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Information Technology & Tourism, Vol. 8 pp. 91–104 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.

ASSESSING THE INITIAL STEP IN THE PERSUASION PROCESS: META TAGS ON DESTINATION MARKETING WEBSITES

ZHENG XIANG and DANIEL R. FESENMAIER National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce, School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA

META tags can be used as information snippets to provide navigation cues for trip planning on search engines. It is argued that, from a marketing perspective, they are useful means by which destination organizations convey persuasive messages to travelers. This study examines the extent to which “description” META tags are used on websites owned by destination marketing organizations in the Northeastern US. Content analysis of these META tags clearly confirms this argument and identifies the persuasive nature of these messages. Finally, managerial implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. Key words: META tags; Search engine; Trip planning; Persuasive communications; Destination marketing

Introduction

especially search engines, has now become one of the most frequently used information sources for travelers to plan their trips next to online travel agencies (Haralson & Lewis, 2004; Luo, Feng, & ¨ o¨rni, 2004; Sigala, 2004; Wo¨ber, in Cai, 2004; O press). As an integral part of online trip planning process, travelers frequently use search engines to locate relevant destination websites whereby they can find more specific and useful information about the destinations (Pan & Fesenmaier, in press). However, the amount of information that search engines retrieve from the Internet is often overwhelmingly large, even for a small tourism destination. Thus, how the website of a destination

Tourism is an information-intensive industry in that tourism organizations rely on the exchange of information with travelers through various information channels to market their products and build customer relationships (Poon, 1993). In the online environment a variety of information strategies such as web portals, online directory providers, and search engines have been used by the tourism industry in order to reach prospective travelers (Goodman, 2000; Gretzel, Yuan, & Fesenmaier, 2000; So & Morrison, 2003; Wang, Hwang, & Fesenmaier, 2003). It is evident that the Internet,

Address correspondence to Daniel R. Fesenmaier, National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce, School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Temple University, 1700 N. Broad Street Suite 201, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. Tel: 1-215-204-5612; Fax: 1-215204-1455; E-mail: [email protected]

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marketing organization (DMO) can attract travelers’ click-throughs is potentially a very important issue. Typically, metadata will be displayed as retrieved results on a search engine interface and will be used as an information “snippet” to provide navigational guidance for information users (Yu & Meng, 2003). As a common practice of a number of search engines, a significant part of the metadata, especially the brief summary about the website, is often extracted from the “description” META tag from the original website (Nowick, 2002). Within this context, a critical issue arises when travelers have to choose among a list of seemingly relevant search results. From a marketing perspective, the metadata describing a destination website should provide relevant and accurate information about the destination that can act as powerful cues to direct a potential traveler to visit that specific website. Thus, this information snippet should be not only accurate and relevant but also enticing and persuasive so that it can attract click-throughs from prospective visitors. Therefore, the use of META tags should be considered as one of the first essential stages of the online persuasive process. This article first reviews issues related to the practical use of META tags, especially the current status of META tags with respect to how search engines utilize them when indexing websites. Then, based on the understanding of the process of travelers’ interaction with a search engine interface, it postulates that the appropriate use of META tags, especially the “description” tag, should be an indispensable part of DMOs’ online persuasion endeavors. By investigating the META tags currently used on DMO websites in the Northeast Corridor in the US, this article intends to provide useful insights into the nature of these META tags. Finally, managerial implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. META Tags and Related Issues Metadata is information about information; more precisely, it is structured information about resources (W3C, 2004). On a web page, metadata is usually constructed as html META tags by web page authors. META tags have been used to anno-

