Hi
I am brand new to this site and already have found lots of useful information. We bought our house on Calis ( Challush ) beach near fethiye in Turkey 2 years ago. The holiday season in Turkey runs from May to end of October. So here are my questions ;
1, Only around 20% of the interest we have comes from our website, most we do through networking, the majority of the hits we get on the site are referals from elsewhere. How can we increase the amount of ' direct ' traffic to the site ?
2, I have a nice ' mouse over ' video clip on my homepage, it seems to work well for broadband visitors, I wonder if it annoys anyone on a dial up connection ?
3, There is a property boom going on in Turkey, lots and lots of people go in the winter thinking price will be a bit cheaper and all of these visitors need accomodation, any idea on how we can tap into this market ?
Many thanks in advance, if anyone wants to know about Turkey then just give me a shout.
Rimms
www.villa-fleur.co.uk
Villa Fleur - Calis Beach Turkey
Hello Rimms and welcome to the forum. I'm sure you'll find lots of useful info on increasing your hits on posts already on the forum. Maybe if you use the "search" facility at the top, next to the FAQ?
I followed the link to your site and I thought the video clip wasn't working - I just got a graphics place holder for a minute or so (and I'm on broadband) I'm sure the techies will give better advice but I would steer away from anything which would slow up the first page of your site, especially for dial up visitors. Since the clip is not specific to your property I'm not sure how much value it adds - but that's just my opinion.
Sue
I followed the link to your site and I thought the video clip wasn't working - I just got a graphics place holder for a minute or so (and I'm on broadband) I'm sure the techies will give better advice but I would steer away from anything which would slow up the first page of your site, especially for dial up visitors. Since the clip is not specific to your property I'm not sure how much value it adds - but that's just my opinion.
Sue-
Christine Kenyon
- Posts: 623
- Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 10:58 am
- Location: Glenridding, Ullswater Valley, Lake District, UK
- Contact:
Hello Rimms. Your holiday house looks lovely - particularly when viewed on a cold day in the Lake District! We've got sunshine and snow at the mo!
Like Sue, I found that the video link didn't load up and that your home page took a long time to load up properly. I was happy to wait ... others may have been off to look at another site.
I think the text on your home page needs to be stronger - use the words to tell us why we would enjoy staying at your holiday home. There are a number of useful articles on this on the forum. Personally, I would prefer a slightly smaller picture of your house so that some words could appear on the screen. It's a lovely picture of Villa Fleur, but it's needs something more.
I think you need more and better pictures of the inside of the villa - with as much sunlight as possible streaming into the rooms. Also, a "picky" point, but hopefully it's helpful, the picture of your house on the Villa Fleur page shows a good range of towels out to dry - not the best impression! And finally, in your picture gallery, I'm not sure that the picture titled "downstairs 3rd bathroom" is useful. It actually shows the bottom of a staircase, a settee and a door
With regard to your question about more direct hits to your site, the section on rental listing sites makes good reading. I use one rental listing site which works extremely well in getting hits to my cottage site. In a way I let them do the hard work for me!
Hope the above is helpful. Best wishes for a successful 2005.
Christine
www.stybarrowcottage.co.uk
Like Sue, I found that the video link didn't load up and that your home page took a long time to load up properly. I was happy to wait ... others may have been off to look at another site.
I think the text on your home page needs to be stronger - use the words to tell us why we would enjoy staying at your holiday home. There are a number of useful articles on this on the forum. Personally, I would prefer a slightly smaller picture of your house so that some words could appear on the screen. It's a lovely picture of Villa Fleur, but it's needs something more.
I think you need more and better pictures of the inside of the villa - with as much sunlight as possible streaming into the rooms. Also, a "picky" point, but hopefully it's helpful, the picture of your house on the Villa Fleur page shows a good range of towels out to dry - not the best impression! And finally, in your picture gallery, I'm not sure that the picture titled "downstairs 3rd bathroom" is useful. It actually shows the bottom of a staircase, a settee and a door
With regard to your question about more direct hits to your site, the section on rental listing sites makes good reading. I use one rental listing site which works extremely well in getting hits to my cottage site. In a way I let them do the hard work for me!
Hope the above is helpful. Best wishes for a successful 2005.
Christine
www.stybarrowcottage.co.uk
-
livinginitaly
- Posts: 202
- Joined: Fri Oct 29, 2004 4:46 pm
- Location: Italy (at last!)
- Contact:
Hi Rimms,
Great picture on the home page ...... really 'invites you in'
I would say though, that the image is maybe a little on the large side and yes, i'd certainly 'lose' the video clip (still hasn't loaded for me on dial up
)
That said, you could also add a text box saying 'to view a video of our property .. click here (broadband recommended)' or something along those lines, then open the link in a 'pop up' page.
Good layout on the site, though a couple of pages do have a 'scrollbar' on the bottom of the screen because the page width is higher than 800 pixels. Still a lot of people using smaller monitors or screen resolutions i'm afraid.
To help with the search engines, you're doing a lot of things 'right' ..... only things i'd add are 'metatags' for keywords and description and a links page. The 'tags' are still used occasionally by a number of search engines, in particular Google still displays the Description tag, and as the actual 'content' homepage doesn't start untill a long way into the code .... it'll help a lot.
