Yesterday HomeAway announced acquisition of Homelidays.com, a well-known player on European rental listing scene. Value of the deal wasn’t disclosed. Thus HomeAway continues consolidation of the holiday rental market. What does it mean to a holiday home owner? Well, it may mean a few things:

• Losing diversity. Lack of choice of good listing sites may lead to standardised “one size fits all” approach. But is one size going to fit every home owner in every region?
• Soulless corporate marketing. Giants need to employ standard company operation procedures, protocols, policies, etc. etc. Won’t corporate culture kill the creativity within the company itself?
• Losing competitive pricing. Clearly limiting the number of players in the holiday rental market will lead to artificial pricing that suits those who are in control.

Interesting things going on in the holiday rental industry. After securing a much discussed $250 million funding HomeAway has at last redesigned its set of aesthetically awful websites. Now they indeed look far better and more professional. As a result of its aggressive acquisition strategy, HomeAway has taken up just about every major player in the market. Here are the HomeAway websites: Holiday-Rentals.co.uk, OwnersDirect.co.uk, VacationRentals.com, Abritel.fr, VRBO.com, FeWo-direkt.de, TripHomes.com, A1Vacations.com, GreatRentals.com, CyberRentals.com. So what else are they going to do with the funds apart from redesigning their websites and acquiring competitors? Snap up all the smaller rental listing sites and establish the total monopoly? Or maybe purchase HolidayRentals.com domain from Tim Hall, whom Holiday-Rentals.com Limited has previously brought to the court trying to take away this totally generic domain?

We’ll see.

By the way, why does HomeAway want HolidayRentals.com so much? Because of the traffic leakage: an A-B.com domain will always lose substantial amount of traffic to AB.com. People tend to remember the terms (”A” and “B”) and dot com is burned into their minds, but they never remember any hyphens in between. So HomeAway’s Holiday-Rentals.com loses a lot of traffic (read “revenue”) to HolidayRentals.com. That’s why it is best to avoid hyphenated domains. If it isn’t possible then it’s relieving to know that hyphenated domains can still do a good SEO job: from the search engine’s point of view phrase “AB” isn’t different from “A-B” - same keywords in the domain.

Let’s go back to the holiday rental industry.

It is young and thriving, rough and actively developing - thus offering space for innovative ideas. One such idea is to tackle the fragmentation of the holiday rental market. Aggregation of rental information, an aggregator website that is. Similar to TravelSupermarket.com but for holiday rentals. While there is a lot of aggregation attempts in the package holiday sector, in the holiday rental world it’s quite a new idea.

Otalo is a new rental aggregator, claiming to be “The Vacation Home Search Engine”. A simple test reveals it doesn’t come close to a real search engine: searching for my all time favourite - “italy pool villa” - yields: “Drats! We couldn’t find any vacation homes with your criteria…“. It reminded me of another, older website - PerfectGetaways.co.uk - that also claimed to be “The Holiday Home Search Engine” but failed on the same search with: “Sorry, there were no results found for your search“. Ah, marketing tricks! A search engine without a search functionality Sales people seem to have no idea of what a search engine is. PerfectGetaways.co.uk isn’t even an aggregator, just a regular listing site and despite that its creators didn’t bother building full-text search against their own database.

Are there any aggregators that work? There are some, such as WeGoRound.com (which is also a true holiday rental search engine), but unfortunately the biggest problem for aggregators and rental search engines is aggregation of availability calendars and presentation of accurate information in general. With so many calendar formats in use it’s technically challenging to write a software that “understands” all of them. And by and large, it’s virtually impossible to scrape the content automatically in a reliably accurate way. No machine understands content better than a human yet. So far no one has reliably solved the problem of full and accurate aggregation of holiday rental information. And I bet it won’t be sorted till there is a single common database of holiday rentals exposing a formalized API for querying. Similar to existing systems serving the package holiday sector. By the way this should also allow for real-time bookings - another wanted feature. To sum up: clearly the holiday rental industry is entering the aggregation and search engine era - I am sure we will face more innovative ideas soon.