tate a website and make the website “search engine ready” through enabling search engines to index or categorize the website (Zhang & Dimitroff, 2005). META tags do not appear in the web page display but can be read and used by search engines or by the user’s browser program (Nowick, 2002). Each META tag has a name field and a content field. The name field, which describes the type of information to be found in the content, can be designated as “robots,” “keywords,” “description,” “author,” “generator,” or other names at the discretion of the author of the web page. Among these different META tags, only “description,” “keywords,” and “robots” are recognized by search engines and only “description” tags can be practically made visible to users in their browser programs by search engines (Nowick, 2002; Zhang & Dimitroff, 2005). The use of META tags on websites, especially the “description” tags, has been documented by a few authors (Craven, 2000, 2001a, 2001b; Nowick, 2002; Zhang & Dimitroff, 2005). These studies suggest that: 1) the use of META tags is relatively low among websites and this can be attributed to the website authors’ lack of recognition of the importance of META tags or their awareness of the variability in the technology that search engines use to deal with META tags, which gives less manageability to webpage authors to make use of META tags; 2) there is a lack of consensus, either from industry or the academia, on the format of META tags; and 3) the web is evolving with new technologies emerging at a fast speed and, thus, the use of META tags may largely depend upon how search engines and web browsers will utilize them in the future. Therefore, issues have been raised concerning the use of META tags on websites. An important issue is the lack of credibility because META tags can be manipulated by insincere web page authors in order to gain higher rank in searches and, consequently, some experts argue that search engines will take them less seriously or, ultimately, even ignore when indexing websites, at least in the case of the “keywords” tag (Goodman, 2000; Nathenson, 1998; Sullivan, 2002). For example, Google utilizes page content and offpage factors (popularity, linking structure of the Internet, etc.) to measure page relevance instead of

META TAGS ON DESTINATION MARKETING WEBSITES META keywords tags. However, there is evidence indicating that some major search engines such as Go and Hotbot still rely on web pages’ “description” META tags to provide summaries for those pages and it does not seem likely that this controversy would inhibit legitimate use of META tags (Craven, 2001a; Nowick, 2002; Zhang & Dimitroff, 2005). If a search engine supports the “description” tag, the summary of the website content supplied by the author in the content field may be displayed in the search result list (Nowick, 2002). Experts in web design or marketing are still trying to convince web page authors of the importance of using META tags and on how to construct the “description” META tags as a marketing tool (Leonard-Wilkinson, 2002; Maloney, 2002; Richardson, 2003). Thus, despite these controversies, the “description” META tag clearly provides an important means by which to communicate with prospective visitors. Because of this, it is argued that it is important to explore the current issues related to the use of META tags within the domain of travel and tourism whereby travelers rely on search engines to locate the websites where they can obtain accurate and detailed information for trip planning. Traveler’s Use of Search Engines for Trip Planning Travel planning is a complex, dynamic, and multifaceted task, which includes considerations of destination, travel partners, transportation, accommodation, and other subdecisions (Crotts, 1999; Fodness & Murray, 1997; Jeng & Fesenmaier, 2002; Woodside & Lysonski, 1989). Trip planning and information search often involves a multistage process wherein travelers may undergo destination choice search, planning search, enroute search, and after-trip search (Jeng & Fesenmaier, 2002). Following from these studies, it is understood that travelers’ information search on the Internet regarding destination choice is a critical stage that will have impact on their subsequent trip planning stages. Even though there are multiple sources on the web by which travelers can access the information they need, it is evident that a large proportion of Internet users begin their online journey of information search by using a search

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engine (Nielson, 2000, 2004) and it is even more so when a traveler is looking for information about a place he/she has never visited (Pan & Fesenmaier, in press; Sigala, 2004; Weber & Roehl, 1999). The interaction between a traveler and a search engine interface can be considered as a choice process, with the outcome being the traveler’s choice of a destination-related website (Fig. 1). The key components in this framework include the traveler, the search engine interface, and the tourism information space, which is defined as a collection of all travel-related information pertaining to one specific destination provided by various parties on the Internet (Pan & Fesenmaier, in press). Implicitly, the search engine facilitates this process by preindexing the tourism information space and presenting the retrieved websites to travelers, often in the form of metadata, including a hyperlinked title, a brief summary, and other information about the web page. Thus, the outcome of traveler’s decision making is largely determined by the interplay between the traveler (and his/her mental model) and the metadata on the retrieved websites (Pan & Fesenmaier, in press). According to Kim and Hirtle (1995), information seeking on the web involves reading/understanding and navigating, and the two processes happen simultaneously. As shown in Figure 1, the sequence of interaction with a search engine interface involves the traveler’s reading and understanding the results of the search and then navigating back and forth between the search engine interface and the travel information space. This implies, then, that the traveler makes a series of decisions based on the metadata to which he/she has been exposed. META Tags as a Means of Persuasion for Trip Planning The Internet is an enormous hypertext system that is composed of interconnected text and information nodes, and travelers need to navigate through the tourism information space in this system in order to obtain relevant information. As discussed above, the early phase of this navigation often involves travelers’ interaction with search engines and from there they can navigate to the tourism information space. A number of theories