Building up a reciprocal links page is also vitally important nowadays. Few points though, link to sites 'you' like the look of of and provide some similar content. Don't link to 'ringtone' or 'gambling' sites, etc.
To aviod (or at least cut down) spam ..... i'd recommend using a link trader site such as http://www.linkmarket.net (select the 'free' option), we've used them for a while now without complaint.
One final point ....... i'm not a big fan of 'this page was last updated on ...' scripts, they can only work against you unless you update the site regularly.
Hope this helps
Great picture on the home page ...... really 'invites you in'
I would say though, that the image is maybe a little on the large side and yes, i'd certainly 'lose' the video clip (still hasn't loaded for me on dial up
)That said, you could also add a text box saying 'to view a video of our property .. click here (broadband recommended)' or something along those lines, then open the link in a 'pop up' page.
Good layout on the site, though a couple of pages do have a 'scrollbar' on the bottom of the screen because the page width is higher than 800 pixels. Still a lot of people using smaller monitors or screen resolutions i'm afraid.
To help with the search engines, you're doing a lot of things 'right' ..... only things i'd add are 'metatags' for keywords and description and a links page. The 'tags' are still used occasionally by a number of search engines, in particular Google still displays the Description tag, and as the actual 'content' homepage doesn't start untill a long way into the code .... it'll help a lot.
Building up a reciprocal links page is also vitally important nowadays. Few points though, link to sites 'you' like the look of of and provide some similar content. Don't link to 'ringtone' or 'gambling' sites, etc.
To aviod (or at least cut down) spam ..... i'd recommend using a link trader site such as http://www.linkmarket.net (select the 'free' option), we've used them for a while now without complaint.
One final point ....... i'm not a big fan of 'this page was last updated on ...' scripts, they can only work against you unless you update the site regularly.
Hope this helps
Welcome to the forum, Rimms! 
Overall, a very nice site - you've captured the feeling of summer in your pictures. Here are things I would change if it were my site.
I like a big picture that tells the story of the holiday on the homepage. But your picture could be too big. It's fine on high-speed internet, but at 137kb it would take quite a while to download on dial-up. In the time it does you may well lose your prospect.
The video on the homepage takes a long time to arrive and when it does it is a TV ad for Turkey. People who are considering a villa holiday in Turkey don't need to see this ad. It may be a winning idea - I haven't seen it on any other rental property site, so it is at least rare. But I suspect it will confuse more than anything else. If it was a video on your location, that would be great as it would be complementing the job of the homepage.
I am seeing Times New Roman on your homepage, but Arial or similar on the others. Best stick with Arial, Times doesn't look right.
'Things to do' page: this picture of the people covered in mud really put me off and made me want to leave because it looks like you have changed the people into black and white for some wacky reason. Only after a bit of delving did I discover they are in fact covered in mud - this really needs to be captioned to tell us what we are looking at.
Excuse my ignorance, but I don't know what Hisaronu and 'the world famous Olu Deniz' are, and it is not explained in your text. I would expand on your homepage copy, by applying the question 'why should I (the potential renter) care?' to everything you've written. This will make you state the benefit of each highlight and hook the reader in.
If you want to get more direct traffic I would write at least double the copy on the homepage, and make it keyword-rich.
Title tag needs changing from Villa Fleur to something with keywords in, and the Description tag needs attention too. Then you need to work on some inbound links. Articles and advice on doing this yourself are available on the resources page here:
viewtopic.php?t=187
I would say these are the main ways to increase your hits through the search engines.
Overall, a very nice site - you've captured the feeling of summer in your pictures. Here are things I would change if it were my site.
I like a big picture that tells the story of the holiday on the homepage. But your picture could be too big. It's fine on high-speed internet, but at 137kb it would take quite a while to download on dial-up. In the time it does you may well lose your prospect.
The video on the homepage takes a long time to arrive and when it does it is a TV ad for Turkey. People who are considering a villa holiday in Turkey don't need to see this ad. It may be a winning idea - I haven't seen it on any other rental property site, so it is at least rare. But I suspect it will confuse more than anything else. If it was a video on your location, that would be great as it would be complementing the job of the homepage.
I am seeing Times New Roman on your homepage, but Arial or similar on the others. Best stick with Arial, Times doesn't look right.
'Things to do' page: this picture of the people covered in mud really put me off and made me want to leave because it looks like you have changed the people into black and white for some wacky reason. Only after a bit of delving did I discover they are in fact covered in mud - this really needs to be captioned to tell us what we are looking at.
Excuse my ignorance, but I don't know what Hisaronu and 'the world famous Olu Deniz' are, and it is not explained in your text. I would expand on your homepage copy, by applying the question 'why should I (the potential renter) care?' to everything you've written. This will make you state the benefit of each highlight and hook the reader in.
If you want to get more direct traffic I would write at least double the copy on the homepage, and make it keyword-rich.
Title tag needs changing from Villa Fleur to something with keywords in, and the Description tag needs attention too. Then you need to work on some inbound links. Articles and advice on doing this yourself are available on the resources page here:
viewtopic.php?t=187
I would say these are the main ways to increase your hits through the search engines.
Paolo
Lay My Hat
Lay My Hat