The number of listing websites is on the increase. Indeed they spring up like mushrooms after the rain. Adding nothing new, they simply clone each other’s functionality (and the mistakes!). 99% of the rental listing websites are aesthetically awful and practically useless, but the amount of them is still impressive. Interestingly, despite the legion of listing sites, the principal owner’s question is still there: Where should I advertise? What are the best holiday home advertising sites? This nice site I found recently may help you in answering the question. It is a directory of listing websites along with reviews and ratings. Just note that the site is still starting off and hasn’t got a lot on it now. Also don’t forget that something that works for one property/area doesn’t work for another and vice versa. So you need to try a few listing sites before you find the best one for you. Don’t forget to vote and add your impressions about the listing sites you tried yourself.

I hope you enjoyed my subjective insight. Good luck and have fun advertising!

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"
/>

I won’t bore you explaining the differences between alt and title attributes, just include both with same description.

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!

Right! You are a happy owner of a holiday home in a sunny (or not so sunny but nevertheless scenic) place. Congratulations! That was a wise and pleasant investment (if you did your homework well). Now you are looking to rent your place sharing your joy with holidaymakers and generating some income from it. Where do you start?

Among many ways to advertise your home, a personal rental website is probably the simplest and the cheapest one. It is more suitable for internet-savvy owners, but hey - you are the one if you are reading this article! All it requires is some of your time along with love towards your property which you already have!

Where shall we start? Domain name, of course! Indeed a very important bit of your website.

Choosing name

Our primary goal is positioning of the website as high as possible in Google search results. We will be choosing a domain name with this in mind.

Although a domain name is not the main factor affecting website position, experts agree it does have influence (in fact it is one of 200+ factors taken into account by Google). And if a domain name helps you jumping a few positions higher than your competitor why not use this opportunity?

In order for a domain to fulfill this goal it needs to be keyword-rich. At best the domain name should be the exact phrase a holidaymaker searches for. Exact means exact, i.e. no additional words in it and same word order as in the search phrase.

How do you know which keyword phrases related to your holiday home potential guests search for? Thanks Google there is an excellent tool for that: Google Keyword Tool.

The tool is easy to use and gives you a list of phrases related to the phrase you entered along with search statistics. Two important things to note:

1) At the top of the page where it says something like: “Results are tailored to English, United Kingdom Edit”, click “Edit” and set the language and country to match your target audience. Unless you decide to target specific countries or languages other than English, set it to: “English, All Countries and Territories”.

2) Select “Match Type” to “Exact”. Only this setting will give you accurate search numbers for keywords.

Now enter “italy villas” into the keyword box and hit “Get keyword ideas” button. Make sure “Match Type” is set to “Exact”. Sort the results by “Approx Avg Search Volume”.

You got the list of phrases people search for every month and that are related to your holiday home. Our goal is to find phrases that are free in the extension we are targeting (more about extension later) and that are searched for most often.

You can go through the list now, top to bottom, and build a shortlist of phrases that are suitable for your holiday home website. Or better click on “Download all keywords as .csv (for excel)” and open the downloaded file in Microsoft Excel.

You can try other phrases for your property, for example “italy rentals”, “tuscany homes”, etc. For each of them repeat the above step: save results as .csv, open the file, cut and paste the data to your first spreadsheet so that you have all the results in a single excel document.

At this point you have a long (or not so long) list of domain name candidates in a single excel spreadsheet. You can sort it by “Approx Avg Search Volume” and build a shortlist of names. Remember our goal is to find phrases that are free in the extension we are targeting and that are searched for most frequently. Thus it’s now time to move onto extension!

Which extension?

.com - is the best extension for your holiday home website you can get, however the bad news is all the good names (read: all you can imagine) are taken.

.net - is a good global alternative to .com if .com version is not available.

The above two extensions target global audience, worldwide that is. However what if the majority of your guests come from one country? Registering a domain name in this country’s extension is a good idea then. To name a few, .co.uk and .de are the top popular ones you may want to target.

