Marketing holiday homes for targeted traffic.

The best way to get great results is to hire a specialist. You do not want to spend hour after frustrating hour learning how to customise a template for the website you just designed or trying to discover ways of getting onto Google page one.

It can be done by any individual, but the time involved is too much for most people. The cost could be exorbitant as you end up trying things that might not work. So, it must be easier particularly, but also in the long term cheaper to hire Silver Coast Web Design and Marketing. See this page, marketing a holiday home for more details on the services offered.

All your project will be put together by myself and I want to get you thinking about the opportunity you have her. I can make a complete website using WordPress and customise any theme to suit your property, plus complete all the on page optimisation for a one-off fee of 200€.

Does that sound good? There will be an annual cost to cover the hosting which if you like you can organise yourself.

After that, you would be missing the whole point if your beautiful new website did not come up when people searched for it. You can get targeted traffic driven to your website if you take up the marketing option I offer. The holiday home web design package can include the option to market your property in the sun for an additional 200€. This will boost your website high in the search rankings and will appear to people who search for the targeted keywords.

That’s it! You should realise that as time passes other people may well be doing the same for their properties, but a small backlink job every so often should be the answer to keeping your website highly visible.

You might already have a website that is not performing well, so have a look here to see if you need website re-marketing and rebuilding.

Marketing for your self catering holiday home

It’s no secret that people are making money from holiday rentals. If you have invested heavily in property just because you fancy taking holidays there and you will only be in residence for at most, four weeks of the year, then you are missing a great opportunity to get a return.
It pays to research your ideas before going ahead of course, but it is really a question of what questions to ask rather than focusing on just getting the answers.

What you could do to make your life easier is to hire someone to do the work for you. I want you to know how I work so that you will consider allowing me into your life to build your rental income by making your website and marketing it for you.
The whole package is what I can do for you and you now want to know if you can afford it.

There are many criteria to consider before pricing something that important and so before telling you my fees, it would be a good idea to let you think about a few things first.

In order to price the job realistically and make it affordable, I will need to know a few details.

• Where the property is located and what attractions are close by.
• How much rental per week in different seasons you believe the property can raise.
• What you realistically expect and need to break even after other costs like maintenance and house-keeping.
• The budget for the website and marketing, also how much you will invest in other forms of advertising.
• How many images you want, how much content you want and how many pages it will occupy.

When you know these things, get in touch and I will give you a quote to do it all.

My job will be to…

• Create the framework for the website and test it to ensure it works in all browsers.
• Upload all your images and write the content based on what we have discussed.
• Complete all the seo work on your pages to make it easier for the search engines to find you.
• I will open a hosting account to serve your website to the world.
• Submit your website to all the major search engines.
• Start the backlink process to get your website high in the search results pages.

Once all this work is done, you will start seeing some results. Please be patient, this is not a quick fix. It can take several weeks for the backlinks to take effect.

Holiday home web design and marketing is difficult for an individual to accomplish without any knowledge or experience, not impossible…but why waste all that time when you can probably recoup all the setup costs of your website with just one or two rental bookings. Interested?

]]> http://holiday-home-web-design.ajm7.com/web-design/web-design-marketing-self-catering-holiday-home/feed/ 0 http://holiday-home-web-design.ajm7.com/wordpress-cms/a-wordpress-tutorial/ http://holiday-home-web-design.ajm7.com/wordpress-cms/a-wordpress-tutorial/#comments Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:46:40 +0000 webmaster-bluefish http://holiday-home-web-design.ajm7.com/?p=288 The best and easiest CMS for beginners.

This tutorial assumes you have a hosting account already, and that you have access to cpanel or something similar. If you do not already have one then try opening a hosting account here.

When you log in to your account you will a whole array of different icons that allow you to do many things, but for now just ignore them all except the one that says either ‘WordPress’ or ‘Fantastico’. If you only see ‘Fantastico’ then hit the icon and choose from the list on the left ‘WordPress’.

You will then see the install screen. It is very simple to use. Look for the words ‘New installation’. Click the link and you will be presented with a new screen.

Here you can specify exactly where you want to install ‘WordPress’. You can choose a directory other than your root if you wish, and some people do so for extra security, but the measures that are taken for security are excellent anyway.
So your domain name is in the top box and that is where you will install WordPress so just leave that exactly as it is. ignore the second box, that will come into play if you want a second WordPress site installed later.

Now a little further down you will see a few boxes that need filling in. Your admin name should be something not obvious. Do not choose your domain name or your own name. Choose a name that means something and that you will remember. The same applies to your password. Make it strong.