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Figure 1. Sequence of traveler’s interaction with a search engine.

have emerged in order to provide explanations regarding navigation through the hypertext system (Bollen, 2001; Conklin, 1987; Kim & Hirtle, 1995; Pirolli & Card, 1999). In information foraging theory (Chi, Pirolli, & Pitkow, 2000; Pirolli & Card, 1999), it is postulated that the web can be seen metaphorically as an “information ecology” with millions of users, in which over 8 billion web pages can be searched through major search engines (e.g., Google). As an analogy to food foraging behavior of living organisms, information foraging theory provides a general model interpreting how people use different strategies and technologies to search for information in response to a dynamically changing environment. Importantly, information foraging theory suggests that the content of web pages associated with hyperlinks is usually presented to the user in the form of “snippets” of text or graphics. The underlying assumption of information foraging theory is that users have some information need and their surfing patterns through the site are guided by these information “scents” depending upon the value of the information contained in each snippet (Chi, Pirolli, Chen, & Pitkow, 2001). A closer examination of a retrieved result displayed on a typical search engine page reveals why information foraging theory is relevant to this context. Figure 2 displays a typical search result on a popular search engine. The first line of the search result, which is usually extracted from the HTML TITLE tag of the web page, provides a

hyperlink pointing to the destination website. The second and third lines, often extracted from the original web page’s HTML “description” META tag, provide a brief summary that is presumably relevant to what the website and/or the destination are about (on some search engines, this summary may take up to four lines; e.g., Yahoo!). However, if the author of the retrieved web page does not provide a “description” tag, some search engines will display the first few sentences extracted from the visible web page content (Nowick, 2002) or a part of the page content that best matches the user’s search terms. Finally, the last line displays the URL, the file size, the date of indexing, and the link to the cached page, etc. A typical search result page usually displays 10 such clusters of metadata with each one representing a website, often in a rank-ordered listing format. Following information foraging theory, these pieces of metadata can all be considered as information “snippets” and, thus, they form navigational cues for travelers to make situational decisions. Whether a traveler will click a hyperlink to visit a destination website or not depends on the amount and quality of the information “scent” these snippets provide. From the traveler’s point of view, this information “scent” can be interpreted as the extent to which the snippet fits into his/her search task, domain knowledge, and mental model. It is evident that many organizations, both commercial and noncommercial, are leveraging a variety of ways on the web to persuade or motivate

META TAGS ON DESTINATION MARKETING WEBSITES

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Figure 2. An example of metadata on a search engine website.

people to change their attitude and behavior, which can be exemplified by the various recommendation systems integrated into Amazon.com (Fogg, 2003; Stiff & Mongeau, 2003). For DMOs, the Internet is undoubtedly an important channel with which to attract and motivate their prospective visitors by creating pleasant destination images and offering value-added information about their products and services. In order to achieve this goal, they first need to have their prospective visitors actually come to “check out” the information they provide on their websites. Under such circumstances, when travelers are searching for destination-related information through a search engine, the information provided to them about a destination website—the metadata—should be persuasive so that the number of click-throughs to the destination website can be maximized. Thus, from a DMO’s perspective, the nature of the snippets delivered through a search engine is critical to whether or not it can trigger click-throughs. Furthermore, these snippets do not stand alone. Instead, their effect is moderated by many contextual factors such as the location of the snippet as well as the text or other snippets that precede or surround it. A common practice of search engines is to return a certain number of such clusters of metadata about similarly relevant websites (Fig. 2). The location of the snippet is often the most important one as many users would consider the location an indicator of the level of relevance (ranking) of that link by search engines’ convention for “objectively” displaying search results, although in some cases this may not be true (Vine, 2004). The situation, thus, becomes complicated when a commercial search engine attempts to attract users to click on the paid (sponsored) links (contextual ads), while users may not be aware of their existence or they may not be given sufficient information to detect the difference between a paid link and a retrieved link generated by the

