There’s been a flurry of news and activity on the net about Facebook and URLs, but in case you’ve missed it or think you’ve missed the boat, read on.

Facebook announced recently the option of registering a unique URL for your account. This gives you a unique and readable URL for your Facebook profile page, like this:

http://www.facebook.com/drrichard

…which is much nicer than the old version.

If you are already a Facebook user, you can register yours now. You’ll need to be quick though, since millions of usernames have been claimed already.

If you’re not already a Facebook user (or a group with less than 1000 fans), you’ll have to wait until June 28th. Facebook is using this window to try to reduce spammy-type grabbing of usernames – called username squatting.

OK. Back to business – how does this help you with your website? Is it worth doing?

Well, the current URLs for profiles aren’t very friendly, easy to remember, simple to pass on or very ‘brandable’. If you’re concerned about any of these, it’s worth seeing if you’re name is still available.

If you plan to try on the 28th, make sure you start early!

Three words long, right?

I read this on a forum the other day and this got me thinking. Are people really that confused about long tails when choosing their website keywords?

OK, so what about ‘apple store locator’, or ‘bmw financial services’, or ‘american idol 2009′?

They all have 3 words too, so are they long tail keywords?

I’m guessing you’ve realized that the answer is no. So what makes a long tail keyword?

Long tail keywords are the many hundreds (possibly thousands) of keyword combinations that bring traffic to your website. They usually bring in a very small number of visitors each (maybe only 1 or 2) and they are usually fairly long combinations of words: 4, 5, 6 or more – and yes, even 3 words sometimes!

When you add up the traffic from all the long tail keywords it usually comes to a significant number, often more than the traffic from your main site keywords.

This reflects the real activity going on at search engines too. There are many more searches for each of those main keywords, but a lot more search combinations of the long tail keywords.

There are some great things about long tail keywords too:

• They tend to be very specific, so you can see exactly what people are searching for
• They tend to have much lower SEO competition, so if you choose these for your website keywords, you stand a better chance of ranking well on search results with these terms

So what’s wrong with a 3-word long tail keyword? Take the example ‘american idol 2009′. There’s a huge number of searches for this term (1 million a month). There’s a huge amount of website competition (35 million results on Google). Plus, it’s not very specific – you don’t know whether searchers are looking for TV schedules, iTunes downloads, info on the stars, or pictures of Simon Cowell.

Not a very long tail combination then. A better example might be ‘cheap tickets for american idols live san diego’. See what I mean? There a low (almost zero) number of searches for this term, plus it’s definitely NOT 3 words long…

It’s hard to find inspiration for your vacation rental website if you’re looking for new products for your customers or new stuff to show on your site. After all, you’ve only got your property to offer, right? Sometimes we miss the obvious stuff though.

Instead of trying to dream up brand new products or topics to write about, try combining existing things or find ways to adapt or improve the stuff that you have already.

In the business world it’s often the innovators that get all the glory, but innovation can be expensive. It’s often easier and cheaper to make your existing stuff better.

Read on for some examples…

If you want to try this, make sure you’re creating something that didn’t exist before, or make sure the combination works better than the sum of the individual parts, or that the new thing makes your existing product better.

It’s a bit like finding holes in your current product list, rather than trying to dream up new stuff.

Here are some ideas for your vacation rental site:

1. Add a blog and write about your place, the area, local attractions
2. Provide an RSS feed from forums where you hang out, e.g. LayMyHat. A lot of caring owners spend time there crafting their offering and making it as good as possible for guests. I’d rent from many of these owners because I know they care about their guests
3. Create a guestbook on your site where existing customers can add comments, share tips and advice on making the most of your place, ideas for a rainy day, or suggestions for improvements
4. Write an ebook of your favorite tips for enjoying your vacation place, and sell it on your site. If you don’t trust ebooks, publish it on lulu and sell it there
5. Create a video of your property
6. Create an audio welcome greeting for visitors to your site
7. Add affliliate links for tickets to local attractions. Make sure you’ve tried them out first and that you truly recommend them

So long as you keep adding value for your customers you’ll end up providing a better overall offering and make yourself stand out from the competition. That might just get you the edge that you need to keep your place full for this season (and the next)

[P.S. I know there's no RSS feed from laymyhat. This is a post about new ideas though]

Website Stress Test just got even better. I’ve been busy recently adding a pile of useful new sections, expanding the existing tips and making the whole thing even more useful for your website. The updates are free if you already own a copy.

