Two Tips to Make Your Travel Site Seduce Visitors

Competing for eyeballs and seconds can be a challenging, but fun, task in the online travel & tourism world.

Today, I’ll share with you two great tips that will help make your travel site more appealing to visitors. They aren’t complicated, but if you aren’t doing them, you’re visitors are probably losing interest fast.

Use Travel Pictures

You’d think this one would be obvious, but daily I see scores of travel Web sites that don’t have any or many pictures. Travel is a world that one experiences with all the senses.

Not having travel pictures on your travel site is like the best chef in the world serving his prized creation to someone with no mouth.

I’d submit to you that every article on your travel site should have at least one good picture.

A picture is worth 1,000 words. That is more true in our industry than perhaps any other.

Use Travel Videos

While creating your own travel videos might be a bit much, you do have alternatives. For instance, YouTube (youtube.com) is full of travel videos that you can simply add to your Web site.

Just the other day I found a couple fantastic travel videos showcasing the New Year’s Eve fireworks in a particular city. Within minutes, these videos were added to a travel site and now there’s more value for visitors.

And earlier today I went searching for videos for another city and in the first two minutes I found a great 8-minute video tour.

When selecting videos to display, here’s a guide you may wish to follow:

• Always watch the entire video to ensure it’s what you want (and there are no surprises).
• Stay away from videos that have advertisements in them (site URLs, ads, etc).
• Look at the ratings the video received, which can give you a little preview of how your visitors will value it.
• If the video seems particularly amateur in nature and you’re worried about it damaging your professional image, mention who submitted it. For instance, you could view the YouTube info and do a user profile with the video.

Your travel site should be a pleasing mixture of media. Don’t limit your visitors to just text, which would be like a chef limiting eager eaters to just broccoli.