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.

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!

There are many things you can do to improve your vacation rental site just by analyzing your competition. To find your competitor all you really need to make a search in Google, Yahoo or MSN for the term that comes close to your mind for your vacation rental home. Another words, what is the most common keyword the average renter will use to find vacation homes in your area? For example, my cabins are in Blue Ridge located in North Georgia. For me, to analyze my competition I have to type something like “Blue Ridge vacation rentals” or “North Georgia cabin rentals“.

Few important points:

1. Don’t use generic words to search for vacation homes in your area.

When you perform a search, try not to do any generic terms such as “vacation homes” or “vacation rentals”.

2. Overly large and government sites exclusion.

exclude from your search:

1. Vacation Rental Portals
2. Chamber of commerces
3. Any government sites

The reason for the exclusion we will tackle later.

3. Apples to apples, cabins to cabins.

If you only have 1 vacation home, you should compare it with results of single vacation rental sites. However, I strongly recommend not to be afraid of management companies who will naturally show up on top because they generally have more content. I’ve seen great optimizations done to single vacation rental sites that brought them up on top of management companies sites. If you are very new to the game, go through all sites on first page and pick similar to yours - with 1 property if you have, but if you only see management companies or multiple properties sites don’t be discouraged and continue digging.

***

As of today, January 10 2008, there are few known (or guessed) parameters that believed by analysts of industry can increase traffic. There is a possibility that this will change as search engines are evolving constantly. If this happens - we will have another post.

***

Lets take pen and paper, or lets open our Excel and start a new document. We will be now doing a comparative analyzes of competitors versus our vacation home. Once we are done, we can see what we can change and what we don’t have a control over. Lets make 5 columns:
Category
Website 1
Website 2
Website 3
Our vacation rental website

where Website1, 2 and 3 - competitors that came up first in our most common keyword search for vacation rental in our area. And category is our comparative metrics.

1. Domain age.

This is something we don’t have any control over. However it is good to know the age of the domain of your competitor so you will have more clear picture of their vacation site optimization and position. In order to check the age, use the following tool - http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php.

2. Page rank of the vacation site

I am sure you heard this term by now - “page rank”. Page Rank or PR is a “heart of our [google] software”. Nobody knows exact algorithm that is the base of Google formula, but you can have a pretty good idea of how PR is calculated reading here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. If you have google toolbox installed, the PR will be listed in the self titled box of your browser, otherwise you can use on-line tools like http://www.pageranktool.net to find pagerank.

Write PR values to your document.

3. Last time Google cached competitor’s vacation rental site

To find out when Google accessed competitor website last time, click on the link in search results titled “Cached“. Write dates to your chart - or write how many days ago. The date it was cashed is an indicator of how often this vacation site being indexed by search engines. In the best scenario page gets indexed daily and for some sites - multiple times per day. We will talk later about caching and indexing when we discuss google webmaster tools.

4. How many pages are indexed by search engines.

For this exercise I want you to use all 3 most popular search engine sites. To find our how many pages on vacation rental site is indexed, go to each site and type site:www.[competitorvacationrentalsitename].com.

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN

Each search engine will bring different results, so lets record them all.

To insure right amount of counted pages, click on the last number in the paging of the search engine.

Small note: while doing this - notice WHAT pages are coming in first 5 results. The most important page, the higher it will be in the search result. If you can observe it and may be write them down for future references, you can come back to them after your research and do similar research.

5. Title and keywords for vacation rental sites

Warning - this information is only for your education, I want you to be really careful with your findings. Both - keywords and title tags were so much abused by webmasters it is advised now to be very gentle with it - don’t do any “keyword staffing“ or copying from another vacation home website.

In order to see title and keywords of your competitor - on your browser go to View->Page Source. it will open a notepad. In the notepad you will find something looking like

<title>SEO for Vacation Rentals  </title>

<META NAME=“KEYWORDS” content=“Blue Ridge Georgia Mountains Cabin Rental, cabins, blue ridge vacation rental,     

family vacation, family travel, my mountain cabin for rent, blue ridge cabin rental”>

Copy / paste title and keywords. You can do the same for descriptions, just to study competitor.

