Millions of people are now choosing to rent their holiday villa or apartment directly to their prospective clients through advertising on the internet. In the first of our series of articles we looked at how to choose which sites to use through the use of search traffic statistic provided by the major search engines. Search traffic represents the volume of visitors that are searching the internet for specific keywords and phrases as is an indicator of how many visitor a particular site may attract because of their positioning on the first page of the results for a given term.

Keywords are only an indicator. To fully benefit from a websites traffic it is also important that the page you create has as much information formatted in the most optimized manner so that your ‘advert’ has the best chance of being listed independently on the search engines. This will help drive traffic not just to the website you have advertised with but also send traffic directly to the page showing the advert of your holiday home.

The premise is, that if the page you create is properly formatted and contains the correct information you are able with a little work to make it visible for some of the most targeted keyword searches, sending visitors who are specifically looking for your type of property in your resort location, straight to your villa.This is much more preferable than hoping they click on your villa as one of many in a database search from the websites homepage. This type of search will send traffic to your page but the ratio of enquiries will be much higher in the former scenario than the latter.

The first thing to look for having chosen a number of sites to consider is the landing page. This is the page on the website that you land on when clicking on the link in Google. This should be a page specific to your resort or property type. This being well search for a villa such as yours and click onto one or two of the properties. There are several things to look out for on the ‘advert page’.

First, compare the title of the page between two or more properties. The title is the description you will find in the blue bar at the top of your screen. Check to see if the title is the same or different for each property. The title of any page on a website should be specific to that page. It is one of the most important things that the search engines look at when they index a page. If the website you are looking at has the same title on every page of the site, forget it and move onto the next website in your list for consideration.

If the title are different they should contain some specific information. This includes, The name of the resort, the property type and the rental status. By this I mean for example, a villa for rent in Moraira, Costa Blanca, Spain should have the minimum included phrases of Moraira, Villa, and rental or holiday rental in the title. You can check the actual title against the list of most popular keywords that you have made from the Google keywords tool. If the page title matches up well with a well search phrase then you can look further.

You should also then look to see if the page has a headline. Usually in bold at the top of the page. If the site is doing its job properly, this headline will be whats known as a h1 tag. You can check this by going to the menu bar at the top of your browser. If you are viewing in Internet Explorer, go to ‘View’ and click on the link in the drop down menu for ‘page source’. In Firefox this say just ’source’. A page will appear with the code used to create the page. It looks confusing, but do not be alarmed. Just slowly scan the top third of the page looking for the text used in the headline. Once you have found it, check to see if at either end of the text there is a <h1 symbol. If there is, good, if not, just make a note, a negative point if you will for this site.

Slowly you will be able to build a picture of which sites are most suited to bringing you the most traffic for your villa or apartment advertisement.

About the Author

Neil Ebsworth is the founder of AMLASpain, the Spanish Property MLS for property for sale in Spain and Villa Rentals Spain

When you read about SEO. Thats Search Engine Optimization for the uninitiated or the profession of trying to put a website at the top of the organic search results for any given keyword.
Having just read the first line of this article I have realized just how much jargon we use in this industry and that for the novice, and we were all novices once, it must be somewhat confusing.

So let me simplify. If you have a website it is normally because you have a product or service that you wish to sell to the public. To achieve sales you need people to visit your website. Your visitors are called traffic. The best way to gain traffic is to appear in the organic search results of Google, (and other Search Engines) for search terms that are relevant to your business. For Eample I own a website for Estate Agents in Spain to list their property on a MLS. The Biggest search term for this industry is Spanish Property, which receives about 10x as much traffic as any other search term. Therefore in a perfect world my aim eventually is to reach No 1 position for this keyword. In the interim you must aim to reach a Page 1 position for smaller traffic keywords which are less competitive and more easily achieved. Think of your keyword goals as a Christmas tree with the most competitive as the fairy on the top. The least competitive and most easy to achieve are at the bottom of the tree. There are many more of them to choose from so be selective, but a wide base of keyword terms that bring you a visitor a day is easier to achieve than trying to rank for one term that will bring you a 100 visitors.