The downloadable guide has a brand new revision and I’ve updated it so there’s now over a hundred pages of checks and tips that’ll help to beef up your website, get you more visitors and more conversions for your online business.

Each check now includes a section called ‘How to Improve’ which shows you some straightforward steps that you can take to fix problems that you find with your website, such as broken links or missing alt tags.

There’s a brand new action plan at the end that takes you step-by-step through all the techniques that you need to employ to create successful pages for your website. Use it every day as you add new pages to your site.

I’ve added a new glossary of terms. If you’ve ever been confused by all the internet geek-speak out there, or wondered what the difference is between a meta tag and a URL, this section is for you. No PhD required, I promise.

I’ve included a really simple example source file that shows how a basic web page is put together. I use this for many of the examples, including screenshots of the source code to help you get your head around your tags and titles.

The scoring on some of the tests has been tweaked to reflect the latest important developments in SEO.

How do you get all of these updates? If you already own a copy then just email me and I’ll send you the new version for free (I promised free updates for life).

If not, here’s the link. I’m looking forward to helping you out with your website.

If you’re a vacation rental property owner and you want to get bookings for your site then it’s certainly wise to promote your place on the internet. But should you build your own website? Why bother to go to all the hassle of designing your own website, coding it, promoting it and supporting it?

Surely it’s easier and quicker to advertise on one of the vacation rental sites, or even to use one of the free listing services such as Google Base or Craig’s list? This is probably true, but what you want is results, and in this business that means visitors and bookings.

Here are nine reasons why your own site design will get you something a little better…

1. There’s too much competition so you need to do everything you can to improve your visibility on the internet. You simply can’t afford to miss out on your own site.

2. You can show your unique difference. Your property is uniquely different, right? You can use your site to highlight this, rather than fitting in with a bunch of other listings.

3. You’ll be more credible as a true online business with a brand, since you can choose your own logo, style and tagline.

4. Site tracking and analytics are way better. Actually they are probably non-existent on the free sites. Analytics allows you to make wise choices based on where your visitors come from, what they are looking for, and what leads them to a conversion.

5. Build as many pages as you want. Content is free (kind of) and there’s no restriction to a single page advert.

6. You get your own domain name. Good for branding (see above) plus you get to build your own Page Rank rather than contributing to someone else’s.

7. Choose your own conversion – whether it’s a contact form, advertising, newsletters, or a free brochure. You’re not restricted to a single form, and you’re free to build any combination of these to suit your website goals.

8. It’s stickier (I borrowed that term). In other words, you can layer more pages of useful information on your readers and take longer to convince them that you have a great place and offer unparalleled customer service. Compare this to a single page listing on a shared site where your competitors are just one click away…

9. Change your mind any time. Some listings sites only allow infrequent updates or may charge when you want to make a change. With your own site you can make adjustments and improvements any time.

One final thing. If you do decide to design your own vacation rental website, please don’t just buy a clone (unless you want to look like everyone else of course!)

Website Stress Test by Dr Richard

Powerful Techniques to Check and Improve Your Website Performance

Website Stress Test is a downloadable guide which shows you whether your site has the vital components it needs to be successful on the internet. Spend a couple of hours running through these simple checks and you will get the best picture possible of how your site is doing for SEO, traffic, content, keywords, visitors and conversions.

Each of the checks is carefully described in an accessible, non-technical way so that you understand why the check is important and how it affects your site performance. At the end of the guide you will get a score for your site which provides an overall view of how your site is performing. You can use your personalized, individual scores as a priority list to help you decide which areas you need to work on to make improvements.

“Your book has been a full set of tools for me in terms of gaining a good position on the web” – Mike Tarantino

Website Stress Test is a high quality PDF document which you can download immediately after payment. You can get started on checking and improving your website right now. The download includes a free spreadsheet which you can use to record your scores.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn:

• Secrets of a Good URL
• Keywords in URLs are out! Almost, but there are ways to get a great URL AND use your keywords
• The importance of great content
• How to build huge PageRank without spending hours chasing links to your site
• What makes a website more visible to search engines?
• The key to getting your site indexed ultra-fast
• Make your site stand out in Google search results
• How to check your site for errors that could harm your search engine position
• Time-saving advice on keyword density for your content
• META Tags – are they really useful?
• How to choose winning keywords and use them efficiently in your pages

Guarantee: I want you to succeed with your website. If you are not completely satisfied with this guide I’ll refund the full price.

