I would like to know what has really worked for you guys in terms of increasing the page rank of your sites or blogs.
Marta
Rentalo.comLodging Directory for Vacation Rentals, Hotels and Bed and Breakfasts used by 5.2 million Travelers
Increasing PageRank (PR) is easy, all you have to do is obtain links from other websites with good PR. However, high PR does not always equal high search engine rankings. For example, if you obtain links from CNN.com to your website, you will increase PR but diminish your ranking for 'vacation rental' terms because in the eyes of Google the CNN.com website is not about 'vacation rentals' and therefore Google will assume that your site isn't either (this is a big simplification of Google's sophisticated algorithms). I suggest you get links from vacation rental related sites only.
In 2007 I wrote a brief article on 'How to increase your vacation rental website search engine rankings", you can read it by clicking on the following link:http://vacationrentals.vrwd.com/articles/1072/1/How-to-Increase-your-Vacation-Rental-Web-Page-Search-Engine-Rankings/Page1.html
Vacation Rentals, Vacation Rental Agents & Managers, Vacation Rental Resources by VacationRental.org
A good place to start is purchasing the book "Search Engine Optimization for Dummies". I found it at amazon.com and one of their affiliates was selling it new for less than $7.00 including delivery.
When I started working on SEO 2 months ago, I was ranked about 16,000,000th with little chance anyone would find me, ever. If you Googled some of my key words, you would find me on page 63. Today, I am up to about 1,500,000 in the rankings, and can be found on page 3 of some keyword searches. My home page is still not 100% optimized, and I haven't started on other pages on the website. The hardest thing for me seems to be building the links.
There are SEO programs which will generate a report for you about your website. You can download free trial programs and determine which one will work for you, and then purchase one of them to help you along.
Tom Stone
North Georgia Cabin Rentals in Blue Ridge, GeorgiaVacation Rental Video Productions
I wouldn't focus on PR. It can easily be manipulated by your linking strategy.
With that said, get relevant links from related websites. It is total quality not quanity. I learned this the hard way about two years ago.
SEO Book - Great resource! Plus they have a toolbar for firefox.
I manage and operate several vacation rental sites and blogs. Some personal sites include Gatlinburg TN and Pigeon Forge TN.
On Yahoo I do great, always top 5 when people search Roatan Rental. Google not so great but I was impressed today when i looked and saw the VRWD.COM listing for my home on page two considering i only listed there yesterday. .
Roatan1: On Yahoo I do great, always top 5 when people search Roatan Rental. Google not so great but I was impressed today when i looked and saw the VRWD.COM listing for my home on page two considering i only listed there yesterday. .
Most people use Google when searching (90%) rather than Yahoo. I am pretty sure your property listing on www.VRWD.com will start ranking pretty high also on Google in the coming weeks/months. In just one day, I noticed that you are already #1 for the term "the blue house rental" (Note: Google results may appear slightly different depending from user location).
Important: to rank high under popular search terms, please make sure you include those Terms or Tags when creating or updating your listing on www.VRWD.com.
By the way, great vacation home!
Come on now John, Now your sounding like an SEO salesman. I gave you props for the way it has worked so far but back off the part about being number one if I type just the right words. Heck, if I type Roatan blue house I fill the whole first page with my little home made no experience site comming in usually in the top 3 0r four.
I changed my listing with your site a little because we all know that the search will be more like Roatan rental, Roatan Vacation Rentals And that type of thing. If they already know to type "the blue house" then they already know my site.
Anyway, I have read a lot of your posts/articles on this type of thing along with others replies and find it very informative. Thanks for this great opportunity , this is a kick ass site
Since this is starting up again this week, I'll add a little more. I don't know if I will really give up all that I am doing, after all, we are competing for some of the same search results. Hubspot has a free website grader - http://website.grader.com/. enter in your URL and they will crawl your site and generate a report. Is there someone you just want to beat? add their URL under competing websites, and they will compare your site to theirs. Very enlightening!
One thing I discovered by their report is that the search engines are rating me two ways: www.cabinsbysundance.com and cabinsbysundance.com. I never thought it mad a difference, but their are entirely different numbers of inbound links to each. I am trying to do a "redirect" so that everything will fall under one or the other, but no luck yet.
They will also tell you about your social networking successes, and failures. Still working on this one too.
The hardest part of this for me is getting inbound links, this takes a lot more work than the rest. I am tempted to pay someone's submission site to do this, but have also heard where this can hurt your ranking too. Any experience with this?
Good news today, ranked an 86% on their evaluation, and also passed the one company I had my sites on in internet ranking. Ranked 854,515 on the internet today. I feel pretty good about this considering three months ago I didn't know what SEO stood for.
Roatan1: I changed my listing with your site a little because we all know that the search will be more like Roatan rental, Roatan Vacation Rentals And that type of thing. If they already know to type "the blue house" then they already know my site.
I agree with you that most people will type something like "Roatan vacation rental" (you are currently ranking good for this term as well on VRWD.com) - but I wanted to show you that among all the "blue houses' advertised in the world (if you check google, there seem to be quite a few of them!), you are already appearing before them.
Click on 'Roatan vacation rentals' and you will see your current position after one day of listing with VRWD.com.
Tom Stone: One thing I discovered by their report is that the search engines are rating me two ways: www.cabinsbysundance.com and cabinsbysundance.com. I never thought it mad a difference, but their are entirely different numbers of inbound links to each. I am trying to do a "redirect" so that everything will fall under one or the other, but no luck yet. The hardest part of this for me is getting inbound links, this takes a lot more work than the rest. I am tempted to pay someone's submission site to do this, but have also heard where this can hurt your ranking too. Any experience with this?
Tom, search engines may penalize you for duplicate content if you have both your homepage showing with 'www' and without. So, in your .htaccess file you should put the following code for your site and it will create a redirect from 'cabinsbysundance' to 'www.cabinsbysundance.com':
Options -MultiViewsOptions +FollowSymlinksRewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{http_host} ^cabinsbysundance.com [nc]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.cabinsbysundance.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Regarding your link building question, it is difficult finding qualified seo professionals. Many SEO companies engage in spammy tactics that can penalize your site with search engines. I recommend you do some reading on e-marketing so that you can do link building on your own or at least be able to hire/monitor qualified SEO professionals.
Another good way is video optomization. Use video as much as possible on your blog. Link your blog through social networking sites like facebook and twitter.
Also talk up other bloggers...they may just do it for you as well.
What exactly does http://website.grader.com/ give you in the report? I am considering using this for a new website we created but am always leary about "free" services like that.
Jennifer Noffsinger
eReservationSolutions.com
eComMerchantSolutions.com
Roatan,
Can the link be done to a different page?
Like, my website is cabinaz.com but I am not allowed to make any links from there or VRBO and homeway will remove the link.
So, some sites do allow me to make the link to the from townhouseaz.com
Do you allow that?Clara