Next if you want a nickname then choose one, I usually leave this blank. Your email address is required and the site name and description can also be filled in here. It is not vital to get it perfect right here because you can change both those things later in your admin panel.

Now click ‘Install WordPress’ and follow the instructions on the following screen to finish the installation.
There!
Job done.

Now you can click the link on the last screen to take you to your website admin panel.This is where you can set your site up for the world to see it in all its glory.

Choosing a theme and setting the options.

You can now choose a new theme if you want to. Have a look at WordPress themes and see if you like any of them. They are mostly free to use and easy to install and activate. Inside your admin panel you will see a link on the left called ‘appearance’.

Click the link and it will open in the choose themes section. Here you can activate and install or delete, upload from your computer or install from a URL.

You will see that the screen opens on ‘Manage Themes’ but if you click ‘Install Themes’ you will see that there are several option present that will show you different themes available from right inside your admin panel.
Try and install one. It is very easy, just follow the instructions and activate it at the end. You can always see preview before installing and then you can go to your site and see what it looks like in real life.

Some themes offer configuration options. If these are available then you will see a new link on the left of the panel under ‘appearance’.

Now you should go to the settings link in the menu on the left. Change the settings on the first screen to ones that apply to you.

Next go to the ‘Writing’ option and I always change the ‘size of post box’ to 20 or 25 because it gives a larger writing area when adding articles. Click ‘save changes’ at the bottom.

Leave everything else as it is and do not forget to ‘save changes’ at the bottom after every change.

Now go to the ‘Reading option’ and what I normally do is choose a static page to be my home page. You can only choose one that is already there if you have not added more, but choose it and edit it later to say what you want it to. If you want to display a number of recent posts on your front page then select that option and save the changes,

Now you can visit the ‘Permalinks’ option and if you want nice search engine friendly URL’s then you can do what I do and select ‘custom’ and copy this /%category%/%postname%/ into the box and save changes.

OK, that is all for the moment, but soon I will continue this tutorial with my recommendations on which plugins to install and how to configure them.

When you have invested a lot of time and money to find the perfect holiday home for you and your family, you probably want to be sure that it will give you a return from holiday rentals. Holiday home marketing is a very competitive business and there are loads of websites out there all wanting to sell you advertising space.

This is a tricky decision to make, which one to go with, so you look at all the reviews you can find and see mainly negative ones for most websites. What you really need to do is check the search engine rankings of the website and the Alexa ranking because between these two you will know the page rank and importance of a website, and also the volume of traffic.

Unfortunately, not every site can give you this information and it needs a little learning time to understand the meanings of the figures and statistics.

So marketing a holiday home needs a lot of careful considerations to avoid wasting time and money. You have probably realised that having your own website is an important thing to have and as mentioned elsewhere on this site, it is possible to design your own using an on-line site-maker with control panel.

Sure…go ahead if you want to do that, it will teach you a few valuable lessons that you will be able to use again. Holiday home web design is my speciality so if you run into trouble then I would be pleased to step in and help finish the project.
The problem is that you need to be high in the search results. If you are not on the first three pages then you might never get any traffic.

This is where we come in. You have a beautiful website and no traffic. We will start working on a backlink campaign to get other websites linking with yours.Here is where you can see prices for backlink building.

Most people still think that you need reciprocal links to succeed…but that is not the case. You need one way links pointing to your site from a variety of sources. There are many ways to get backlinks and they include article marketing, blog comments and forums posts, but unless you have access to a lot of high quality websites that allow this type of linking the you will be facing a long struggle.

Another important fact to consider is the time involved in getting the backlink process perfect. The search engines prefer to see links accumulating naturally so if hundreds or thousands of new backlinks suddenly appear, that does not seems natural. The process used to build backlinks takes a few weeks to show real results and this is better for the ranking of the website.

You need good content on your pages containing the right words to get the best out of holiday home marketing and you need your images to be brilliant and eye-catching, but they must also have titles, descriptions and alt text.
You need keywords that apply to the property and the location and you need to use them a lot. These words will be the backbone of the links you will get because the text inside them needs to relate to important words on your website for the greatest effect and the most powerful boost to your ranking.

It’s quite easy if you know how, but it is not easy to get it right. That is why you need help marketing a holiday home because you do not want to make any mistakes with the marketing as it will waste a lot of precious time. Marketing your holiday home the right way is the only way.

