Season prepare – what will make your vacation rental site stand out

I compiled a check list for vacation rental websites prior to the heavy season. The list is based on the renter’s comments, our observations and general industry research. The goal of this list is to have your visitors (and potential guests) to enjoy your site and come again.

1. First impression counts.
If you are running a great vacation rental, why settle for a not so great website. The bad news is the time of copy/paste websites from Microsoft Word is long gone. The good news is that it doesn’t cost a fortune anymore to build a professional looking website. I am a big fan of Wordpress, so here is a scenario that I want to offer you:
Step 1 – Buy hosting (30 minutes max)
Step 2 – Set up Wordpress -most hosting plans come with the ability to set up Wordpress (30 min).
Step 3 – Find a theme that you like (1 hour or less). In 2 hours you will have a great start. There are many variations – you can pay for custom design; you will want to experiment with pictures that you have. However, it will pay on the long run to have Wordpress content management. You will not be stuck to “canned” predefined designs, you can make more entries. You can have designs for each season – just find nice templates for summer or winter and within minutes, your site will look new.

Here are a few sites I found by simply doing a quick search online for vacation rentals websites built with Wordpress:

• http://southernitaly.wordpress.com
• http://beachfrontonly.wordpress.com
• http://villascapeflorida.com
• http://www.floridavacationrentals-usa.com
• http://www.crespilane.com/content/
• http://www.dillonbeachvacationrental.com
• http://seattleduckhouse.wordpress.com
• http://www.matzkoscottage.com

2. Stick with a clean and easy to understand design.
Flying stars and falling leaves needs to go. All scripts must be replaced. Every page has to be clean and simple. The motto of current Internet promoters is “don’t make them think”. Anyone who comes to your website needs to know from the very first visit that it is about your perfect vacation home.

A website that’s easy to understand will help your visitor make a decision and it will also help you to maintain your site.

3. Clear navigation is the key!
Every vacation rental website has the same set of pages:

1. Vacation home details
2. Availability calendar
3. Picture gallery
4. Rates
5. How to contact or book information

Most of your visitors are expecting to find this information easily. Remember you have only 7 seconds to present your site to someone who comes to it for first time.

Clear and simple navigation without menu options, pop-ups and other complicated items is the best way to lead potential guests through your website to the information they’re looking for.

4. Ensure that your content is up to date.
Your availability calendar and current rental rates will be the most visited pages on your vacation home website. Update them as needed.

If you have a contact page with any form – ensure it is functioning. If you have an email posted on the contact page – make sure it is working.

Go over your site and see if you have any broken links.

5. Start an interaction with your visitors.
“Social marketing” - is a somewhat new area of Internet development, you better get to it fast. The first step would be to collect emails and contact information of your potential guests to convert them into renters in the future.
A few quick ideas:

• Create a form where visitors can enter there email for specials. You can also offer them to sign up for postal mailing if you are interested in mailing advertising.
• Buy an e-book online with interesting information. It can be recipes, or a “how to” book – and offer to enter email so that you can email the book to them. You can find free e-books online.
• Compile a comprehensive list of “things to do” and “things to see” in your vacation rental’s area. Offer them to have it sent via email.
• Buy promotional items and create simple “sweepstakes”. Make sure you keep all entries in case of any questions.

For any of them, make sure you add a disclosure in fine print that that explains that they will receive a communication from your vacation rentals site after they submit an email.

6. Help them to share your rental site.
Offer users to bookmark your page, subscribe to an RSS feed, or submit your content to popular news sites like Digg.com.

Create a “tell a friend” form – you will be surprised how many will use that form. People are much more likely to visit a website based on a friend’s recommendation versus some other type of advertising.

Many of us focus on building traffic to our vacation rental sites, but we have to also stop once in a while, evaluate what we have, check on how interesting and relevant it is to our visitors and make improvements.

Link exchange for vacation rentals - are they good anymore?

I received a link exchange offer, should I swap links?

This one of the questions that is asked over and over and over.

As all of you probably know that when search engines decide if your website is important and interesting to Internet users – it takes in consideration how many other “important” sites have a link to your site. Why? Because a long time ago, this is how webmasters would tell visitors about some great websites they saw or recommended.

Once it was determined to be a part of “popularity” algorithm, everyone started looking for ways to place their links everywhere possible. Hundreds directories rapidly developed. If the webmaster had a chance to place link or swap a link anywhere, he would readily do it.

And naturally – a new type of service formed – “link exchange developer”.The Internet became so saturated with useless directories and pages of “resources”, all in the chase for achieving a high level of incoming links.

It took a while for Google and other brave search engine guys to realize the situation and adjust their search algorithm accordingly. Paid directories received a very large hit – many completely lost their positions and some went down very low. With those directories many of our “good” links went under too. Google explicitly confirmed that link exchange is not good practice. No, let me rephrase – gaining links in order to deliberately trick Google’s algorithm is a bad practice. As far as Google is concerned, if this link exchange is useless for users, they don’t care about much about it either.