Price: $29. Please contact me for details of how to buy Website Stress Test

PLUS: The web moves fast, so I’ll give you free updates for life on Website Stress Test. The latest revision was completed in May 2009

So What’s So Special About Vacation Rental Website Design?

Why write a whole section about it? Isn’t it just a case of building a website and adding some photos of your property?

Not really. There are some special things about vacation rental websites that make them different to other websites…

You’re selling something valuable. OK, there are lots of websites out there that sell stuff, but not so many where individuals sell something that’s quite so valuable. Your property probably costs you a lot to own and run and hopefully customers pay you a lot to rent it!

Customers spend a lot of money on their vacations, and hopefully your property too, so they are really going to care about getting something that’s good and that they can trust. It’s not just money either – people commit a lot of time on the research and also the vacation itself. They want to get good value for this.

Pictures tell the story – your site will hopefully make heavy use of pictures to show visitors how great your place is.

Competition can be very high, particularly in popular areas such as Orlando, so you’ve got to use all your available design tools to make a site that’s unique.

It’s your online brochure so you’ll probably be sending people to it to view your pictures, check out your facilities, and so on

1. Don’t Buy a Clone

I saw a recent advert for “100′s of clone vacation rental websites required”.

Why would you want a site that’s the same as 100′s of others? Wouldn’t you prefer something that was unique and memorable?

Don’t forget there’s a lot of competition out there so you need a website that people are going to notice and remember in a week’s time when they are still trying to decide where to stay.

It’s a good idea to think about what makes your property unique and then to capture this in the design of your site.

How are people going to remember your site? Maybe with a unique style, or stunning photos, or a quirky name?

2. What’s Your site For?

This might seem like a strange question with a pretty obvious answer but bear with me.

Your website forms part of your vacation rental business and you need to be clear what role it plays. Is your site there to:

• Gather leads?
• Showcase your property?
• Connect with renters?
• Earn advertising revenue via Google AdSense?

Or even:

• Do everything including making the booking and collecting payment?

These are all possible, but that’s not the point. The key is to make sure you’ve defined what your website is intended to do and then design it with this goal in mind.

Here’s another way to put this – if your site is intended to gather leads, then don’t distract visitors by filling the pages with adverts – you’ll probably end up with a site that does two jobs poorly instead of one job really well.

3. Build a Great Structure

Once you’ve set the goal of your vacation rental website it’s time to develop a site structure that helps your visitors and leads them towards that vital final step.

To do this it’s a good idea to work backwards from your goal. What steps should visitors go through before they complete the goal? If you want them to contact you via an inquiry form then you probably want them to look at your photos and read some useful descriptions of your property first (you don’t just want them to fire off an inquiry without looking at your stuff, otherwise they may forget who you are and which site they found you on).

It’s good to make sure the site is completely focused towards your goal. Every part of your site should be designed to lead visitors forward. It should be easy to navigate around and it should be clear what all the various sections are for.

The best websites truly help visitors to solve their problems and have a sensible flow from one section to the next. It’s good to avoid the trap of linking every page to every other. It’s tempting to do but it can confuse your visitors and the search engines.

4. Do Your Keyword Research

Before you launch into writing your website you’ll need to spend some time researching keywords. It’s important to get these right if you are planning to promote your site with search engine optimization (SEO) or even with paid advertising such as Google AdWords (both common ways to promote vacation rental sites).

The reason for choosing keywords is that you need to ‘guide’ the search engines so that they can understand what subjects your site pages are about. If you don’t focus on particular keywords then it’s likely that you won’t be ranked very highly for search engines.

A great place to start here is to read my posts about keywords. The key points are that the keywords that you choose need to be highly relevant to your pages, have a low level of competition and also lead to inquiries from your visitors.

5. Write Your Pages

OK – so you’ve chosen your keywords so it’s time to get going writing some pages. Make sure you use your keywords while you are writing!

Watch out for people who say they will ‘SEO Your Site’ – unless they work very closely with you and understand the goals for each of your pages, you might just be paying good money for a few extra tags on your pages. Good SEO is all about writing good content that’s focused around your keywords (and yes, you do need to get your tags right too)

6. Pictures Tell a Thousand Words

As we saw at the start, your vacation rental website will probably make a lot of use of pictures to show off your property.