And now a sweet and important bit about country-level extensions. Google gives slight prevalence to local websites (assuming more influential factors being roughly equal). Consider an example. Let’s assume the two websites ItalyVillas.co.uk and ItalyVillas.com have equal rank and keyword relevance to ‘italy villas’ search phrase. However since ItalyVillas.co.uk has got a more local extension and is hosted in the UK it will show higher in the results presented to a UK-based holidaymaker. Just remember that locality is less important than website ranking and therefore provides advantage only if your website rank is comparable to the ones of your competitors. Plus you need to host your website in the country you are targeting for the locality to work in full.

.eu - heard of it? Yes it exists and available for registrations by Europeans. Not a bad choice for targeting European audience. And it has still got a lot of good free domains to grab.

Anything beyond that, e.g. .org, .biz, .info, .me, .mobi (did you know these exist?) is usually considered 3-d grade and best avoided. However, having said that, search engines do not penalize any exotic extensions, so you can still give them a go. It’s just that your website name won’t look “professional” in potential guest’s eyes. Also users may forget your exotic extension and type .com instead.

At this point you should have a list of domain name candidates along with extensions you want to target. Now it’s time to check what’s available!

Checking availability

Before you dive into exciting world of domain name discovery, a word of caution: do NOT under any circumstances check the availability of names on any website except for trusted ones. Why? - I hear you asking - because there are nasty people out there who write nasty programs and affiliate with shady domain checking websites. Their nasty programs automatically in real time sniff the names you enter and grab any good ones even before you get a chance! This happens within minutes. Stories from real people who lost their ideas to such shady websites come out every other day. So be cautioned.

I recommend this tool for checking domain availability: DomainTools Whois or DomainTools Whois bulk for multiple domain check. This site allows checking of country-level extensions plus exotics: Moniker Whois bulk (you will need to register). These places are known to be safe. (I am not affiliated with these sites, the recommendations come from my own knowledge and experience)

Copy paste your domain list along with extensions to a bulk-checker above and hold your breath.

You can now see what’s available. Pick the domain name with the highest monthly search volume, available in the best extension and..

Register it!

Where? My favorite registrars are Namecheap.com for anything except .eu and Internet.bs for .eu. They offer best price/value ratio in my opinion. (Again I am not affiliated with these websites)

How many?

I know you want many now! Many websites on different domains all advertising your holiday home. Or you just discovered a stack of good domains - all perfect for your holiday home - and struggling to stick with only one.

An important advice here is to NOT duplicate your website on different domains. This is of absolute importance. Otherwise all of your websites will be penalized by Google or excluded from the search index completely (will not show in the search results that is). So don’t do it.

What you can do instead is having one main website on a single domain with other domains pointing (redirecting) to it. Use “301 Redirect” for that, this option is usually available on the control panel of your hosting account.

Duplicate content

As any holiday home owner you must be advertising your property on a number of rental listing websites. Having read about the duplicate content problem you may now wonder: does publishing of the same advertisement across many listing websites affect me badly? The answer is: it will only affect you badly if you don’t follow these rules:

1) Your advertisement on a rental listing website should contain a link back to your website (and precisely to the page where original content comes from, so just a general link to site’s home page won’t do it) AND

2) Your personal website should always have the fullest version of content on it; a slightly cut version of content should be used on all adverts across rental listing websites. The cut version does not have to be unique for each listing site, just one for all will do it AND

3) You should wait until your personal website gets indexed by Google first; only after that happened can you advertise your holiday home on listing sites.

Holiday rental websites that do not allow linking back to your personal website don’t play on your side. Instead they build their popularity and strengthen their position at your cost, using your original content (don’t they have to pay you for the content then?). An owner-friendly listing site will always allow linking back to your personal site. This will strengthen your position in addition to strengthening their’s. Just remember to follow the rules above.

Giveaway!

By the way, while writing this article I found a good domain name which is still available for registration! It will be suitable for an Italy holiday home owner. Here it is: HolidayRentalsItaly.net.

1,900 searches a month for this exact phrase: “Holiday Rentals Italy”, 4,400 searches in September. Not bad at all considering two other popular ones - HolidayRentalsSpain.net and HolidayRentalsFrance.net - are both taken.

Well, that’s about it for now! I hope you had an enjoyable experience choosing your holiday home domain name!