Most of our old vacation rental websites have already developed some sort of “resources” page and still receives requests for link exchange. So let’s talk about each part of this situation. Before we proceed, lets keep in mind, the main goal of any website development now to have maximum relevance to the product we are trying to sell. In our case – lodging in our vacation home.

Do I keep a resource page on my vacation home site?

Yes – you most definitely keep it. The reason for it is simple – search engines probably already indexed your page and it will hurt your rating if you remove a page that has existed for some time before. However, I strongly suggest for you to re-work entire “resources” or “our friends” page that your vacation rental site has.

Things to consider:

Remove any wording with “exchange” or “swap links” text. Remember our main goal (selling vacation rental service)? Replace your offers with something like this – “If you feel that your business will be interesting to guests of our Blue Mountain creek cabin, we will be happy to show it here”. I suggest totally retrain from words like “link”, “list”, “linking”, “exchange”, “swap” and similar. Yes, I know – it is very silly – but – search engines are fed by Internet crawlers that have no “human” understanding of what is said on the page, however there is some intuitive logic in their crawling.

Regroup all your links in the order that would be interesting for your reader. Imagine yourself as a potential renter visiting your site. Is your “resources” page easy to read and understand? Does it provide interesting resources for the renter who will be staying in your cabin? Or potential visitor who is making the decision? Count links on your site. If 60% of them are something not related to your business – it needs to be reworked. There of course can be exceptions. For example a hot tub company in California and you are in Georgia. Unless you are using hot tubs from that company and they are so good, you don’t’ want them to be there. However, if you use them and they are some very famous name, write about it and link to your website where this hot tub is described.

I would delete links that are not relevant at all. You need to know your situation and your relationship with the person who placed or exchanged the link to make this decision. If you have to have the link, find a way to “connect” it to your business. If you are linked to the DVD store in Arizona, write that some movies in your library came from them.

Do I exchange links with others when offered?

This question will bring 2 important questions. Here again – remember the main goal?

• How can your visitor can benefit from this new potential link?
• Will the link from the site that offers the link bring you any traffic that can potentially convert into booking?

If you answer at least one of the questions with “Yes” – then you probably should.

Lets’s discuss some scenarios. Disclaimer- all this is based on my experience and views, you need to make a decision if it will work for you.

You have a rental cabin in North Georgia mountains. Your link directory is very lean and useful. You have groupings on local things to do; local attractions, places to eat and other nice needed content.

You receive 3 offers for link exchange:

1) Local company who offers white water rafting. This would be an excellent place for your renters to come and enjoy vacation time. It would benefit your renters to see it. You go to their site – they do not have a organized “resource” page, where everyone they exchanged links with is just listed without any order. Frankly, this is not a good place for your link to be. However, if the page rank of their resource page is 3 or above, exchange the link. If it is 2 or below, don’t. Do add their link to your “things to do” or whatever else you call this group for local activities. And don’t worry that they got a free link – your visitors will get good information from it and this is what matter the most. Small note – in many times, for companies like that you can even bring some revenue by referring your renters. Call the activity company up and ask if they offer any referral fees. If yes, on the link page tell them – here is the company that does this, we can help you to book it if you want. Some owners I know would give $5 from their referral fee to the renter and that would benefit everyone. I would be happy if I could do some family activities close to my vacation rental and pay $5 less than anyone else!

2) Real estate company from Atlanta. Atlanta is just 80 miles from North Georgia mountains area. Will your visitors benefit from this link exchange? I am almost sure – no. However, before before making a decision to reject, see how their directory is organized. Some real estate companies have really nice directories with vacation rental category that get indexed in SEs and potentially can bring you some visitors. If they have simple and not organized site, you know the answer. If you do decide to include them to your resources – make it look useful. “Staying in our cabin in Blue Ridge? Why don’t you move to Atlanta to visit us more often?”

3) Competitor vacation rental site. If this vacation home is not in your immediate area (ok, lets say up to 100 miles), not sure if it would be much use for your visitors. I would say “no”. If this is something locally, consider these points: 1) where your link will be placed? 2) where you will place their link. If they have a nice category with “Other cabins” or “If we are totally booked, please see here” and there are not more than 5 links, this is good. If they have not organized and odd directory – this is not good. I suggest to place competitor link as a last category of your vacation rental website resource page and keep not more than 5 links there. Some people will say – we can lose our business if we do that. Yes, we can lose business but we can also gain business by traffic from another source.

Dear vacation home owners and webmasters! Let’s make Internet as clean and useful is possible. Don’t be afraid to lose links, don’t be afraid to link someone to you. Think in terms of what you sell and how this will benefit your visitor. Work on the content. Add more pictures. And just have a patience – you will be see results, I promise.

Happy booking!