It’s really, really important to make these look as good as possible. There are so many sites out there where owners put up pictures that are small, fuzzy or dark (or all three).

Here are some simple tips to make your images as good as possible:

• Make them as large as possible on the web pages, but,
• Scale them so you’re not expending an image that’s too small, or squashing an image that’s too big
• Buy a decent camera – the best you can afford
• Choose good angles and lighting
• Crop your images with your favorite photo tool (PhotoShop, flickr, etc)
• Make the widths or the heights of your images the same (there are artistic ways to combine different widths or heights but this requires a good eye)

7. Get the Right Style

Unless you are a graphic designer or very experienced on the web you may be a little intimidated by trying to choose a style for your vacation rental site. Don’t worry though, there are some simple rules that you can use to select something that looks good and is memorable.

Here’s the #1 rule: unless you are very confident, it’s best to go for something very simple and straightforward. In other words a simple color scheme, standard fonts and a straightforward layout: let your writing provide the unique content.

A great tip for choosing a color scheme is to look at your site photos and choose colors that work well with them.

If you don’t have a logo yet, this can be a great way to make yourself unique and memorable – you can get one designed very easily at 99designs. You may even be able to base your entire site style on your logo for a professional look. Your logo should help to convey something unique about you and your website.

8. Get Yourself a Blog

Instead of wasting time worrying about whether you should start a blog, just get started!!

A blog is a great way to let people know that you are the expert on your vacation rental. You don’t have to limit yourself to writing about your property here. You can talk about the local area, tourist attractions, restaurant reviews, recommendations for days out – even the weather!

Blogs are really good for connecting with readers and customers and for showing that there’s a real person behind your website. If you open up the blog and allow comments, you can even get your readers to contribute to the discussion.

If you’ve decided you want to start a blog there are a couple of different options available…

You can grab a free blog on blogger.com and start blogging with 5 minutes. This is really easy and you can do some basic customization of the layout.

If you are concerned about branding or want to create a blog that’s integrated into your site then wordpress is a great platform. You can completely customize the theme of your blog and make it part of your website.

One final word on blogs – it is important to keep updating your blog by regularly adding posts, so that your readers keep returning to view the new content.

9. Speaking of Content…

We’ve already talked about the importance of writing great content for your vacation rental website. The very best sites grow continually and have new pages of content added on a regular basis.

One of the best decisions that you can make about your site is to set yourself up so it’s easy for you to add new pages yourself. If you are efficient at HTML and CSS then this may be easy for you to do, but this still isn’t the quickest way to add new pages. A content management system (CMS) such as Joomla can really help here. WordPress is also very useful as a mini-CMS.

10. Try an Availability Calendar

Many people choose to provide online availability calendars on their vacation rental sites. This is a great way to quickly show whether your property is available for the dates when your visitors want to book their vacation.

There are a couple of things to watch out for though…

You’ll need to choose a calendar carefully so that it fits in with the style of your site and looks professional. It’s easy to find a number of online calendar providers out there but watch out for how they fit in to your site.

Another thing to think about is whether you really want to show your availability to the general public. This may seem like a strange point, but here’s why:

• If your place already booked on the days that your visitor is interested in, you may still want them to contact you anyway. Perhaps you’d like to start talking to them anyway about future bookings, or finding an alternative place for them.
• Also if your property isn’t booked very often, this will show on your calendar, which may give the impression that you’re not very popular or successful

11. Measure, Improve and Repeat

So that’s it. We’ve covered everything you need to know to complete your vacation rental website design. There’s one more area to talk about though.

Remember we said that the best websites grow and improve over time? This is also true for your vacation rental site. If you’re going to start making some improvements to your site then you need to make sure you can measure exactly how it’s doing, for visitors, traffic sources, page popularity and so on.

One of the best site analytics tools is Google Analytics and this is the one that I use for all of my sites.

You should set it up and register the goal that we set at the start of this discussion (contact form, etc). Do make sure you can measure your goal.

Once you start to measure traffic patterns on your site you can start to find areas that are working and do more of these. Which pages are popular? Which sites send you the most useful traffic?

