic that VisitMaine.com will provide. The traffic will come through “link-backs” on your business profile page, getaway listings, including packages and specials and events listings. A “link-back” is a one-way URL link that takes a Web user from one website to another.
There are other opportunities, but here I’ll focus on the link-back traffic opportunities generated through a business profile page, getaway listings and the events listing.
Let’s talk traffic. I recently researched the monthly statistics for VisitMaine.com at Quantcast.com, a company that measures Web traffic. On average, 78,000 people from the USA visit this website each month, with a further 14,000 people a month coming from foreign countries. The total traffic is around 90,000 a month. In the summer, the traffic statistics go into the hundreds of thousands.
VisitMaine.com has a Google page rank of five out of 10. Websites that have page ranks of five or higher are generally highly trafficked ones. VisitMaine.com’s Alexa rank is 155,764, which places it among the top 200,000 websites on the Internet. Alexa calculates rankings by a combination of the average daily visitors and page views on a website over a 30-day period.
To acquire traffic back to your website, you need to register and create a business profile. A business profile page will display your business contact information, description and be indexed in the VisitMaine.com search engine. There is a field to list your business website URL, and this is the important link-back you’ll receive.
The second benefit is that by adding your business profile, you will help increase your own website’s search engine ranking positions at Google as your business website will be linked to a larger, more authoritative travel-related website.
I believe the primary factor to getting your business website listed high in the search engine results is the number of websites that are linked to your site and the authority (high page rank) of the website linking to you.
VisitMaine.com is ranked very high, so linking to it will help your own business website become more relevant and rank higher in the search engine results.
The third benefit is an advertising opportunity to advertise your business’s packages, specials and events. Package getaways must bundle a two-night stay with two or more travel-related add-ons — including breakfasts, dinners, vouchers, gift certificates, tours, activities, workshops or programs, performances or cultural events — that are normally booked separately.
Special getaways can be any tourism-related product such as lodging, meals or activities that promote a single travel product or service. Special getaways are an opportunity for your business to generate sales during off-peak periods through pricing incentives. Specials also can be used to liquidate inventory at the last minute.
Events are special events or occasions that occur in a town or region, or at an individual business such as a fair, festival, lecture, sporting event, etc.
When you add a package, special or event at VisitMaine.com, an individual Web page for that offering is created and is indexed in the website.
The individual Web page includes the getaway offering, a link to your business profile and a link to your business website. Every time you create a new offering you create another opportunity to gain traffic back to your website. This is a win-win opportunity as you not only can promote and advertise your travel offerings but you also can gain visitors.
VisitMaine.com is one of the most-trafficked websites in Maine. The Maine Office of Tourism has created a great service in making this online marketing platform available. You should not underestimate its power. Set up your profile, and get going.
This column was first published in the Bangor Daily News.