You can have the simple blog website if you wish with Joomla! but it is capable of so much more than that. There are a great many developers out there who contribute great add-ons in the way of components, modules and plugins and they are mainly free but if you want a commercial product for more options and better interface then that is also possible.

If you want an on-line shop or brochure to display your products or whatever you are selling then Joomla! has got all the right things to make that possible. I am not saying that WordPress cannot do these things but Joomla definitely has the edge on ‘user’ control and permission granting.

If you have a hosting account with a well known company then the installation of Joomla! can be done with a couple of clicks…really easy and fast.
However, the configuration of Joomla! at first a little confusing and can be overwhelming the first time you see it. There are some good tutorials here, so if you have the time and the patience you can learn it yourself.

The under-the-hood interface of Joomla! is more complex than that of WordPress but is still fairly simple to use if you want to add content like text or media. There are loads more configuration options inside the control panel but once the site is configured, your administrator can set your permissions so that you will not even see the more complicated options.

I personally use Joomla! on several sites of my own, and would happily recommend it to any of my clients.

The seach engine optimisation using Joomla! is pretty simple because there are boxes for all the important meta tags right beside the editing box where you enter your content.
You can see all yur articles in whatever state they are currently in (ie:published,draft,unpublished) and filter them so that you only see the ones you need to see.

There are vast quantities of free and commercial templates available for Joomla! and most of them are very good. I like the ready made templates because I know in advance that they are cross-browser compatible which saves me a lot of time and you a lot of money. I like to take the original template and change it to give a unique look and feel because you do not want to see another website that looks the same as your after all.

I can do all that for you. Sure, you might be able to work it out for yourself and be happy with the result but to use my services, it would take a lot less time and it would not cost you a fortune either…but send me your proposal and we can discuss a package to suit your idea.

If you want a simple blog to inform the world that you have something to say and publish it with a couple of clicks then this is the system for you. You can write new articles, edit old ones, give all your content good meta tags and, re-organise all your pages and posts if you want into categories and give them tags, and all of this inside an easily understood control panel.

If you want something a little more complex for a business website of any sort then WordPress is perfect to showcase your product. It can now, with version 3, allow multi-sites. This means that if you have WordPress installed in your root folder then you can have many other installations in other folders or sub-domains and access them all from within one control panel.

With the uncountable number of plug-ins to power up your website you can do almost anything. Security is excellent for protection from malicious attacks and the free-ware add-ons are amazing. Of course you can buy commercial products that have better options or nicer GUI, but the free stuff just needs finding, installing, activating, configuring and enjoying.

I personally use WordPress on several sites of my own, and a couple of clients sites were made using WordPress.

The search engine optimisation using WordPress is pretty simple and to prove that, I launched a new sub-domain in early December 2010 called holiday-home-web-design.ajm7.com and watched its progress with great interest.
It got indexed within three days and three weeks later I ranked on the first page for the search term ‘holiday home website design’.

Now I had also been doing some serious behind the scenes seo work to promote all my websites a little further up the rankings, but this was exciting because it all happened so fast.

I can do that for you too. It won’t take a long time and it won’t cost you a fortune…but send me your proposal and we can discuss a package to suit your idea.

It has become fairly admitted that to read internet site presenting something that is not attractive is somehow wasting time. There’re many effective methods ecommerce owners employ to improve site acknowledgement as well as sales like stuffing keyword proportionately throughout the web pages by putting them in content – so that visitors find it interesting. In accordance to this, Brin and Page initiated an analysis by evaluating some web sites and the backlinks from other domains. This question was later on brought into a thesis. They suggested that as given online site links to another, the second business website in fact enjoy backlink juice. Each time site visitor click on this business website, it is also considered as backlink votes for the linked web page.

Years ago site owners would not be mindful of the importance to buy backlinks since they built links to few sites solely to give connection and the methods weren’t developing because no one was aware of SEO. Even big www firms didn’t regard it crucial to obtain text backlinks. It is a fact that the issue about paid value of one way backlinks spread sluggishly before Brin and Page founded Google. At the time Google participated in the business, it quickly appeared to win over other major search engines. Webmasters then found that this big SE analyze and give judgment to their webpages based on site PR, and website PR can be obtained from backlinks.

