Advertising your Holiday Rental

There is an abundance of websites on the internet offering to advertise your holiday property.

Some of these offer free advertising whilst others choose to charge somewhat high annual fees.

So why are some free? Well their concept is generally to recruit as many owners of holiday rental properties as possible and then later to turn the site into a money making venture.

This can be achieved in various ways; one way is to generate an edge of competition - your advert can be featured on the home page to be ahead of the now enormous and growing list of adverts at a certain cost.

This can be very tempting as your advert may be the 105th advert in a long list where only 10 adverts / page are shown. Accordingly the chances of your advert being viewed is practically zero!

I would suggest that before advertising on a free site you check whether or not your advert has any chance of being amongst the first 10 displayed without payment being made and what the payment will be when property featuring is introduced.

There are of course paid-for sites which will bring your advert to a highly listed position,if you regularly update the availability calender of your holiday rental property.

There are other free sites that have overcome this "long list disadvantage" to their advertisers by introducing a rotational script,i.e. when a page is entered or refreshed all properties on the page are relocated giving each one the chance to be in the top position.

One such site is http://www.holiday-seek.eu

Entering the details of a particular holiday property onto an advertising site can be a time consuming experience even if you have prepared text and photos at the ready to upload.

It is therefore necessary to judge whether or not this time consumption to place an advert is worth the effort or not.

One factor has already been mentioned - the position on the list but there are other factors to consider.

The whole concept of advertising your holiday property on the web is to get your advert read by many viewers and generate bookings for your property.

This will not happen unless the website itself on which you are advertising is high on the list above other holiday advertising sites.

This essentially means that the advertising website must be on the first pages of the major search engines for your unique search terms (keywords) entered by the potential renters of your holiday property.

A website at page position 395,000 out of 590,000,no matter how beautiful or well constructed it is, will rarely be seen if at all.It is a well known fact that renters will not go further than the first few pages before they make their decision on which rental property to book for their holiday.

So how does one choose a website that is highly placed in the search engine listings? The answer of course is to do a search for the keywords of your holiday property in each of the major search engines,Google/Yahoo/Msn and see which sites are in the top positions.

The webmasters of these sites work hard to get their sites into these top positions.They are in tune with the optimization techniques for the various search engines.

They know the importance of the Title and Description Tags in their coding of their web pages and the various techniques of Search Engine Optimization. Those webmasters which are not in tune to these techniques will of course have their sites listed low.

This is yet another aspect of your decision making on which site you choose to spend valuable time advertising your holiday property.

Before deciding to advertise on a website you would be well advised to look at one of your competitor adverts and decide what the unique title and keywords could be for the search engines.

Then view the source coding of it. This is easily done in the Internet Explorer browser by going to the menu item "Page" and then selecting from the drop-down menu "View Source".In the Firefox Browser just click on "View Source".

In this coding just a few lines down from the top, you will be able to see the Title and the Description of the advertisement. If these only relate to the main site and not to the particular advert then you will be relying on the website itself to gain in position.Ideally the title and description tags in the code should relate to the property being advertised and not the main website.

This will then give you the chance to submit your site to the search engines yourself and jump ahead of your competitors.

Do this by doing a Google search for "Add URL" or "Add Site"

and entering your full website address beginning with http://www into the URL or Site boxes on each of the search engine application forms and selecting the category holiday/vacation rentals.

Webmaster at http://www.holiday-seek.eu