Steady on Google at #1 after 12 hours.......!?

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
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Mountain Goat
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Steady on Google at #1 after 12 hours.......!?

Post by Mountain Goat »

OK, there must be some mistake, please shoot this down, I must have got this wrong. After 12 hours on holidaylettings we're steadily in first 4 (and #1) after going live with them yesterday afternoon.

Our HL listings were done in a rush, with poor images. All listings created after 12 Feb this year.

Well, alright, there's a bunch of others on the pages coming up, it isn't our own personal website, but still....

Keywords:

swiss alps chalet rental
#1 HolidayLettings
#2 HL
#3 Info-World (more to come on them - they're interesting as well)
#4 IW

swiss alps apartment rental
#1 IW
#2 IW
#3 HL
#4 HL

switzerland apartment rental
#2 HL

swiss apartment rental
#1 HL (out of a mere 4 million others struggling in some googlepit below)

leysin rental
#3 slowtrav
#5 HR (Holiday Rentals)
(out of 58,000+ - we're a smallish village)

leysin apartment rental
#1 HR
#2 HR
#3 slowtrav
#4 slowtrav
#5 IW
(out of 13,900)

leysin chalet rental
#1 slowtrav
#3 HR
#4 HR
#8 IW

chalet apartment rental (no country)
#3 HL

These are realistic 'non-unique' key words for potential punters aren't they? I'm not 'forcing' the search with unique keywords like 'chalet xyz'

No, I know nothing about HL besides being pleasant and patient to deal with my incapability to upload images (although I suspect it may be rather clumsy), and a reasonable cost, and a neat site.

slowtrav.com we've discussed on another posting.

And it's very satisfying to see our arch 'competitor' being pushed down the page with hopefully another 40 pages further down for them to explore over the next few weeks (and I'm keeping the hooves crossed they've never heard of LMH).

My knowledge of SE optimisation is weak and way out-of-date, but doesn't this appear to be seriously acceptable for "next-day" performance?

Info-World is tied in with Latroba - see other post - but nothing about them on LMH that I can see - they're also pleasant to deal with as well, but I wouldn't mind exchanging PM on their deal. Our result on IW is not actually that good, as we are very much an afterthought on the resulting page.

A leaping Goat
Last edited by Mountain Goat on Wed May 17, 2006 1:01 pm, edited 26 times in total.
mvus
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Post by mvus »

I notice you don't have a link to your website on Holidaylettings.
I put 2 villas on there last week for a client with no computer knowledge and they allow you put your website on for free providing you link back to them somewhere prominant.

They had an enquiry within an hour of the ad going live and 3 in the first day and between them and ownersdirect have had a good response in the first week overall.
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Mountain Goat
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Post by Mountain Goat »

Yes, there's a slight problem there. Our own website is still very much under construction, and our time has been spent tweaking the database type sites.

For (maybe) obvious reasons these commercial sites don't approve of links to their competitors.

However I'm going to have a go at HL allowing our page to link to slowtrav. As I've said elsewhere, slowtrav allows unrestricted outbound links, and needs to list HL anyway. So, a bit of diplomacy with both slowtrav and HL in getting them together and it might be allowed.

In fact all the database rental listing sites could benefit from allowing in/out with slowtrav. I hadn't realised that slowtrav had such an emphasis on France and Italy, and Switzerland is a bit out of mainstream.

I can see every advantage about having our own site, but the work generated by HL, HR, Slowtrav, Latroba etc. doesn't give us much spare time for our own site (it's not so much the serious enquiries, it's sorting out the nutters which is time-consuming, and don't mention availability calendars).

Although this is obviously heretical around here, I'm not at all sure we could ever match these sort of results under our own steam without working 24/7 on it.

Goat
mvus
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Post by mvus »

Sorry, I saw your link at the bottom to leysinchalet.info and assummed it was your own website.

You won't get away with a link to a commercial website like slowtrav on any of the major rental ites

I wouldn't worry about trying to compete with major commercial sites on google with a private site. The owners sites mainly act as reasurance to potential clients and as a deal closer when faced with a choice of several properties. You can ignore all the techy stuff you read on these forums and just make something attractive and welcoming and you'll improve on it over time as you learn more.
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Mountain Goat
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Post by Mountain Goat »

No, that's good old HR.

Well, I sort of see your point, but what has HL got to lose with linking to slowtrav? It isn't a commercial rental database site (6,500 pages of genuine content etc. etc.) but complete gold-dust for the likes of us with its classified listings at $50 a go.

HL, HR et al have got everything to gain by being listed there, and nothing to lose. In fact, as slowtrav's listings of rental sites are so US-biased the first Brit rental site to get in there would benefit even more. No?

Goat
(not yet a director of slowtrav or holidaylettings)
Last edited by Mountain Goat on Sat Apr 29, 2006 8:44 pm, edited 5 times in total.
mvus
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Post by mvus »

Well, you could always try but most state only links to non commercial private sites allowed
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Mountain Goat
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Post by Mountain Goat »

pja
Don't suppose you fancy a Spring break up a Swiss mountain, clutching your digital cam? Your websites seem a good deal....

Watch this space. Anyone got any contacts at HL?

Sobering thought: SE listings are one thing; firm bookings are another.

Goat
Chris from slowtrav
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Post by Chris from slowtrav »

Goat is correct (hi Goat!), we do allow our advertisers to link to whoever they want, as long as it's not to someone totally disreputable or a porn site or something.

If you take a look at the Slow Travel Classifieds (www.slowtrav.com/cl), you can see that many of the commercial sites, such as VRBO, are among our advertisers.
Chris from slowtrav.com
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