Now most articles that you will read will start to talk about the fact that to rank for any given keyword you need to build links pointing at your site from other sites with the keyword you are trying to rank for in the anchor text of your link, (thats the clickable part of the text that sends the visitor to your site) . This is all true. You will read about the need for Directory submissions, writing articles, reciprocal linking strategies and many more ways to gain links from your piers so that you may build your link popularity and get your deserved place on the first page of results for the keywords you have chosen.

I will leave all those noble strategies to other for now and focus on a method of obtaing as many links as you want for yourself without going outside the remit of your own website. Do not get me wrong. All that you read about in-linking is bona-fide and should be pursued as part of a multi faceted approach that is necessary for successful placement in the Search Engines. This article is designed however to highlight the importance of internal linking strategy of your own site that can make a great effect on your Search Engine position. It is an overlooked subject and often missed by many site owners. It is often the key to out ranking your competition but also should not be confused with a tradition of spamming the content of your web pages to gain position by stuffing the content with meaningless keywords and links.

Those strategies have pretty much been taken care of by the Search Engines in their algorithms.

When linking your pages internally there are some guidelines to consider.
These include,
The percentage of links pointing at any given page with the same keyword anchor text. If the percentage is too high it may be deemed to be spamming, so always keep your link texts varied leaving the most important keyword links coming from the most important pages of your site.

Use your footer to carry links to your most important pages. That way you are linking your most important pages from every page on your site. These can also be used as a baseline link for a generic keyword creating a good number of links to an important page. If you then link in content links with a more specific target keyword from an internal page you will gain good points for the important keyword along with recognition for the baseline links in your footer.

A final example as this subject will need to be extended later.

If you create a hundred pages of quality content about your site subject or product and you have 1 link in the footer to your homepage. Lets say its a site selling property and your footer link is property homepage. In the text you carry a link for Spanish Property for Sale also to the homepage. You now have 200 links pointing at your homepage with 50% of them targeted at your keyword.

If the assumption is correct that Google allows and reads up to 100 internal links on any given page without penalty then you can see that by interlinking your pages in an intelligent manner you could end up in our example with 10 000 links from a 100 good pages of content.

Whilst it is by no means the only thing to consider, it makes a good start.

About the Author (HTML)

Neil Ebsworth is co-founder of AMLAspain.com, TheSpanish property MLS and Villa Rentals Spain. A portal for Rental Properties

The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point yesterday as part of another attempt to hold up the financial institutions on Wall Street from further speculation worries. The stock market took some confidence from the move and posted the largest one day gain on the Dow Jones index for quite some time. But as far as struggling home-owners are concerned, the rate cut has done little to ease pressure on their burden. In fact, by cutting interest rates and further weakening the dollar, the Fed had invited higher oil prices, increasing energy and transport costs at a time when most households are already feeling the pinch.

The rate cut which is the third in as many weeks follows the collapse of Bear Stearns, who were eventually bailed out and purchased by JP Morgan for the sum of $2 a share. Bear Stearns had been trading a year ago at nearly $150 dollars a share and fell victim to a run on their shares following rumours over their exposure to the sub-prime mortgage market and the extent of the losses they may have suffered.

The positives from this story are that the Federal Reserve was able to move quickly to back the takeover, helping to minimize the loss of confidence in the general banking sector. The negatives however, which will effect more on the average blue collar worker in America through the imported inflation that the lower dollar will bring, seems to reflect more on the political view of the current administration, who will bend over backwards to prop up the corporations at the expense of the man in the street.

And when your stoic republican points towards the tax rebate that is about to be delivered to every household, as an indication of what the government is doing for the average American in this time of need, don’t be fooled. The maximum $800 dollars rebate is more of a cynical move to help prop up the employment market before a presidential election than it is designed to combat higher gas, food and energy costs.