6. How many websites are linking to competitor’s vacation rental site.

For this category, type to each search engine (see above): link:[competitorvacationrentalsite].com.

This is very important step. Not only you will know who links to your competitor, but you also can see if you can be linked there too. See sites that offers reviews, travel or vacation sites that don’t require link back.

Note: don’t do MSN for this exercise and also notice how google cleaned up incoming links - you will see that yahoo will report much more links right now.

7. Google analytics use.

 This is very optional step. But I recommend you to do it because this is something I believe will tell a lot about your competitor. To do it, open again website source (View->Page Source) and search for www.google-analytics.com by hitting Control-F and copy paste www.google-analytics.com to search box. Some sites are using different web statistic tracking, but I want you to note competitors who does google analytics. I strongly believe that if competitor is using it, you should do too. We will talk about google analytics later on.

8. Canonicalization issue.

There’s something new that Google is encouraging now - canonicalization. To find out if vacation rental site has canonical issue, type in browser site’s name without www and see if it will turn it into name with www. As a rule now, you have to have only 1 instance of domain - with www or without. In the event if you have something like vacationrentalsitename.com/index.html that will be the same as vacationrentalsitename.com - you have the same issue. I will help you to work on it later on, but for now lets just see how competitors are doing in this area, OK?

9. Lets see our table for vacation rental sites comparing.

I used real findings, I will keep competitors sites un-revealing.

10. Conclusion - what did we learn from this analyses?

I am pretty sure by the time you are done with searching and comparing your vacation rental competitor you will have a great idea on how they handle their internet presence. After you done few things you can do right away:

• Rework your title, keywords and descriptions
• Rethink the structure of your vacation home site based on the competitor structure
• See if you can be linked to similar sites that competitor is linked to
• Start something that competitor does - blog, mailing, extra pages for news, etc
• Place your site to google analytics to have control over your traffic
• Create sitemap and submit it to google

SEO is not about tricks and secrets, it is about great websites and useful information. This is constant job and it will probably never stop. But I am sure if you continue working on your content while offering great service to your renters, you will be on the first page and fully booked!

You probably wonder why would you need to know about usability for your vacation home site. Simple - it is a an art to bring visitors to your site, but it is a greater art for them to get interested, come again and eventually book your vacation home. As you feel this is a far subject from SEO, I want to assure you, this is something that will pay off on the long run!

As for any science, there are certain known studies. When visitor comes to any site first time, he/she tends to “scan” pages - not read or browse them. The visitor will have about 5-7 seconds to analyze if this is a site they need and if they can not confirm it right away, they leave and may be never come back. Guess what? We just lost our potential renter.

Here’s few MUST for your vacatin rental website to have:

• Home page MUST be very clear about the purpose of the site
• Home page MUST have location of your vacation rental
• Make very easy to understand labels for each page (Calendar, Contact, Pictures)
• Make information such as rates, contacts are clearly accessible and very easy to read
• Don’t have any misleading information on your vacation rental site
• Don’t post any links to any un-related resources or any other websites that  has no relevance to vacation homes
• Make sure each page has an easy to understand title, so if gets bookmarked will be easy to find (Blue Ridge GA luxury cabin - rates)
• Create good printable version of your vacation rental - this way if they want to have information to be printed, they will have good resource to analyze your rental home
• If possible, make an ability for them to email your site to friends and family - vacation rental hunters are mostly family people who will look for approvals from others.
• Always allow to send you an email - preferably not a text link, but an image or a form. Most of visitors will want to call you right away.

few comments about above. Use more obvious labels all the time. I’ve seen “Virtual Gallery”, “Look inside!” and similar labels instead of simple “Pictures”.  Make your site a professional looking site. Many studies point now that Internet users are more sophisticated then before - they naturally want presentable sites.

