If you have decided to go down the route of building your own website to advertise your holiday rental then obviously you need people to find it. Not only is the holiday rental market competitive but so is the Internet for getting your web site found. When I first created our website at the end of March 2007 for our gite in Brittany a search for the term “Gite in Brittany” found it in Google on page 54. I doubt anybody searching for a holiday would continue clicking next to get to page 54! This meant we had a website but nobody could find it. So how do you go from page 54 to page 1. The answer is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

The first thing I want to make clear is I’m not on page 1 yet in Google for the search “Gite in Brittany” (I am in Yahoo though), this is work in progress for me. I am on page 2 of Google so it’s close but it obviously gets a lot harder the closer you get!! Secondly I am not a professional SEOer, there are lot’s of people out there who are, or claim to be, but not me, this is my first personal website. Thirdly I do not work for Google and so have no actual knowledge of how their algorithm works, I just know about the things I have seen and read for myself. And the final point, I will talk about Google as they are the major player in search engines. Yahoo and msn etc have there own algorithms but if you use the same techniques it should stand you in good stead for all the major engines (e.g. for the term “Gite in Brittany” I am in position 12 in Google, 3 in Yahoo, 12 in MSN and 4 in ASK).

So that’s the caveats out of the way. This blog will contain a simple introduction of the sort of things I have done as a complete SEO novice and what I have found out but it is not a comprehensive guide, I will add further detail in later posts. It should hopefully give you a starter for 10 though in the world of SEO so you can start getting your website moving up the search rankings while you research a little more and play about with things yourself.

Search Terms

So the first thing you need to decide on is what do you want to get to page 1 for? If your trying to get to page 1 for a search like “Holiday” (which returns 293,000,000 results) then good luck, you’ll be against some pretty serious competition! If you want to get to page 1 for a search term like “taxidermy of newts” you should stand a pretty good chance (this search returns only 16,700 results and in fact this page is number 1 in Google for this term, so that’s how easy it is!). Conversely, getting to page 1 in Google for the search term “taxidermy of newts” will do you no good whatsoever if you’re trying to rent your gite in Brittany!

So you have to decide on what search terms you are trying to target. How do you do that? Well think like a holiday maker, what would you search for in Google to find a holiday? Ask your friends and family for the terms they would type in to Google. You can also use Google’s Adwords, not to actually advertise but it can help you choose keywords and show you which keywords are more popular and also when they are popular. Remember though, if you choose to target the most popular keywords you will be up against some stiff competition.

Domain Name

So once you have decided on a few “search terms” you should create your website around these. The first thing to do is get a relevant domain name. In my limited experience it does seem to make quite a but of difference. So in the above example getting www.Taxidermy-Of-Newts.comwould propel you up the rankings for the search “taxidermy of newts”. The other thing to note about domain names is that Google does seem to like domains that have been around for a while. Therefore one SEO technique is to buy a second hand domain name, one that has been around for a few years. This could get pricey and you may have to wait so it’s upto you if you want to go down this route. I registered a brand new domain name, which slows things down but you can get there in the end.

Content

So once you have got a domain name you need some content. Basically you should create your website for your potential guests, provide content that they will find useful and make it easy to use and read. However there are a few things you can do to make your content search engine friendly at the same time.

Provide a meaningful page title for your visitors but one that contains your keywords that you have decided on. Don’t keyword stuff your title but do make sure you include your relevant search words. Don’t have the same title for all of your pages though, this is of use to your visitors as well as the search engines.

As I have said in a previous post, if I was going to build my website from scratch again I would use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This is not only so that the whole site is consistent and easier to maintain but also has an SEO benefit, Google pays more attention to the text at the top of your site (as in the raw HTML and not how it looks on screen) than that at the bottom. If you use CSS you can have your content in a different order to how it is displayed on the screen. In my site, for example, the photos and navigation bar appear before any useful text in the raw HTML, that’s a lot of HTML for Google to get through before it finds out what my site is about. If I had used CSS I could have had the navigation bar HTML  after my text but still appearing in the same place on the screen so the user would not notice any change but it would be of great help to Google

The next thing is to use headings in your content, Google will place slightly more relevance to text in a heading tag as it assumes that things marked as headings must be important.

