School is almost out and summer time family vacations are being booked by the hundreds of thousands right now online. I know of many summer vacations that have been ruined because of last minute planning, or waiting to think that you can get a last minute deal.

In popular vacation destinations this is usually not the case. Popular beach or mountain areas only have so many so rooms, condos, and homes available and the best ones get booked up fast for a good reasons. Typically the owner that discounts his property extremely in peak periods does so for a reason. One reason for this can be a bad reputation for not taking care of his unit or some other reason.

There is the flip side of last minute deals as well and that is when owners raise the price of their units because demand is high and supply is low. You could end up paying much more to stay if you wait to book your stay 1 week before your planned trip versus booking it 4 months in advance.

Booking in advance is you best bet. This way you can be confident you will have a good place to stay at a good rate, and your deposit is often time refundable should you need to cancel. ivacationonline.com has a travel insurance that is available for a fee that will allow you to cancel for any reason and get your booking deposit refunded.

Many people think of ivacationonline.com as a website that offer vacation rental management software but do not realize that they are also one of the worlds premier website to renters to book short term and long term vacation rentals. They offer vacation rentals in all of the best vacation hot spots and have the best rental rates for these destinations. Stop by ivacationonline.com to check out the large list of rental properties available and book your next vacation through them

SEO for your Vacation Rental by Owner

Trying to drive traffic to your vacation rental by owner is the goal of every owner.

We all know that the best way to get out on the market as fast and as efficient as possible is by joining the most productive web portals that are available to you.

That being said, what can you do for the long term SEO, or Search Engine Optimization of your vacation rental. There are a few things you can do that are very reasonable in cost and can help bring natural, "free" traffic to your listing.

We spoke on the last blog about "branding" your listing and having your own personal domain name, like, http://www.bluetides411.com/

This is still a great idea and an easy way to communicate to your prospects how to get to your online booking site and listing on ivacationonline.com.

What we will address here is more to do with SEO than "branding". Using http://www.ivoldomains.com/ you can buy a domain name for SEO reasons. After doing some research on what terms may benefit you and your listing, you can search to see if that domain is available. Here is an example of the process from start to finish.

I found a term that had a good amount of searches but was not that competitive in the market. We use tools from Yahoo and Google to establish what terms are being searched and what terms are being advertised. We decided to use " destin florida vacation house" as our SEO term.

We then take that term and create a natural amount of it into our description on our listing. You can view the listing here and read the description to see how it is used:
http://www.destin-florida-vacation-house.com/

We also where able to buy the URL and point it to our listing on ivacationonline.com. That is why when you click on the link above, you land on my listing on ivacationonline.com. I also have the domain name http://www.tobagosun.com/ pointing there too. These are for different reasons. I give my prospects the URL, http://www.tobagosun.com/ and I created http://www.destin-florida-vacation-house.com/ for the SEO of the listing. I use the dashes to let the search engines see what I am trying to convey to them. destinfloridavacationhouse.com is not as easy read by the syders as
http://www.destin-florida-vacation-house.com/

The other things that need to be done is the terms, "destin florida vacation house" has to be entered into the "title" of my listing on ivacationonline.com.

I have also put these as the keywords on my account with http://www.ivoldomains.com/ and make sure I represent it in the description too. So now the combination of my URL has my search terms in it, my "title" has that term in it and my description mentions it more than once, should bring me up nicely in the search engines.

The reason this will help you is you are going after a selected term and you are showing the search engine everything it is looking for to decide if this term applies to this site. If it is in your domain, your title, your description and your keywords, the search engines have no choice but to show this page as something that this person searching must see. So you have to make sure the term applies to your listing.

This will take time. At least 30 days before you may see results. But for the cost of the domain, $9 and I also recommend the TRAFFIC BLAZER at $17 at http://www.ivoldomains.com/ it is a no brainer! Once I submit it thru the TRAFFIC BLAZER on http://www.ivoldomains.com/ and the search engines spider the site, I will start to see natural results for my terms.

The main concept on choosing a term is to find one that is searched but the competition is low. Try to optimize for "vacation rentals" is a HUGE task. Basically forget about it. Find a term that applies to your property, has some level of searches online and take the large piece of the small pie. In the search engine world, it is called "grabbing the low hanging fruit".

If I can get 10 to 30 extra clicks a month, for free, and the search they performed is a "dead" match for my property, then I will stand to increase my web presence.

Adding this to your arsenal of marketing is a great long term way to establish your business online. Please contact us at anytime for help in using this concept. Here are a few owners URLS that are now doing this:

http://www.destin-florida-home-rental.com/
http://www.destin-florida-vacation-house.com/
http://www.destin-florida-rental-home.com/
http://www.gulf-shores-duplex.com/
http://www.pet-friendly-gatlinburg.com/

Good luck!