Vacation Rentals Community

I guess this is a good spot to say hello and thanks for the interesting site.

My wife and I are building our second vacation rental and are still in the learning stage. I run a construction business in Houston that requires little time on my part.

I like to build....just not for others Thats when I decided to increase my homes value by buying the old home next door and restoring it. We finished a new home last year just down the road that we use as a guest house for all our kids as well as a vacation rental.

We were very happy with our first year and think the new water front house should do much better. I am in the market for another after this one.

My advantage is being able to build cheap while making a living off my Houston business.

As mentioned we are new to this and our first mistake was focusing on Motorcyle riders. We live between Houston and Dallas and are a hilly and wooded area (something they dont have). Ran an expensive add in Ride Texas Magazine and commited for a year. What a loss of $$'s that was LOL

Never had one look?

We have placed on Homeaway and almost all rentals to date have come from there.

Sorry if I am long winded....I am a 50 year old with great building skills but limited computer skills.

Our web site is www.etexasrentals.com  I know I have work to do but have been working 7 days a week on our new project.

Great site and many thanks. Look forward to learning more

HomeAway is indeed a good vacation rental portal, but there are many other good sites as well.  I think it is worth being also on some other portals because they are very inexpensive (on average you can be listed on 10 portals for less than $1,000).  Most vacation homes only need one booking to recover this cost. 

Regarding your vacation home website, not bad for your first site.  Now, you should start marketing your vacation rental site.  However, I don't recommend competing on search engines with major vacation rental sites for major vacation rental terms (it would be very costly competing with pay per clicks and extremely difficult ranking higher than portals for popular vacation rental terms).  However, you should focus on marketing your site with very targeted vacation rental terms (such as Crockett Vacation Home, Crockett Vacation Rental, etc...).   I would also recommend you edit your Title tag on the homepage and your subpages to include your targeted keywords.  Try to obtain links from other sites that include keywords for which you want to rank high on search engines (these should be the targeted keywords you display on your homepage title).    There are many more things that you can do to optimize your page, however I think this is a first good step towards improving your vacation rental exposure.  

Thanks for the info John.

If I am following you I am doing that. I have used meta tags and have been able to get the site to show when certain phrases are typed into google or yahoo.

I am not sure what you mean by editing the title tag? I was  upfront with my inability to work a computer

We have been running search phrases through google and yahoo and Homeaway shows up on all but refined searches. We are a little know lake but are located smack dab in the middle of Houston and Dallas (2 hours).  I need to work on that ranking stuff (working early till late on the house).

Is this something I can hire someone with more knowledge to do?

I think it is best for you to manage your website marketing as it is an ongoing effort and, unless you are willing to spend thousands, you will most likely end-up hiring a marketing company or person that engages in marketing spam which can get you penalized permanently on Google and other search engines. 

Your current title tag  for etaxasrentals.com has the following title tag: <title>Etexasrentals</title> ...you may want to consider putting the most important keyword under your title tag (keep the title less than 60 characters long). 

For more information about increasing your search engine visibility I suggest you read the following blog page I wrote a couple of weeks ago:
http://www.vacationrentalscommunity.com/blogs/john/archive/2007/11/19/5-ways-to-improve-your-vacation-rental-web-page-ranking-on-the-major-search-engines.aspx

Great info. I will attempt to do that? Edit....I was succesful in my attempt. I really appreciate the help

I will read your blog as well. Thanks a bunch.

thanks for the tips. i think i will try to check it out.

I agree with your assessment of advertising.  We own two vacation rental homes in Windsor Hills Resort in Orlando FL.  The community actually has it's own site for owners, but when we began this adventure, we decided that we did not want to rely on just that one site (especially since the design of the site lends itself to "bidding" among owners.  At any rate, I spent some time researching sites -- I simply googled the top 5 or 10 phrases I thought folks would use to find a rental home near Disney.  I set a budget of $1000/year.  I listed on the sites that consistently showed up in the top results for my phrases ... for under $1000/year, I listed on 9 sites. I have gotten bookings from all of the sites I listed with, and we have stayed about 90% booked since our first rental in June of 2007!  Another good option is to sign up for free-sites and trial listings.  Many sites will give you a free trial for 2-3 months.

Deanna Quinn

http://www.quinnsvacationhomes.com