Next is the content. Write it for your potential renters, convincing them that your holiday home is where they want to spend their valuable time off, don’t write it for search engines. Make sure you include the keywords that you think people will search on though, if you don’t your site won’t be found for those words, but make it readable. Some sites just have a list of keywords as the first thing on the page, which is great for google but doesn’t make for a nice experience for yor potential guests, although whether to use this technique is up to you.

You should make your website simple to navigate and make sure users know where they are at all times, getting lost on a website is very infuriating and could lose you bookings. If you use images for navigation make sure you supply a text only navigation system as well so that Google can navigate it’s way around your site. If Google can’t follow your links than you won’t get your whole site listed in Google’s index.

If you have images then make sure you supply text alternatives and titles. This will help users who have slow download speeds and could also help Google as there are more words on your site and the search engines love words.

There are plenty more little tweaks you could do but these ideas should help you build a site that is both search engine friendly and easy to use. Think of the person viewing your site first and the search engines second.

Seacrh Engines

If you do all of the above and nothing else you will have a lovely website but it still won’t get found. The next thing you need to do is get people to link to your website. The search engines all work by having their “spiders” crawling the web continually following links. If you create a brand new website and get a link to it from a website that already exists in a search engines index then pretty soon your website will get found and indexed. You do not need to submit your website to the search engines, although it is hard to resist!

So how do you get inbound links, well you need to search the web for directories that are relevant and get your website listed in them. Search for sites that you think will be useful for your guests and see if the site owner will exchange links with you. Try to ensure that the links you get are relevant and stay away from the 3 P’s (P0rn, P0ker and Pills) as they are not relevant to your holiday rental (well I hope so) and they may harm your site, or at the very least won’t do it any good and could put your guests off if they see links from your site to sites like that.

When getting a link try and make sure that the actual link “<a>link</a>” is from a nice textul description of your holiday home, not just your domain name e.g “2 Bedroom Cottage in rural Brittany”, rather than just “www.BrittanyFamilyGite.com” or even worse “Click Here”. Google places a lot of emphasis on the link text to your site to tell it what your site is about. Also make sure that it is a plain link, no javascript and a direct link, not via there own website e.g. not “www.ALinkSite.com/?www.brittanyfamilygite.com” and that they have not added a “rel=’nofollow’”as this will be of no use to your website, in Google terms anyway.

Page Rank

So far I haven’t mentioned Page Rank but I suppose I need to now. Page Rank is named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. It was Google’s way of giving you the most relevant pages. The basic theory is that if a site has a high page rank it must be good and so the results were provided in page rank order.

You can see a sites page rank by using the Google Toolbar or using one of the many websites that will tell you what a sites pagerank is. This visible page rank ranges from 0 to 10. Very few sites on the Internet have a page rank of 10. However internally it is not a simple number from 0 to 10 but a number with a far larger range. This internal page rank is then used to calculate the visible Page rank. It is supposedly done on a logarithmic scale, meaning that getting from Page Rank 1 to Page Rank 2 is pretty easy, getting from 9 to 10 is very difficult.

There has been a lot of debate recently about the relevancy of page rank. I am not going to go into it here as it doesn’t matter. The most important thing is getting your website high up in the search results. If you get a high page rank by concentrating on this then great. Page Rank is only important if you want to sell links (which Google doesn’t like) or if you want to exchange links with certain websites that insist on a link from a page with a certain page rank, so please don’t worry about it and please don’t get obsessed by page rank, although this is easier said than done when first starting out.

Goal

Remember, your number one goal is to get bookings, not page rank! For this you need to appear high up in the search results for the search terms guests search on and for this you need good, up to date content and inbound links from relevant sites. So just concentrate on this and the rest will come.

As I have said, I have gone from page 54 to page 2 in Google for a “Gite in Brittany” in 6 months, and in fact I am on page 1 of Google for “2 bedroom cottage”. Remember though that being on page 1 of Google isn’t what’s important, it’s being on page 1 in google for terms that people actually search on. That’s the tricky part and it’s those search terms that you’ve got to try and work out for yourself as the search terms for your type of property in your area could be very different to mine!

Don’t worry about getting it right first time, this is an ongoing process as once your site is up and running you can use all sorts of tools to monitor how people are finding your site and I’ll go into these in another post.

Brittany Gite – 2 Bedroom Self Catering Cottage / Gite near Dinan, Brittany, France

Buying, Owning and Running a Gite in Brittany Blog

©Derek Arkwright 2007