Personally I think the beauty of the search engines is that the small private sites have just as much chance of getting page 1 rankings as the big ones do. Try searching for Chester holiday cottage in Google and, at the moment, we are well up the first page, above several big listings sites.lforro wrote:We agree with the advantages of having text on your page, but on the other hand having a lot of competitors it’s hard to be on top of the “Google list�. If you search for holiday home you’re bound to find first a list of all the portals before you start seeing private sites. I think that before arriving at one of those sites, many people will already have given up…
Remember that people don't search for 'holiday home', or at least not more than once! They soon realize that they have to be more specific - e.g. 'holiday home sicily'. Our small private sites have a major advantage over the big directories - we can go on at great length about how fantastic our location is and that makes our sites more relevant to a specific search than a big listings site which can only give over a couple of paragraphs to each area.
One service you could offer the owners is some 'keyword research'. Find out exactly what phrases potential customers are searching for so they can gear their text to those key words. Check out the excellent references here for more info: viewtopic.php?t=1159