John's Vacation Rental Blog - All Comments

re: Tips and Advice in Choosing a Vacation Rental

Kirsten Massebeau — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:09:15 GMT

Ask the vacation rental owner about restrictions, deposits, cleaning fees, and pet restrictions. Also ask about any local retrictions for say beach access. Also, some rental owners require that all the bedding be done and beds remade while others follow a more relaxed policy closer to a hotel. This will help you find what suits your vacation style best.

re: 5 Ways to Improve Your Vacation Rental Web Page Ranking on the Major Search Engines

Anurag Wadhwa — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 01:56:26 GMT

You can also think of advertising in these sites of a property and give link of your site. There are packages of most of the sites where one can put a direct link on the advert.

re: 5 Ways to Improve Your Vacation Rental Web Page Ranking on the Major Search Engines

gertygirl — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:48:15 GMT

You can include your vacation rental website link for free at <a href=\"www.pickmyvacationrental.com\">www.pickmyvacationrental.com</a> . You listing will attract visitors and give your website a boost. We also allow listers to give links that go directly to their listing on other vacation rental by owner websites. We prefer the latter, so that our visitors can feel the listings are more legitimate.

re: Break The Mould: Treat Renters Like Friends

crockettlakeguy — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:10:05 GMT

Well stated John.

We toyede with the more business like approach at first. I felt uncomfortable trying to seem like "entity". I finally said we will do it my way and we have never had a bad response from a guest.

I feel our people want the human touch!

lease option

lease option — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:19:20 GMT

Every“ project” folder has the same set of folders within it. I keep it consistent so I know exactly what is in each one, and therefore find things more easily when I need them. I divide everything for a project into these folders: Documents (for emails

re: 5 Ways to Improve Your Vacation Rental Web Page Ranking on the Major Search Engines

edg209 — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:37:13 GMT

Thanks John these are great tips!

We have a vacation rental by owner website www.VacationRentals800.com that is getting good natural search results in Yahoo AltaVista AllTheWeb and other search engines but our Google page rank of 4 suffered a reduction of 2 points when they changed their algorithms last year and has been static ever since.

When that happened we faced a host of problems just as you outlined in your post. We found it very frustrating that so much emphasis is being placed on a website’s page rank rather than the quality of the navigation, the information presented to vacationers, the function of the property owner’s webpage and ease of use of our vacation rental website.

Just as you stated we found that other webmasters have become quite stuffy about which sites they will exchange links with. If it is true that Google will not recognize a link from a website with a PR less than 3 then it is even more difficult for a quality site to improve their page rank after the wholesale adjustments made to the entire web community last year.

Even with your great explanation of the situation the entire issue of page rank is a little baffling especially since many articles I have read written by webmasters indicate that even though they have experienced page rank reductions their visitor traffic has not decreased. Many of these webmasters claim that they do not even care about their Google page rank. I wonder if that is really the case or just a reflection of their pride.

I appreciate your tips very much! They will surely help us in our current campaign to join vacation rental forums and link our site to the vacation rental community. Increasing traffic to our site is our main goal. If our Google page rank improves that will be a bonus!

re: Break The Mould: Treat Renters Like Friends

crockettlakeguy — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:21:49 GMT

That has been consistant with our guest. They have all been impressed with our desire to help but not hinder.

All have said they will return....second year coming so we will see?

re: Welcome to Vacation Rental Blogging!

mindmyhouse — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:39:27 GMT

Hi again, oooopsie, my signature didn't come through from my online profile in your database. My name is Susan Holtham and I'm the editor of MindMyHouse.

re: Welcome to Vacation Rental Blogging!

mindmyhouse — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:36:29 GMT

Dear John,

I am really pleased to have found your Vacation Rentals community website! It is beautifully designed and I have enjoyed the very useable interface thus far! We are an online house sitting matching service called www.mindmyhouse.com. We have been online for three years and are only now embarking on our marketing campaign. We would very much like to reach out to vacation rental owners. We are hoping/assuming that they may require the services of reliable, free house sitters from time to time when their vacation rental properties are empty. We have 6000 such people online right now! Anyhow...I am about to post to your forum to ask your other members if they would be interested in a service such as ours. If so, I would love some advice on how to reach vacation rental owners on a very tight budget. Cheers!

re: Break The Mould: Treat Renters Like Friends

Alex — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:43:32 GMT

This is true. Vacation home renters want to deal with a down to earth and easy going home owner.