search algorithm. From a DMO’s viewpoint, being indexed by a search engine and displayed as a search result definitely provides an opportunity to promote and market its website and even the destination itself. Therefore, the metadata that a DMO may have purposefully selected to convey to travelers via this interaction represents an important first step in the persuasion process. Research Questions The importance of Internet applications in the travel and tourism industry has increased tremendously in the past decade whereby DMOs have realized that Internet marketing has become an inseparable, oftentimes determining part of their overall marketing endeavor (Buhalis, 1996; Gretzel et al., 2000; Werthner & Klein, 1999; Yuan, Gretzel, & Fesenmaier, 2003). For example, DMOs often leverage a variety of advertising strategies such as register with web portals and trade or pay for links on online directory providers and search engines. However, the extent to which DMOs use META tags in their marketing endeavors remains unknown, although it has been mentioned in destination marketing research (e.g., Wang et al., 2003). Generally, little attention has been paid to how Internet users interact with metadata displayed on search engines and even less so regarding their value as a means of persuasion. Thus, an understanding of the current status of the use of META tags on DMO websites will enable us to gain insight into potential issues and problems related to DMOs’ marketing efforts on the Internet and even their capability to effectively manage information technology to support their marketing endeavors. Hence, the first research question is formalized as follows: Q1: What is the current status of DMOs’ use of META tags on tourism-related websites?

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As a verbal technique, tourism destinations exploit different keywords to depict and represent the destinations in order to convey persuasive messages and portray positive images (Dann, 1996). In this sense, META tags are one type of such keywords that destination organizations use to promote their destinations on the Internet. Through examining these META tags, a better understanding can be achieved about DMOs’ marketing strategies on the Internet, such as how DMOs are positioning themselves, what images they are trying to promote for their destinations, and what products and services they can provide the prospective travelers with. Thus, the second research question addressed in this study is: Q2: What is the nature of the messages conveyed through META tags on tourism-related websites? Method The first phase of this study seeks to provide a general understanding of the current status of the use of META tags on the online tourism information space. The focus on META tags used on tourism-related websites was primarily on the “description” META tags. The second phase of this study examines the content of META tags in terms of the keywords used, the major concepts they have in common, and the types of persuasive messages they are trying to convey. In order to answer Q1 an analysis was conducted by providing descriptive statistics about destination websites’ use of META tags. Answering Q2 involved the deconstruction of the data language by using quantitative content analysis tools and grouping the content into semantic categories. Figure 3 illustrates of the entire process of data collection and analysis. First, “description” META tags on websites owned by 352 DMOs in the Northeast Corridor of the US (including the states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) were downloaded using a software and saved individually in a spreadsheet. These DMOs include state tourism offices/bureaus, convention and visitors bureaus (CVBs), tourism offices, and chambers of commerce. Multiple approaches were used to collect the name list of these 352 DMOs, which included

making telephone calls, following links provided on state tourism websites, and using names of destinations to query search engines. Thus, it is posited that this pool of DMOs represents the entire DMO population in the Northeastern US. To address the first research question (Q1), text processing and statistical tools were used to produce descriptive statistics such as the ratio of user and nonuser of META tags, average length of META tags in terms of number of words, and the frequencies of the META tags within certain length range. The third step involved data aggregation and preprocessing to prepare the data for analysis in Step 4. For data aggregation, all META tags in the spreadsheets were saved together in a single text file. Data preprocessing was done using two approaches and resulted in two different transformed data files: 1) quantitative content analysis tool— CATPAC (Woelfel, 1993)—and self-written text processing programs were used to identify stop words that needed to be excluded in the analysis, and 2) the aggregated text file was edited manually by using a text editor to substitute the proper names such as destinations, CVBs, chambers of commerce, and the Northeastern states (including their abbreviations) with generic tokens such as “theplace,” “thebureau,” “thechamber,” and “thestate,” etc. Replacements were also provided to words that were different only in numbers or tenses. For example, all verbs using different tenses such as “welcomes” and “welcomed” were replaced by its present tense (i.e., “welcome”); nouns in different numbers such as “casinos” were substituted by its single number form (i.e., “casino”). Because the goal was to discover the main themes in the text, using these generic tokens would accurately reflect the concepts that all META tags actually had in common. Furthermore, other proper names such as “New England” were also replaced by generic tokens such as “NewEngland”; otherwise, the programs would treat them as two unique keywords separately, namely “New” and “England,” which could generate undesirable results. Human coders were used to identify the main concepts (categories of keywords) in the text by categorizing the most frequently used keywords and calculating the frequencies of their occurrences, as individual words and as categories as