Test your vacation rental site in bother Internet Explorer and Firefox, you will be surprise how site that was just so nice in IE will look ugly in Firefox or vise versa.

Happy booking!

• It’s advisable to be wary of any SEO firms, which send emails out of nowhere.
  It’s important to reserve the exact skepticism for email that’s unsolicited about search engines, as one would do for “miracle” diet pills or even requests to assist in the transfer of funds from any deposed dictator.
  Before you agree on any help for your rental site that came from Internet, make sure the company exists.
• Not one service can assure a top ranking on Google search.
  It’s vital to take precaution of SEOs, which claim to assure rankings, advertise any “priority submit” to the Google service, or even allege any “exclusive relationship” with the Google service. There isn’t a priority submit for the Google service. The sole way in submitting a website to the Google service directly is via the Add URL page or even via the program Google Sitemaps, and one can achieve this him/ herself at absolutely no cost.
  There’s no guaranteed ranking from Google that you can buy for your vacation home website for anyone.
• Be cautious if any company maintains secrets or refuse to explain clearly its intentions.
  If something remains unclear, inquire about explanations. If any SEO causes misleading or deceptive content on someone’s behalf—like “throwaway” domains or doorway pages—the website can be entirely removed from the index of Google. Eventually, the individual is responsible for actions of companies employed, so it’s optimal to ensure one has knowledge of how the companies can be of assistance.
  Be ware of something called “black hat” SEO – they can get your holiday home site penalized.
• One should never be responsible for linking to any SEO.
  Any SEO that talks about links that are “free-for-all”, link any popularity schemes, or submit a website to a multitude of search engines, should be avoided. Normally, these are useless exercises, which don’t have any effect on one’s ranking in chief search engine results—least likely in a way one would consider as a positive.
  Don’t pay for submission to multiple search engines. Don’t pay for service to be listed in thousand directories.
• Several SEO services attempt to sell an individual the ability of typing keywords into a browser address bar directly.
  Many proposals require PC users to make an installation of extra software, and not too many PC users achieve this. Such proposals can be evaluated with serious care and even be skeptical about self-reported quantity of PC users that have downloaded applications required.
  Great rule of the SEO game – don’t get involved in something that seems to be so good to be true or something that is very complicated.
• Choose an SEO company carefully.
  Before choosing an SEO company, make sure that you conduct research on the industry. You can simply conduct your research on Google.com. Another way to find out further information is to search for articles and news bulletins that have appeared in the press. Although Google doesn’t voice their opinion on SEO companies specifically, there are companies on the Internet pose as SEO services; however, their own business practices and behavior are questionable.
  Be very cautious before choosing an SEO company for your vacation rental business.
• It’s important to know where the money goes.
  Make sure you ask the SEO company that you decide to work with which of their fees go toward temporary advertising and permanent inclusion. Many SEOs make bold promises about placing websites in the highest ranks within search engines. However, your website is actually placed in the advertising section, not in the search results. Google doesn’t sell higher rankings in search results. Many search engines combine pay-for-inclusion or pay-per-click results with their regular web search results. Another thing to be cautious about is when SEOs change their bid prices in order to create the impression that they have control over search engines. They may even give you the impression that they can place themselves in any slot they choose. The reason being, Goolgle’s ads are labeled clearly and completed separated from our search results.
  Do a good research first – there are a lot you can do for your vacation rental site without spending anything.
• Shop and compare for the right SEOs.
  Never hire an SEO company without verifying its references. Although they may be a good beginning, references are far from the entire story. One should inquire the duration of a company’s existence and the number of individuals employed full-time. If you should feel apprehensive or pressured, it’s good to go with a gut instinct and be on the safe side: don’t be afraid to hold off until a firm you can entrust in is found. It’s advisable to ask the SEO firm if it makes a report of every abuse of spam the firm discovers to Google with the use of a spam complaint website form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. SEO firms that are ethical make a report of deceptive websites, which violate spam guidelines of Google.
  Save the bookmark!
• Ensure you are legally protected.
  For one’s own safety, one should certainly insist on a money-back guarantee that’s unconditional and complete. You shouldn’t fear any request of a refund if not satisfied for whatever reason, or if any action of a SEO creates a domain that must be removed from an index of a search engine. It’s wise to ensure a contract is in writing, which includes pricing. The written contract should require a SEO to remain within guidelines in recommendation of each PC search engine for website inclusion.