Again, website owners didn’t observe how obtaining backlinks could be very helpful. A lot of e commerce websites commenced building the page of search engine optimization standards and through this they arranged trade with diversified online sites. As a lot of readers thought about the long list of ecommerce sites in particular site was not important, site owners thought the recommendation to buy backlinks wasn’t needed and they continue placing other networked web site’s links on their web sites. Google evidently identified that technique and found out that the participating business sites were not working at all. Since Google concluded that those backlinks were links they acted reciprocally to facilitate both parties, not because of the web visitors were given something worth reading, the sites were not considered valuable anymore. From this point, Google then fixed the hassle free ranking system and made the momentum by launching their own engines to benefit from the search engine insights.

At this time, a lot of website owners are not only managing their websites for spare time and get dollars, but they have started to become serious about Google PR, that Google Page Rank something serious for their future. After all, the plan of advertising links takes part into top, and it has been obviously advantageous to offer links to website owners who hope to obtain links. There are endless techniques to obtain backlinks. Several link building firms employ deep links, others get certain money for bloggers to build links, while the rest sell backlinks from link farms. It is theorized that site owners might Buy Backlinks to enjoy page-rank.

If you are searching for info about the niche of one way links, then go to the URL that was quoted in this line.

Blog Comment Service – How NOT to overpay for It… | Free Traffic System.

Google loves links even more than it loves even the greatest optimized content when it decides what PageRank to award your website.
Getting found on the first page of Google serps is all about links.
When people find links they like the look of, they click on them, and Search Engines follow them to discover your site and then they can categorise your website and list it apropriately.
Links are vital to the success of any website and so every site needs them.

Links have made the Internet what it is today.
They’re important for several reasons:

1: People will click on them and discover your site.
2: Search engines follow them and that means they see your website, and find out what it’s about.
3: Search engines consider the quality of those links in addition to the quantity of them to be an good indicator of your pages’ importance.
4: Search engines also consider the link text (the text you see in a different color to click on) to be important in determining what your website is all about, and therefore deciding how your website is ranked for the words in that link text.

|The fact of the matter is, if you have no links then the search engines will most likely ignore your website and so it might never get found.

RELEVANT LINKS ONLY PLEASE.

The Search Engines give greater importance (in terms of where they place your page in their results) to links from web-pages that come from the same category or type of website that you have, in other words they must be closely related to have any real meaning to the search engines.
These are called “relevant links.” If you’re a song writer[/spin], for example, it would be more helpful to you to get a link from a web-page about lyrics, bands, singers or any combination of those topics.
In contrast, a link to your bands’ upcoming gigs site from a hotel would be almost a total waste of time and energy.

The Search Engines consider relevant links to be way more important, than links from websites unrelated to your own. They carry more weight and get you further up the rankings.
And, if you can get a link from a relevant page that also contains your keywords in the link text, then that is the ultimate goal.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT LINK TEXT.

Your link text (the words that you click on to activate a link), is very important, too. Having the right link text will help you get found when someone searches for those words or phrases.

You may not always get the chance to choose the words someone uses to link to your site, but if you are offered a way to specify the link text (as in a reciprocal link exchange, or in a directory submission), suggest one that contains at least one of your keyword phrases.

Here is an example to test your knowledge … Which of the following two examples of Link Text would you use to link to the fictional Bluebell Hotel website ?…

Bluebell Hotel , or…
Bluebell Hotel – Quality accommodation in Birmingham.

The first link text doesn’t give people (or Search Engines) any idea of what the site is about, it is purely a name of a business. Only do this if your trading name is Microsoft. (insert big cheesy grin here.)
The second includes some keywords and so has the power when used enough times, to boost your PageRank and get you higher in the search results.

Almost all links are good, but ones with your keywords in themwill shoot you up the rankings faster than you can say ‘Google Rocks’.

THERE ARE MORE TYPES OF LINK THAN YOU THINK!

One-way links: These are just from website A to website B. Website B doesn’t link to website A. Most links on the Internet probably fall into this category and they are the most desirable type of links. It should pointed out that search engines also consider one-way links more important than reciprocal links…

Reciprocal links: These happen when you exchange links with another website – preferably one with a subject related to yours – that’s a reciprocal link. Find other sites in your field – even competitors – and offer an exchange of links.

For best success, link to the site in question before you email them to ask for a reciprocal link. In your email, tell them where to find their link. If you don’t hear back from them after a reasonable amount of time (perhaps a month), you can remove the link from your page.

Reciprocal links are less desirable than one-way links, they’re less important in the eyes of the search engines. However, they might carry less weight, but it’s still worthwhile exchanging links with sites related to your own, which may be of interest to your visitors. You probably want to be careful about who you link with; don’t accept every “let’s exchange links” offer that lands in your inbox. Links that look like spam or lead to irrelevant low quality sites may even do your rankings harm in the long term.