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Figure 3. The process of data collection and analysis.

well, in each piece of META tags as an indicator of their importance. The underlying assumption was that if one keyword was used frequently in META tags across different websites, it should reflect either the common practice of website authors or the DMOs’ marketing strategies. Text analysis was then conducted to construct a matrix of the number of META tags by the number of frequently used keywords, with “1”s representing a keyword’s presence and “0”s an absence in a META tag. Descriptive statistical analyses (e.g., how many times a keyword appears in the aggregated text and how many META tags contain a specific keyword) were performed on this matrix. In Steps 5 and 6, the aggregated text was further deconstructed into unique words with their corresponding frequencies by using self-written programs in combination with CATPAC and then interpreted based on the categories generated in Step 4. The purpose of this analysis was to investigate the variability in the META tags by looking at all unique words with lower frequencies. Four human coders were recruited to categorize all unique words to ensure semantic validity (Krippendorf, 2003). Findings The findings of this study are presented in two sections whereby the first section summarizes the results from the general descriptive analysis and provides a summary on frequencies of users/nonusers and distribution of length of META tags. The second section presents results of the content anal-

ysis of META tags in terms of the major concepts and variability in the content. General Descriptive Analysis Out of the 352 DMOs, 313 DMOs had a website or their websites were available at the time of downloading (Table 1). Although the focus of this study was on “description” META tags, other META tags (i.e., “keywords,” “author,” and “robots,” etc) were downloaded in order to evaluate differences in use of various types of tags. Approximately three quarters (75.4%) of all DMO websites used some form of META tag. A little more than half (52.4%) of the DMO websites used “description” META tags. Interestingly, “keywords” META tags were used slightly more frequently than “description” tags. In addition to “description” and “keywords,” other types of META tags included software program-generated tags such as “progid,” web page author information such as “author,” and tags for search engine indexing such as “robots.” This number is much higher compared to the percentage of the use of META

Table 1 Number of META Tags on DMO Home Pages Total No. of DMO Websites 313 Ratio

Frequencies of META Tags on Home Pages Description

Keywords

Others

Any

164 52.4%

184 58.8%

164 52.4%

236 75.4%

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tags on randomly selected websites in a study conducted a few years ago (Craven, 2001b). Figure 4 shows the distribution of the length of META tags measured by the number of words. The mean length was approximately 26 words, which may indicate website designers’ awareness of the rule of thumb for the appropriate length of a META tag. Interestingly, there seemed to be a cluster of META tags with length ranging from 32 to 44 words, suggesting it might be common for website authors to issue META tags with approximately 40 words in length. However, the fairly large standard deviation (17) suggests that about 85% percent of META tags fall between 9 to 43 words, which is quite a wide range and thus, may contradict the above interpretation. Content Analysis of META Tags Content analysis of destination websites’ META tags served two purposes. First, it was used to identify the major themes by classifying unique words into a number of definitive categories that were contained within the META tag text by hu-

man coders. Second, unique words with low frequencies were examined in order to provide a basis for interpreting the variability in the content of META tags. Identifying Major Concepts. The aggregated text file without stop words was deconstructed into individual unique words together with their corresponding frequencies. Figure 5 presents the cumulative frequencies by the number of unique words as a percentage over the total frequencies of all unique words. The original aggregated text of META tags consisted of 4265 words. After removing all stop words, there were 892 unique words, which resulted in a total number of 2343 words. Thus, on average, each unique word was repeated 2.63 times in the aggregated text. The chart shows that the most popular 60 unique keywords with the highest frequencies (represented by section I in the graph) accounted for more than half (52%) of the total frequencies of all unique words (2,343). The second tier of 100 unique keywords (section II) accounted for roughly 15% of the total frequencies of all unique words, with fre-

Figure 4. Distribution of number of words in a META tag.


