Without a doubt internet nowdays is one of the most effective mediums for holiday home advertising. There is plenty of rental listing sites where you can list your property for a fee or sometimes even for free. Not all of them will be effective for your particular property however. Currently I believe into location-specific rental listing sites. That is the ones that focus strictly on a single location, such as Cyprus, or Spain, or even better - focusing on small popular regions, such as Ibiza or Tuscany.  Such location-specific rental listing sites are less crowded and, if implemented properly, generally position better in search engines due to being very focused on the location.

Apart from advertising on rental listing sites, what else can you do? Create your own website, of course. Assuming the domain name was chosen right, your personal property website can turn into a very effective marketing tool. Basically it will serve two main goals:

• Draw visitors from search engines (if domain name was chosen right and the minimum SEO requirements met)
• Be a “business card” for your property. You can just point interested holidaymakers to the website where they can always find exhaustive information on your holiday home including videos and pictures.

What would you need to do after your holiday home website has been completed? You will need to get backlinks to it and they will need to be relevant. There are many ways to get backlinks but generally link building isn’t as straightforward as it sounds initially. You can always get a free backlink to your website from our Holiday Rental Directory. HolidayRentalDirectory.org is the open human-edited web directory focusing strictly on holiday rental websites. Add your website URL to the holiday rental directory, it won’t cost you any money and will give your personal holiday home website that valuable backlink it needs.

Up for developing another Holiday Rental Search Engine? Here is an executive summary for you, ready for fund raising:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The idea is to create a true Holiday Rental Search Engine, similar to Google but only for holiday rental websites.

Vast numbers of holiday rental owners have personal websites for their properties. The search engine will discover and index these websites and will make them searchable by prospective guests using any keywords they contain, just like Google does it. For example potential guest will be able to type this into the search box:

heated pool villa in mallorca sleeps:3 bedrooms:1-2 price:120-180GBP/week

or simply:

pool villa in italy

Search results will be presented in a convenient way, as a list of matching holiday rentals. Each holiday rental on the results page will have 2 large pictures, short description and most important attributes (such as sleeps: n, bedrooms: n, rate: x-y, pet-friendly: yes/no). Clicking on any match will lead directly to owner’s personal website for this holiday rental. That is where potential guest can find exhaustive information on the property and book directly with the owner.

Holiday Rental Search Engine is a relatively new idea that has been tried by  very few. (Though there is one online business that is trying to masquerade their usual rental listing website selling it as “holiday home search engine”, however it has absolutely nothing to do with a real search engine and simply does not work even on simplest searches. It’s important to realize that solid state-of-the-art know-how technology is mandatory for a true holiday rental search engine implementation. Few specialists can develop such a technology and few interested companies can afford the development costs.)

Do not confuse Holiday Rental Search Engine with usual holiday rental listing website. Holiday Rental Search Engine shows personal rental websites in a convenient form where usual holiday rental listing website shows paid advertisements previously placed there by rental owners.

These days holiday rental owners are very reluctant to place advertisements on listing websites because:

• There are so many of them
• Good ones are quite expensive
• It takes so much time and effort to fill out all the online forms for an advertisement

Our Holiday Rental Search Engine will not suffer from any of the above problems: it will be free for all, quick to add URL to and unique in the functionality offered.

Advantages over usual holiday rental listing websites

• True holiday rental search engine, full text search of holiday rentals by any terms, e.g.: “heated pool villa in Florence sleeps:3 bedrooms:1-2”.
• Our search engine will be free for both holiday rental owners and tenants.
• There is no need to convince owners to advertise their rental on the website (very hard business these days!), we simply add the URL to our database. Usual holiday rental listing websites perform tremendous work to attract owners.
• Adding URL to the search engine will be half a minute process where adding an advertisement to a usual holiday rental listing site is often a 1-2 hour job.
• Our database of holiday rentals will only grow where for usual holiday rental listing websites it often diminishes as a result of owners leaving for another listing site.
• Our holiday rental search engine will offer the most direct way of reaching rental owners, not even using a listing website middle man: guests will get right to the rental owner’s website where they can discover more information and book directly.
• Usability (ease of use), friendly UI (user interface) and handy useful functionality will be the top priority. 99.9% of usual rental listing websites feature awful interface and cluttered design.

Means to generate revenue

Means of generating revenue will be similar to the ones used by Google search engine – sponsored listings and (possibly) selling advertising space.

• Up to 3 sponsored rental adverts on the search engine home page (they will take same space and will be changing). An advert won’t be a usual banner but a nice large picture of the property being advertised, it will be a natural part of the search engine home page design.
• Up to 3 sponsored keyword-sensitive rental listings on top of the search results (same as in Google).
• Unlimited number of sponsored keyword-sensitive rental listings on the right hand side of the search results page (same as Google AdWords – pay per click advertising).
• Possible sale of the search engine to a big holiday rental advertising company.

Competitors

Holiday rental industry leader, HomeAway Group, has revenues of around $150 million and $50 million in EBITDA. HomeAway Group has acquired at least eleven holiday home listing sites, including Holiday-Rentals.co.uk, VRBO.com, VacationRentals.com, Abritel.fr and OwnersDirect.co.uk.

Low running costs

Once the software is developed the business will not require substantial running costs:

• Web hosting
• 2 x Developers for system maintenance
• Further marketing and promotion

HolidayHomeAdvertising.co.uk is number one in Google.co.uk for “holiday home advertising” search phrase. Among usual affecting things (such as unique highly relevant content and backlinks) the proper domain name showed to be the deciding factor.

Holiday home advertising is quite a competitive area these days. It therefore requires a lot of creativity from your side. Every smallest opportunity should be employed and made work towards the goal of letting your home.

Did you know you can attract visitors to your holiday home site using Google Images? Google Image Search that is. This has proven to be the source of high numbers of visitors for several home owners. Not many of these visitors would turn into guests, but even one real guest out of many visitors is worth the effort.

How does it work? Go to Google Image Search and look up “italy pool villa”. See the results? One of these pictures could be your Italy pool villa picture, attracting potential guests to your personal rental site.

In order for your images to appear in the search results you need to do a few things. First and most important, image filenames should say exactly and precisely what is shown on the picture, that is:

italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg

instead of 2369878.jpg, which tells nothing to a search engine. italy-villa-001.jpg isn’t good enough either because it does not include the details. Best to be precise and include any details in the filename.

Next important bit is specifying picture description in the alt and title attributes of the img tag. As below:

<img src="/images/italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg"
alt="Italy pool villa front"
title="Italy pool villa front"
/>

Width and height attributes are always good to include (with width being a little more important than height). It is a good practice and Google appreciates good practices. So the final img tag will look like this:

<img src="/images/italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg"
width="200" height="200"
alt="Italy pool villa front"
title="Italy pool villa front"
/>

In case you link to images with anchor tag (using “<a>…</a>” that is) use the detailed description phrase as link text:

<a href="/images/italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg">
Italy pool villa front view
</a>

At last make sure your images are accessible by Google. If there is a restriction at all, it usually exists in robots.txt file (or less often in .htaccess file).

That’s all for now. With Google Image Search you can significantly increase the number of visitors to your personal rental website so this small effort is worth it. Have fun with your holiday home advertising!