The Most Typical Abuses an Owner of a Website Most Likely Encounter.

A typical scam is a creation of any “shadow” domains, which funnel PC users to any website by the use of deceptive redirects. The shadow domains will usually be owned by a SEO that claims to work on the behalf of the client. However, if this relationship becomes tarnished, the SEO may direct a domain to another website, or a domain of a competitor. During this occurrence, the client pays to develop a site in competition fully by a SEO. Another illicit method is placing “doorway” pages full of keywords on the website of the client somewhere. The SEO makes a promise this will result in the page becoming more vital for further queries. This is undoubtedly false since any individual page is barely relevant for a vast range of various keywords. Even more insidious is the doorway pages that usually entail hidden links to other clients of SEOs as well. The doorway pages deplete the popularity of links of any website and direct it to a SEO and other clients that may comprise websites with content that’s illegal and unsavory.

Other Things to Look For with SEO Services.

Several warning signs appear for one to know he/ she is dealing with a SEO that’s questionable. By every mean necessary, don’t be afraid to turn away if a SEO does any of the following:

• Places links to other clients on any doorway page.
• Owns shadow domains.
• Does not make distinction between advertisements, which appear in any search result, and actual results for search.
• Provides to sell any keyword in PC’s address bar.
• Assures ranking, but just on long keyword, obscure phrases one can obtain anyway.
• Receives traffic from spyware, scumware, or false search engines.
• Had domains removed before from an index of Google or not listed on Google’s site.
• Operates with a number of aliases.

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) can be contacted if one feels deceived by the SEO in anyway. The FTC handles several complaints regarding unfair or deceptive practices of business. Visit http://www.ftc.gov, and click “File a Complaint Online”; or contact them by telephone at 1-877-FTC-HELP.

Happy booking!

This is a question that is asked a lot. Is there a point for us, vacation home owners to work on content for our vacation rental listing on portals. It is more enough that we have to worry about our vacation home website, learn SEO, count keywords and think about links to others.

Again, your main priority is your website, the unique content for your rental, information about local attractions, events, keeping up calendar and guest book up to date.

But it is wise also not to forget about other places where you put your advertising money. You have two goals on every travel portal:

1. Be found among vacation home listings on the portal - among your competitors.
2. Be found on google search via organic search - link to your listing on portal instead of home page of this portal.

The first - is a question of your title and picture. We will talk later about it. Sometimes (at some portals) you can control the number you come out on the search page, sometimes you can not.

But the second is something that you can control and treat as your another website(s) that can be found via organic search. And frankly, since mostly it is only one page - that is not that hard to make it a unique. Just rewrite your content, add more descriptions and you are all set. Yes, you will help the webmaster of vacation rental portal because you will optimize your content for search engines and at the same time you will help yourself on the long run.

Again, remember the rule - your rental website content must be unique. And it is better to have short and unique descriptions on the portal then detailed and repetitive.

Happy booking!

Lets answer following questions:

• can I copy / paste information or description from my rental from my site to portals?
• will my site get penalized if information on my website is the same as on vacation rental portals
• how can I improve my chances in search engine.

Can I copy / paste information or description from my rental from my site to portals?

Yes, you can copy and paste information from your website and across vacation rental portals. This will not benefit your own vacation rental site in any way. Google will most likely feel that one of the older portals where your identical description appears will be more trustful source for this content.

The best approach will be - ALWAYS HAVE A UNIQUE CONTENT ON YOUR OWN VACATION RENTAL SITE.