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Figure 5. Cumulative frequencies of unique words.

quencies ranging from 2 to 6 words, suggesting a lower commonality among these words. The remaining unique words are all with frequencies of either 1 or 2 (section III), suggesting there was a high level of variation among these words. Obviously, the more unique words were used for generating the categories, the more precise the categories could represent the major concepts in the META tags. Because the top 60 words accounted for more than half of the total frequency of all unique words in the aggregated text, they were considered as reasonably definitive elements of the entire aggregated text and thus were used for the purpose of identifying the major concepts in the META tag data. Nine categories representing the major themes in the META tags were identified by human coders. They included unique words about “places,” “activities,” “attractions,” “organizations,” “information,” “amenities,” “directions,” “persuasion,” and “undefined.” The category “places” contains place names or a part of a place name (e.g., “Franklin County, New York”). Other categories were coded based on their semantic meanings instead of syntactic roles. For example, the category “persuasion” was defined as verbal techniques using keywords to convey persuasive messages. The word “you” was often used as an “ego-targeting” technique (Dann, 1996) to address the visitors of the website and thus it was coded as a form of persuasion. In contrast, the word “we” was coded as merely a synonym for the name of the organiza-

tion. The category “undefined” contains those words that do not appeared to have a consistent meaning across different contexts. For instance, the word “community” occurred in different contexts such as “community website,” “business community,” and “resort community,” which clearly connote different meanings. Similarly, the word “visitors” was used to refer to visitors to both the website and the destination. A further step was taken to measure the prominence of these concepts in the META tags. Frequencies of the top 60 unique words were calculated along with the categories they belonged to and the number of META tags in which they appeared. The number of META tags in which they occurred was considered a better indicator for concept prominence than their frequencies of occurrences; that is, raw frequency is a biased measure of the relationships between the categories and the individual META tags, because some of these keywords might have been used in a repetitive manner in one single META tag. As shown in Table 2, the top 60 unique words and generic tokens appeared 1269 times in the META tag text and the percentages of breakdowns by categories were calculated. These unique words and their corresponding categories represented the core concepts in the META tags. As expected, generic tokens such as “theplace,” “thestate,” “thechamber,” and “thebureau” appeared in high frequency. These words were used as “identifiers” for the destinations and

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Table 2 Categories and Top 60 Unique Words Frequencies in META Tags

Table 2 Continued Number of META Tags Containing

Frequencies in META Tags

Categories/Words

N

Percentage

N

Percentage

Categories/Words

N

Places theplace thestate area city destination Activities business travel vacation dining meeting convention visit fishing activities shopping hiking skiing canoeing camping Persuasion you official welcome service beautiful historic free come inexpensive heart history enjoy Information information website guide web calendar internet hosting Organizations thechamber thebureau tourism local we economic Attractions events attraction recreation beach island resort

432 253 144 18 9 8 207 40 24 19 17 14 14 14 12 11 11 9 9 7 6 149 27 24 19 14 13 12 8 7 7 6 6 6 133 53 35 16 8 7 7 7 128 47 32 24 10 9 6 115 22 21 16 12 10 9

34.0%

160a 154 98 14 9 8 88a 31 21 16 16 13 10 14 12 11 11 9 8 6 6 85a 24 24 17 14 12 12 8 6 2 6 6 5 69a 42 29 15 4 7 4 3 91a 44 29 21 8 8 6 66a 22 21 16 12 10 9

97.6%

golf park country center Amenities accommodations restaurants Undefined community visitor tourist Directions located Total1

7 7 6 5 71 60 11 50 20 19 11 18 18 269

16.0%

11.7%

10.5%

10.1%

9.1%

53.7%

Percentage

5.6%

3.9%

1.4% 100.0%

Number of META Tags Containing N 7 6 5 5 38 37 11 44a 19 17 10 16a 16 164

Percentage

23.2%

26.8%

9.6% 100.0%

a

Number of META tags containing any of the words under this category.

