Since launching Rent a Gite in Frankreich, I’ve had a lot of interest (ie people registering with the website) but only a 50% uptake (people actually creating a website listing). Given that creating a listing is free, this rammed home to me the importance of making your desired outcome easy for website users and not putting unnecessary hurdles in their way.
Until today (5 hrs of coding later), users had to first register, then upon receiving a password, create their listing. Mehr lesen
If you can’t beat ‘em… this is actually more of an experiment than a business model, but I’m interested to see what’s what in the directory market so I’ve launched Rent a Gite in Frankreich.
There’s lots of sites out there taking money off people for listing their gites, and so I’m launching my own, free directory (free to a point, but essentially free). Over the course of the next few months I’m going to bring my SEO expertise to bear on the site (the directory is built using WordPress plus a series of amazing plugins, so that’s a good start), and allow the link juice love to flow directly down to all the gites listed in the directory.
So if you own a gite, advertise it now before I sell my soul and start charging like the rest of them. It’s bound to happen.
homepage screenshot
I’d love you to list if you own a holiday rental property in France, and also would appreciate any feedback in the comments below.
There are a huge range of SEO plugins for WordPress, but I like this one as it focuses on the things I believe to be important in SEO, and ignores the rest.
Most WordPress themes are designed with SEO in mind, and certainly WordPress, with it’s pings, linking structure, text focused content and customised URL structure is a dream when you’re building an SEO optimised website. Mehr lesen
Foto-Liebhaber Thema ist sponsored by Ferienwohnungen Normandie and designed by Normandy Gites
Website Grader: Handy tool for checking your site marketing
Victoriac over on Lay My Hat just posted a really interesting little tool for checking your website Marketing called Website Grader. Stick in your URL (make sure you include / exclude the www according to how your site is presented in browsers), wait a minute or so and see a fairly comprehensive report on a variety of website Marketing factors.
I’m not convinced in the validity of their scoring mechanic (I get 91/100 at the moment which is surprisingly high given I’ve only been blogging for a year or so and I’ve only got a PR 1 so far) but it’s useful to sense check the factors that can influence traffic, page rank and search results. Mehr lesen »
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