I’ve just been having a sniff around the wonderful forum over at Lay My Hat and came across some interesting views on using a blog to launch a gite website. A quick note on Lay My Hat, it’s a great resource if you’re running a gite business, with loads of discussion and sharing of information about how to maximise your gite rentals with an active community and well managed forum. Worth signing up to.
One of the interesting discussions on the forum was around using a blog to promote a gite. Some of the posts were in favour, some against, but there were several misconceptions which I thought demonstrated the lack of knowledge there is surrounding blogging generally. Some posts worried that they wouldn’t have the time to post as often as required on the blog, others about whether a blog would look professional enough to promote their gite.
I’m a big fan of blogging, and in particular WordPress as a blogging platform (this site uses WordPress). Some blogs I’ve been launched for clients in my previous life include Arena Magazine, and the rather more prestigious (but ultimately less interesting) 10 Downing Street website, each of which should hopefully calm any nerves about whether a blog design can look professional.
What many people fail to understand is that WordPress is not just a blogging tool, it’s a web publishing tool. It’s perfectly possible to publish a “normal” website using WordPress without any blog part to it, if you choose to. So if all you’re after is a 10 page web site with text, images, and a contact form, you can still build it (very easily) and update it (very easily) using WordPress. So if you’re put off by the idea of ‘having to blog’, you shouldn’t be, as you don’t have to have a blog element to the website.
Secondly, if you do decide to have a blog on your website, it doesn’t have to be the homepage, you can hide it away in a ‘news’ section should you wish to. Equally, having a ‘blog’ doesn’t oblige you to post regularly, so even if you do have a blog section, you can just update it when you have something interesting to say.
However, there is one excellent reason you should blog regularly as a gite owner, and that is SEO. Search engines love blogs, and WordPress is VERY easily configured to be perfect search engine fodder (see my previous article on preparing your gite website for SEO, then take a look around the pages on my website to see how well the blog is optimised in terms of URL structure, page titles, etc).
Why do search engines such as Google love blogs? Well search engines look for the following:
Text
Links (inbound and internal)
Recency of content
Frequency of content
So if you’re producing regular informative text content you’re going to be bumped right to the top of the search engine rankings and a blog is the perfect tool to produce regular text content.
How do I know? I launched this blog on 6th October 2008 (just over a month ago) and I’m already ranked #1 on Google for the majority of my desired search terms (some of which are pretty generic) and am position #3 or #5 for the others (which should hopefully improve as I continue to blog!).
Incidentally, this screenshot shows my gite website ranking results produced using the excellent Rank Checker plugin for Firefox which allows you to produce an instant ranking report from a previous saved query report.
This SEO result is despite not having a Google Page Rank yet for any of the pages on my site (i.e. none of my linking activity has yet been picked up and considered by Google) and is purely down to me producing regular and recent text content on my web site. Don’t get me wrong: i’m not advocating just writing any old rubbish on your blog, but instead consider writing articles about things to do in your local area, things you’ve been up to, improvements you’ve made to your gite etc, and try to consider optimising those articles for SEO.
So in summary, if you want an amazing website, which is easily updated, looks great, and is fully optimised for SEO and drives you up the search rankings, yes, get a blog as your gite website. And if you need help with it, i’m a blog designer, so check out my gite website design section of this site.
Using a blog to launch a gite website
I’ve just been having a sniff around the wonderful forum over at Lay My Hat and came across some interesting views on using a blog to launch a gite website. A quick note on Lay My Hat, it’s a great resource if you’re running a gite business, with loads of discussion and sharing of information about how to maximise your gite rentals with an active community and well managed forum. Worth signing up to.
One of the interesting discussions on the forum was around using a blog to promote a gite. Some of the posts were in favour, some against, but there were several misconceptions which I thought demonstrated the lack of knowledge there is surrounding blogging generally. Some posts worried that they wouldn’t have the time to post as often as required on the blog, others about whether a blog would look professional enough to promote their gite.
I’m a big fan of blogging, and in particular WordPress as a blogging platform (this site uses WordPress). Some blogs I’ve been launched for clients in my previous life include Arena Magazine, and the rather more prestigious (but ultimately less interesting) 10 Downing Street website, each of which should hopefully calm any nerves about whether a blog design can look professional.
What many people fail to understand is that WordPress is not just a blogging tool, it’s a web publishing tool. It’s perfectly possible to publish a “normal” website using WordPress without any blog part to it, if you choose to. So if all you’re after is a 10 page web site with text, images, and a contact form, you can still build it (very easily) and update it (very easily) using WordPress. So if you’re put off by the idea of ‘having to blog’, you shouldn’t be, as you don’t have to have a blog element to the website.
Secondly, if you do decide to have a blog on your website, it doesn’t have to be the homepage, you can hide it away in a ‘news’ section should you wish to. Equally, having a ‘blog’ doesn’t oblige you to post regularly, so even if you do have a blog section, you can just update it when you have something interesting to say.
However, there is one excellent reason you should blog regularly as a gite owner, and that is SEO. Search engines love blogs, and WordPress is VERY easily configured to be perfect search engine fodder (see my previous article on preparing your gite website for SEO, then take a look around the pages on my website to see how well the blog is optimised in terms of URL structure, page titles, etc).
Why do search engines such as Google love blogs? Well search engines look for the following:
So if you’re producing regular informative text content you’re going to be bumped right to the top of the search engine rankings and a blog is the perfect tool to produce regular text content.
How do I know? I launched this blog on 6th October 2008 (just over a month ago) and I’m already ranked #1 on Google for the majority of my desired search terms (some of which are pretty generic) and am position #3 or #5 for the others (which should hopefully improve as I continue to blog!).
Incidentally, this screenshot shows my gite website ranking results produced using the excellent Rank Checker plugin for Firefox which allows you to produce an instant ranking report from a previous saved query report.
This SEO result is despite not having a Google Page Rank yet for any of the pages on my site (i.e. none of my linking activity has yet been picked up and considered by Google) and is purely down to me producing regular and recent text content on my web site. Don’t get me wrong: i’m not advocating just writing any old rubbish on your blog, but instead consider writing articles about things to do in your local area, things you’ve been up to, improvements you’ve made to your gite etc, and try to consider optimising those articles for SEO.
So in summary, if you want an amazing website, which is easily updated, looks great, and is fully optimised for SEO and drives you up the search rankings, yes, get a blog as your gite website. And if you need help with it, i’m a blog designer, so check out my gite website design section of this site.
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