51.8%

42.1%

55.5%

40.2%

the organizations that the websites belonged to, and obviously they were used as annotations to accommodate search engine indexing. Words such as “business,” “travel,” and “vacation” appeared in high frequency, indicating they were used to make suggestions to visitors. Also, they represent different messages from two types of organizations, namely chambers of commerce (whose goal was more oriented toward business opportunities) and convention and visitors bureaus (whose goal was limited to travel and tourism). Persuasive words such as “you,” “official,” “welcome,” and “enjoy” were frequently used to convey inviting messages. In addition, adjectives such as “beautiful,” “free,” and “inexpensive” were frequently used to motivate people to visit the websites. Words about the Internet, information, and local attractions at the destinations also had high frequencies. Words in other categories such as “amenities,” “directions,” and “undefined” were used relatively less frequently in these META tags. An example drawn from the original text is shown below with the category labels identified in brackets to illustrate the core information elements of a META tag and the messages a DMO intends to convey to its website visitors. By claiming to be a trustworthy information source, this piece of META tag emphasizes on the website’s capability

META TAGS ON DESTINATION MARKETING WEBSITES of providing information related to a variety of attractions, activities, and amenities. Official [persuasion] visitor guide [information] to the Adirondacks [place] in Franklin County [place], New York [place], includes canoeing [activity], lodging [amenity], golf [attraction], campgrounds [attraction], ski areas [attraction], hotels [amenity], motels [amenity] and canoe maps [information] and kids activities [activity].

Table 2 also shows the number and the corresponding percentages of META tags that contained at least one of the unique words that belonged to each of these categories. Most META tags (97.6%) included at least one of the five unique words, namely “theplace,” “thestate,” “area,” “city,” and “destination” under the category “place.” Because one piece of META tag represents a website, this clearly indicates that almost all DMO websites used place name-related words to identify themselves. Roughly half of these websites (ranging from 40.2% to 55.5%) used at least one word from each of other five categories: “activities,” “persuasion,” “information,” “organization,” and “attraction.” However, only a small proportion of these DMO websites used any word from the categories “amenities” (23.2%) and “directions” (9.6%). This suggests there is a hierarchy of priorities for implementing META tags using these keywords. Comparing the frequencies of words with the number of META tags that contained them revealed that only a few words and tokens were repeatedly used within individual META tags; these include “theplace,” “thestate,” “business,” “information,” and “accommodations.” Nearly 94% (154/ 164) of the META tags contained the name of the place or destination; however, only 60% (98/164) of the META tags explicitly associated their place names with the names of the states in which they are located (e.g., “Columbus, OH” and “Columbus, GA”). This could potentially create problems when travelers are searching for destination-specific information, because places in different states could have the same name. Examining the Words in Low Frequency. The top 60 most frequently used words represented roughly one half of the unique words and, thus, a

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large portion of the text data remained unexamined. Analysis of all unique words contained in the aggregated text using the eight major themes were relatively effective in terms of capturing the main concepts in the text, suggesting that a concordance exists in terms of the distribution of words by categories. The examination of lowfrequency words revealed that: 1) a large number of words with low frequencies were classified as “undefined,” and 2) there was a large number of secondary place names, most of which were places within a specific destination. This suggests that destination websites are responsible for promoting a certain geographic region with several subdestinations bundled together, as shown in the following example (note the secondary place names in bold): Endless Mountains Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, which includes Bradford, Sullivan, Susquehanna, and Wyoming counties. . . .

The low frequency of words also indicates a high variety in approaches to constructing the persuasive messages. For example, many websites used a variety of adjectives to promote destination images or their products and services, such as “beautiful,” “scenic,” “attractive,” “romantic,” “fun,” “historic,” “legendary,” “charming,” “coastal,” “sandy,” “world-class,” “outstanding,” “exciting,” “dynamic,” “fabulous,” and “friendly,” etc. These websites also emphasized the values of their products or services by using adjectives like “memorable,” “free,” “valuable,” “premier,” and “special,” etc. In order to establish their websites’ credibility as trustworthy information sources, they often claim that they are “official” or “not-for-profit” organizations. Interestingly, these websites used different names to address their visitors, such as “visitors,” “travelers,” “tourists,” “guests,” and “vacationers.” The following is a typical example drawn from one DMO website showing the persuasive keywords in bold: Welcome to the Jackman-Moose River area of Maine. This beautiful area offers excellent snowmobiling, hiking, hunting, fishing, as well as remote vacation getaways.

