France This Way...the blog!!

I came across a great new resource for gite owners at gite guru that will be useful if you either don’t have a website for your holiday rental yet, or the one you have looks a bit outdated…or simply never shows up in the all-important google results!

There are lots of steps involved in having a successful website, such as:

• make it look nice – great pictures, design, layout etc
• have an easy navigation structure (menus)
• get it visible in the search engines
• give it useful content
• make it clear at all stages how to book the property!
• make it visible in the search engines
• get the meta-tags and other ‘invisible’ content such as alt tags on the images right
• make it visible in the search engines

You’ll see a pattern emerging here I think. It is very possible to be very proud of your beautiful website – but if no one else sees it, what does it matter!

But equally if you are number 1 in google for all your relevant phrases but your site is terrible no one will stick around and book the property. So You need to focus equally on both aspects.

Anyway, gite guru looks at a lot of the website issues on a new site that’s packed with good advice, so you should take a look if bookings are looking a bit thin for 2009.

It’s never too late to improve things but sooner is better than later!

One last special request: one thing that I hope the site will look at in due course, perhaps as one of their series of training videos, is the ability to use wordpress (the software this blog uses) as a ‘static’ website ie a site that looks like a website rather than a blog. Little do most rental property owners realise it, but this is the answer they are looking for when trying to improve or replace a website.