Natural links: Over time, people will discover and link to your site because they like it; these “natural links” are extremely desirable and very valuable too.

To encourage natural or “organic” links to your site, always publish articles on your website that will be very useful to your visitors. In short, add new articles every day if possible. Google loves new content and quickly gobbles it up into it’s databases for retrieval later when searched for.

Many sites offer a ‘link to us’ page to make it easy for people to link to your site.

Here are some other link examples:

Paid links: It is possible to pay for a link in a web directory or on another site. Though it’s usually not necessary to buy links (and Google frowns upon some types of link buying and selling), if you’re going to do it, make sure to buy your link from a quality site somehow related to your own.

Internal links: These are to pages on your own website. These type of links are completely within your control and can have an overall effect on the way you get listed and indexed by the search engines.

Use brief, descriptive text links. For example, if you sell Real Estate, a link on your pages reading “homepage,” is clear enough, but it’s better to use the key words of the product you sell. This helps the search engines understand that the page being linked to is about “Your Product” – not about “homepage.”

You begin to sense how devastatingly simple and powerful this is, right?

Image links: Search engines can’t read images. So, if you’re linking with an image, use “alt” text to describe the web-page the image leads to. An image tag might read something like this:

<a href=”http://yourproduct.com”><img src=”/images/articles/product.gif” alt=”Your Product”></a>

OK SO WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO IN ORDER TO GET THESE LINKS?

You can use social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and they work for loads of people. You have to work on for hours and hours to generate any interest but it can be very rewarding.

Submit your site to web directories: Directory links are great. They’ll have your keywords in the link text & description, on a page with a topic relevant to yours. People browsing through the directory can find your site as well.
Submit your site to the best general directories & specialized topic directories.

Sites in your field: When you find a website similar to yours (even that of a competitor!), or on a related topic, consider asking them for a link. Don’t forget informational sites, professional organizations, & forums.

Go local: Your place of employment, friends, clients, school, local organizations, or businesses you deal with may link to you.

If you’re an artist, ask local galleries, other artists & art supply shops. Musicians, ask local venues, music stores, gear manufacturers, band-mates. Writers can get links from their publishers & fellow writers and so on…

You know more likely places to get links than you think you do! A little brainstorming will turn them up.

Forums & Emails: If you participate in online forums or discussion boards, put a link to your website in your signature (if it’s permitted). Every post you make will give you a link. (although the importance and weight of a link of that type is not anywhere near as great as normal website links.).

It will happen naturally: If your site offers something of value, folks will begin to link to it because they want to. And, some of these links will be from relevant sites.

You can encourage your visitors to link to you by including a “link to us” page that provides link code & some graphics.

YOU NEED LINKS TO YOUR SITE…

…you’ll be lost without them. There are many other things you can do to promote your site as well but in terms of your website being found by the Search Engines there’s nothing as important as getting links to your website!

Good luck with your site!

So which should you choose?

The amount of money you can afford to allocate for your website design is the first factor that will affect your decision.
The more money you have decided to spend on your website, the more likely it is that you will need to hire a professional to do the job.

And of course the opposite is true – if your budget is quite small, you will need to use website templates that are either free or relatively cheap and learn how to customise them for your purposes.

Another big factor that will affect your choice is what you need the website for.

If your website is going to be complicated and in a competitive niche, than you need to think more towards hiring a professional because there are a lot of very important jobs that will have to be completed well and properly for the site to stand any chance of making it on the web.

If you try to get away with spending as little as you can on this type of website then there is every chance that at some stage in the future it is going to cost you money – either in lost revenues or in the money you will need to spend to have the site rebuilt.

Then you must be aware of the need for upkeep and maintenance of your website. Are you able to do it yourself? Will you need expert help and advice every step of the way? Budget for this too.
If you are planning on keeping your site constantly updated with fresh content, than you will need to use a Content management System (CMS) like WordPress or Joomla.

The great thing about a CMS is that anyone can add new pages without needing any web design skills.
The control panel is easy to use and intuitive, so learning how to use it yourself should be a piece of cake.

It would be a big time saver if you make sure your website designer knows beforehand that you want your site designed with a CMS.

There is no doubt that having a professionally designed dynamic website that you can update yourself beats the heck out of traditional static websites. It also presents you or your web guy the perfect way optimise for the search engines

So if you are thinking of starting a website, make sure you think carefully about what you need it for and how much you have to spend when you make your choices. Check out the deals at my web design and seo page.