Discussion The goal of this study was to gain a better understanding of the initial persuasive strategies

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adopted by tourism-related websites by looking into the current practice of using META tags by DMOs. The results from this study indicate that there are several issues related to the use of META tags. Perhaps most important, a significant number of DMO websites are not using META tags, suggesting that there is clearly a divergence in organizations’ understanding of the usefulness of META tags. The consequences for ignoring the use of META tags can be dangerous. If a website’s homepage does not contain a “description” META tag, some search engines will strip off the first few sentences from the visible page content and display it as a summary for that website, which may result in some undesirable result (Fig. 6). As can be seen in Figure 6, the metadata conveys to the searchers a misleading message that the website is not interested (or competent) in providing information the searchers might want (as indicated by the question mark in “search by ?”) and redirects them to call a 800 number instead of visiting the website. In addition, it seems that no consensus has been reached among DMOs’ website authors with regard to how a “description” META tag should be generated. This is demonstrated by the wide range in the number of words used in the tags. This may be attributed to the unpredictability and variability of search engines’ approaches of dealing with these tags. For instance, some search engines display at most two lines (roughly 25 words) of a META tag and, therefore, a tag with more than 25 words will be displayed in a truncated form. However, Yahoo! gives more page space to this metadata, displaying up to four lines of text, which is approximately equivalent to 40 to 50 words. This also implies that “description” META tags should be concise and the most important mes-

sages should be conveyed in the first one or two sentences. The analysis of META tag content also confirms that META tags on destination websites are, indeed, an important means of persuasion. META tags mainly comprise a few major themes reflecting DMOs’ common approaches to online promotion by providing information cues. These themes are usually implemented in a hierarchical order such that place names are prioritized followed by keywords about activities, attractions, organizations, and persuasion. As the identifiers that can differentiate themselves from others, place names are used on virtually all DMO websites. Also, their strategies for persuasion are often different from each other: some recommend activities at the destinations in which visitors can be involved; some encourage their visitors to pay attention to their resources such as attractions and services; and some simply intend to attract visitors to their websites by offering valuable information or business opportunities. Undoubtedly, the language in META tags is used as a verbal technique to invite and entice travelers to visit their websites when they are searching for information about a specific destination. Despite the controversial issues related to the usefulness of META tags, the authors argue that META tags are extremely important information components embedded on websites. When travelers are planning their trips on the Internet, search engines are oftentimes the “bridge” that links them to the websites. Thus, during travelers’ interaction with search engines when looking for destinationrelated information, META tags play a critical role as information snippets and persuasive messages by helping them make navigational decisions. The findings of this study support this argument and

Figure 6. An example of a destination website shown on a search engine.

META TAGS ON DESTINATION MARKETING WEBSITES suggest that DMOs should integrate this tool into their marketing strategies and communicate better with their website authors or developers to ensure an appropriate use of META tags to maximize the outcomes of their online marketing and promotional efforts. In addition, this study also revealed the richness of information passed through these snippets in a digital format during travelers’ interaction process with search engines, although, in general, meta tags are usually short in form and concise in meanings and many of them do not even form a full sentence. Within the tourism context, they largely reflect the key “selling points” of the destinations whereby tourism organizations are trying to impress the prospective travelers at the first stage of their online persuasion process. However, this study did not examine users’ actual interaction with META tags on a search engine interface and no conclusion can be drawn on the effectiveness of META tags in terms of their relevance and persuasiveness. How META tags can affect traveler behavior when using search engines for trip planning still requires empirical evidence. For example, will the use of words such as “official” or “not-for-profit” in META tags be more effective in terms of triggering user trust? Thus, future research should focus on issues related to the quality of META tags. Also, technological development on the Internet is a key issue in that it will ultimately determine the usefulness of META tags, and previous research and this study did not provide a quantified understanding about the extent to which major search engines are actually using META tags and what would be the possible replacement for them in the near future. Hence, future research effort can be directed toward understanding the emergent technologies on the web, especially the potential impact on the use of META tags. Biographical Notes Zheng Xiang is a Ph.D./B.A. student in the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management and the Fox School of Business and Management at Temple University. He is also a research assistant at the National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce. His research interests include travelers’ online information search behavior, travel-related website usability, marketing strategies on the Internet, and the development of knowledge-based systems for tourism marketing organizations.

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