If the administration wanted to do more to help those affected by the current mortgage crisis they could start by suspending the ability of the banks to foreclose on homeowners by auto-computer programs. A large problem with the mortgage lenders at the moment is that they have out-sourced their administration to companies who are ill equipped or poorly trained to deal with the problems that are arising. These outsourcing companies never foresaw the numbers of cases that they would be dealing with and computerised most of their procedures to cut costs. What has resulted is computerised foreclosure, without consultation and where consultation occurs, it may already be too late to achieve a positive result.

If each case was required to be reviewed independently, it could be determined whether it was sold incorrectly to begin with and where possible it could be re-written so that those home-owners who were never going to be able to afford the true cost and were effectively swindled, could refinance under terms they may allow them to keep their home. This would, of course, create a back-up of cases, but this effective delay in foreclosing on peoples homes maybe the delay required to unravel the truths behind the companies that made billions of dollars profit from those who could least afford it.

About the Author

Neil Ebsworth is the founder of AMLASpain, the MLS for properties in Spain and with a home for sale in Mount Pleasant SC real estate in the US is keen observer of US Real Estate trends

There are literally millions of holiday home owners now advertising on the internet. Some people set up their own website and just sit back and hope that they will be found by prospective holidaymakers looking for their vacation property. After a while they start to realize that there is a little more to getting seen on the internet than just creating a website.

The next step for most is using one of the myriad of advertising sites to create a listing. With many of these they are attractive to look at and after about an hour of work you have a respectable listing showing your vacation property or villa in its best light. Once again they sit back and wait for the inquiries to pour in. Once again they are disappointed.

The fact is there are several things you should do if you are a villa or apartment owner if you want your property to be seen on the internet. One of the things not to do, is to sit back and think that things will happen all by themselves.

As a quick guide to getting your property seen on the internet, we will fore-go the setting up of your own website. If you are a novice at things such as SEO, (if you dont know what SEO stands for then your a novice!) and move straight onto where to list your property and how to get your listing seen by the most people.

The first thing is to choose the site to advertise your rental with. There are many ways to do this but I recommend two fairly standard procedures to follow.First make a list of all the keyword search phrases that you would use if you were looking for a villa to rent in its location. A keyword phrase is the words or phrases that you would type into the search box if you were a holidaymaker looking to book a rental.

For example if I had a villa in Moraira, Costa Blanca, Spain I might come up with a list that included the search terms, Moraira, Moraira villa to rent, holiday villa in Moraira, Moraira villa rentals etc. Make the list as long as you can and even ask a friend or two to repeat the exercise. Remember to include general terms as well. Sometimes these can be the most search phrases that actually get the most traffic. For the example above, the top searched terms include, villa rentals spain and villa rental Spain, Spain rentals and rentals Spain. Once you have made your list, put it to one side because you will need it later.

Now you will need to use some tools that will show you where people actually search and in what volume. The key to successful advertising is getting the maximum number of visitors to your listing page. This is best done by first using a site that receives a lot of traffic for the type of property and the area you are renting in. The best single tool to use is the Google Keyword tool. To find it just type ‘Google keyword tool’ into your Google search.

here you will be able to type in some keyword search phrases from your list to find out where people actually search. The tool will give you the terms with the most volume on average and the volume for the previous month. Start working through your list of general and more specific terms ranking them in terms of actual search volume. You should then end up with a list for the most searched terms by volume for the highest traffic general terms as well as your localized search terms.

Now go to Google and type in the highest traffic terms. make a note of the websites that appear on the first page results for each term. What you are ideally looking for are the websites that cover not only the high volume general terms, but also rank well for your local keyword searches. Once you have been down the list you should start to see a pattern of which sites rank well in all areas. If not, then look to split your advertising between a mixture of sites that provide high traffic and those that provide more localized result rankings. Remember to avoid the Pay per click sites that advertise at the top and bottom of the page and down the right hand margin. These sites pay a fee to advertise on Page 1 of the results page. If their advertising budget runs out then so does the traffic to the site. The organic results are most likely to give you stable traffic in the long term.

You should now have a list of maybe half a dozen potential websites to choose from. To decide which ones to choose will depend on a number of different factors that will be covered later.

About the Author

Neil Ebsworth is the founder of AMLASpain, the Spanish MLS for property Spain and holiday rentals Spain