A Simple But Effective Marketing Formula
The formula for vacation rental success is simple...
Marketing > More Traffic > More Inquiries > More Reservations > More $$
The most efficient and cost effective way to generate more traffic to your website is through online marketing. Of course, like any business, achieving online success and good levels of traffic requires work.
Mind you, it isn't magic. It's about setting some goals and spending time each day or week doing some basic work.
Online Marketing
Let's start with the most important method of online marketing... the search engines.
When your site is found and visited by customers who use a search engine, it's like getting pre-qualified customers. You already know they're actively seeking what you offer. All you have to do is reel them in with your website!
There are two main ways to get your site into the search engine listings:
1. Free Listings
2. Paid Listings
Your first goal should be to get into the free listings.
Go to a search engine like Google, MSN, or Yahoo! and type in what you're looking for. The engine provides a list of websites (pages) that are related to your search. Generally, with a few exceptions, the results you see in the main body of listings are free.
Paid advertising is identified on most search engines under a section called Sponsored Links. This is pay-per-click or PPC advertising (more on that later).
Follow 3 steps and you will start to receive free traffic...
- Create a search engine friendly website.
- Know that it is unnecessary to submit your site to major search engines.
Search engines like to follow links from site to site. Thus, if another website links to yours, the engines will find you. Search engines really don't like people who submit their sites via automated programs. Submit too often and you could get temporarily banned or dropped completely.
- Obtain inbound links to your website.
Inbound links are links from other sites that point to your website. The most important aspect to generating free search engine traffic for your site is the creation of quality inbound links. The more inbound links you have (especially from highly ranked sites that are relevant to yours) the more weight your site is given by the search engines and generally the higher it will appear in the rankings. This is called "link popularity" and most search engines value it as an indication of how important your site is.
About Inbound Links
Seek relevant links from quality sites, ones that have information related to what your own site is about.
Search engines are sophisticated at determining if a site that points to your site is relevant. If your vacation rental is in Orlando, Florida and it has plenty of links pointing to it from sites about Orlando or about vacation rentals, you will do well. Links from completely unrelated sites, such as gambling sites, might not help much at all and might even hurt.
Your links should be keyword links.
What are keyword links? If your site is about Orlando Vacation Rentals, and your domain name is "orlandov-rentals.com", another site could simply link to you by using your domain name: www.orlandov-rentals.com That's okay but a link that's text-based is far better because search engines will view the text as an indication of what your site is about.
In that particular case, the better way to link to your website is to use the phrase Orlando Vacation Rentals in your link. Notice how the keyword text is hyperlinked to a website.
At first, knowing where to start obtaining links can seem like a daunting task, but it's not as difficult as it appears. The next section explains exactly where to start.
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