It doesn’t take a very long time to re-write your content and make it unique for portals, we will talk about it later. We will also touch up on how long the content should be and how it should be (or shouldn’t be written).

So if you copied any content from your own website, take this first step to optimizing your own vacation rental website - rewrite your content on every page where you think you had some copying done.

Will my site get penalized if information on my website is the same as on vacation rental portals?

No, your site won’t be penalized. As we talked before, Google realize that portal site is a collection of ads. Google doesn’t punish sites for duplicates in advertising. However, your site will not benefit from it in any way as explained above.

How can I improve my chances in search engine?

This is a long road ahead of you :). But if you start with few simple things now, you will see results by next Google update and you will see more inquiries in the future too.

Check your vacation home website - for any duplicated content you have on portals where you advertise. It usually happens when you create a listing in vacation rental portal - you will just copy a part of your website description and then paste it to the listing details. Rewrite the content on your vacation rental site and never use itanywhere on Internet. This will help your vacation rental site to advance in search engine game.

Check all titles and descriptions on all vacation rental portals you advertise.

1. Make a list of all portals where you market your vacation home.
2. Put side by side descriptions and titles.
3. Mark identical descriptions and / or titles of your vacation rental
4. Make 1 change every day. If you only work on 1 portal per day, you will be done within 1 week as average vacation rental owner is listed on 5-7 vacation homes portals.
5. Make it a rule - never reuse any content even if you are in rush to complete a listing.

This will help your vacation rental listing on the portal to advance in search engine game.

Happy booking!

I want to start with Google as this is an engine who is doing more then other engines in terms of analyzing, capturing and dealing with duplicate content. Also as majority of Internet users will use google to search for your vacation home, this will be just a natural step to take.

What is considered by Google as a duplicate content?

Google states it very clearly in these 2 articles that I will sum up and we later apply it to our vacation rental industry:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html (December 2006)

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-at-smx.html (June 2007)

1.
Here is what Google defines as a duplicate content. “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”

2.
Google does say they know that a lot of duplicate content is not intentional. However, they acknowledge that they are after a duplicate content created “in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.”

3.
Translation of the very same page is not a duplicate content. Snippets and quotes are not duplicate content.

4.
Google don’t penalize in most cases for the duplicate content. They concentrate on filtering, not on page rank adjustments. In rare cases when duplicate content was created intentionally to misled searched, site will get penalized.

5.
Here’s what as of today Google will recognize as an “OK” duplicate content (with a way to show to search engine they are ok):
- Printer version for the same item.
- Similar product or services listings on different sites that you own that overlap in content.
- Reusing content from another source with full author credits.
- Good reason for duplicate content, or intentional mistake resulted in duplicate content (wonder how this can be proven).

6.
Google offer different suggestions on how to deal with duplicate content. 

Let’s talk about portals. What are vacation rental portals? These are large websites that has thousands of vacation homes.

They can be worldwide portals - you will find vacation homes on any continent. There are sites only for Florida vacation homes or only for Hawaii vacation homes. There are also sites for vacation rentals by interest - skiing, fishing, mountains. There are about 400 portals that I know at the moment who will be happy to host your vacation rental listing.

We will not talk about marketing value of all these portals, as our blog is strictly about SEO and SEM. So we will analyze our listings for the search engine needs.

All vacation rental portals have 2 things in common, regardless of website or language or type of portal.

They have Title and Descriptions.

Continue to Part 2.

1. Vacation rental own website
2. Listings in portal
3. Other Internet marketing avenues

#3 (we will talk about it in the future) consists of press releases, links and mentioning from other sites, pages on local government and business directories, yellow pages, etc. We don’t have much control over the code and many times a content on sites like that. And we can not dramatically change something there to build better organic search results.

The most control we have over our own vacation rental website (s) and we have a great control over a content on every portal where we list our holiday homes. For now we will be working on #2 - Listings in portals.