City Tours is a new addition to Google Labs that puts Google squarely in the tourism business: Give it a city name, and Google not only suggests sites to see, but it also maps out a multi-day itinerary and proposes a minute-by-minute travel schedule for you to follow.
And what’s really impressive is that City Tours [...]

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SEO is critical, but how do you know it’s working? Here are some tips and tools for spot-checking your SEO efforts and fixing the weaknesses.
If you’re reading this, SEO permeates everything you do. Or at least it should.
The trouble is, SEO isn’t a fire-and-forget tactic, and making the most of natural search results requires constant [...]

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Inflation-adjusted spending on travel and tourism in the U.S. declined at an annual rate of 5.9% in the first quarter after falling 6.9% in the first quarter, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said.
Weak demand is depressing travel and tourism prices, the agency added. They fell 10.9% in the first quarter on top of [...]

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Sure, it makes sense for most businesses to follow their customers into the world of social media. But before doing so, they must have a firm grasp on how to measure the ROI of those ventures.
For organizations, social media can serve as a private media channel that allows corporate control of the messaging. Social networks [...]

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Don’t be surprised if you get a phone call from a cheery-voiced, erudite lady or gent tipping you off that the genteel, 137-room Hotel Ritz in London, created by Cesar Ritz himself in 1906, has rooms for 30 percent off.
This is no scam, no boiler-room telemarketer reading from a script, no digital voice that sounds [...]

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Web analytics is critical to measuring the success of your website as you identify opportunities to improve your business and marketing initiatives. Most marketers are confused with business implications of analytics reports, so it ends up being simpler to track what you know.
Web analytics has made great strides in the past decade, from when hit [...]

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As consumers modify their spending patterns, their search behavior—the keywords and terms they use to locate products and services—also change. We recently culled over half a million search terms containing a certain modifier.
It is no surprise that the recession has affected online consumer spending habits. In lean times, people are more apt to curb spending [...]

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The online hotel sector is proving more resilient than traditional channels in volume terms but not prices, acccording to hotels.com.
The Hotel Price Index, produced by hotels.com at the end of last year, showed global hotel prices were 12% down. “There is some fairly aggressive price cutting,” added Pocklington.
He maintained there continued to be a shift [...]

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Travelers visit search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN first (34%) when considering vacation destination alternatives. The Web sites of specific countries or destination boards are visited next (23%), followed by online travel agencies such as Expedia and Travelocity (22%).
While the percentage of leisure travelers who report making reservations online has grown more than [...]

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