Also, you should look for things that don’t work. Are pages being ignored? Why? Can you fix them? Are people reading your pages and moving further through the site towards your goal?

This should be a continuous process. Measure. Modify. Measure again. Repeat until bookings start to improve!

Remember that your vacation rental website is never static and that you are in control!

How do you measure success in your email marketing campaign for your vacation rental website? Do you measure it with your unsubscribe rate? If you do, you may not be as successful as you think you are. In fact, you may be wasting time writing messages that your renters aren’t reading!

Email marketing is a great way to keep the conversation flowing with your list of contacts. You can offer something useful to encourage people to sign up, just like @craigmcginty does.

I was talking to a friend with a vacation home the other day. She said that she thought her email newsletters were doing well because she doesn’t get many unsubscribers (in other words, people opting-out from her email list).

I thought that was an interesting point of view.

Maybe you’ve been in this situation too. If your readers aren’t opting out from your list, you must be doing well, right? I’m not so sure…

Does this really mean that the people on your email list like your stuff? Does it mean that they are reading it? Enough to keep in contact with you and maybe book your place again?

Maybe they ignore your messages and don’t have the motivation to unsubscribe

You probably subscribe to a few lists yourself. You know the ones – they fill up your inbox and you may get around to reading them once in a while. You might even decide sometimes to clear things out a bit and to unsubscribe from a few of the lists. Do you ever get around to this? Or, are you buried in email?

This is probably a familiar story for many of your contacts.

Here are a few things to think about:

• Is it easy to unsubscribe?
• Are your message titles interesting enough for people to open them?
• Are your messages interesting enough for people to look forward to them and open them?

So let’s talk about some better ways to measure your list. You should definitely find a way to measure it – otherwise how do you know if it’s working?

Most email marketing systems (e.g. AWeber, profollow, constant contact) allow you to measure your delivery rate. How many times have your messages been delivered? This is a good first step.

It’s even better if you can measure the open rate. Which messages are being opened (and therefore read) by your contacts? Which ones have a low open rate? Why don’t people open them? Maybe the titles don’t look interesting or relevant to the group of people who signed up to your list. Can you improve these?

It’s even better than this if you’re measuring a conversion event, such as clicking on a link, or signups to another list, or even bookings (in other words, sales!) This allows you to measure whether subscribers are actually reading your messages all the way through to your links.

Should you measure your unsubscribe rate? Certainly. If it starts to go up then this means you may not be providing something valuable for your readers. Maybe you’re sending out too many messages. You should check to see if readers are unsubscribing after a certain message in your queue. If this message causes problems, take a good look at it and think about why you might be losing readers at this point.

Just make sure that the unsubscribe rate isn’t the only metric that you use.

I’ve been thinking about SEO for vacation rental websites again. I know it’s a popular method for promoting your place, because it’s free, easy to do and pretty successful.

Or is it?

In case you haven’t heard, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a technique for making your site appear prominently on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc).

Let’s start with the free bit. Tweaking the tags and the pages and collecting links are great free things you can do to improve your search engine position. Nobody charges you for these so yes, they are free.

The problem here is that this tweaking takes time, and time isn’t free. If you have a business then you should be accounting for the time that you spend. Even if you don’t do this, it’s easy to see how SEO work sucks up a ton of time.

Is it easy to do? I think it’s pretty easy to create links from Squidoo, or digg or forum posts, but once you’ve got a couple of these from the easy sites, it starts to get harder.

If you’re busy on a forum, you can easily collect a lot of links. 100 links from posts on the same forum aren’t really worth much more to Google than one link. So where do truly valuable links come from? From other people’s sites. It’s good if they are buried inside lots of relevant content, and it’s even better if the number of these links grows over time.

So I’d say these types of links are hard to get.

As for success, it depends on factors such as search volume and competition.

You’ve got to choose your keywords really, really carefully to be successful. Vacation rentals tend to have a lot of competition on search results (don’t forget SEO is a popular method, like I said).

Even if you’ve done a great job of choosing your niche it’s pretty hard to translate that into a long tail keyword that come top on search results. Maybe your niche is “I’ve got the only 8 bedroom house by the water in Vancouver and I’m only targeting married couples with 16 children”. Do people type that phrase into Google? I doubt it.

So where does that leave us? As I said, I’ve been thinking about this and I reckon that SEO can be tough for your vacation rental website. It certainly isn’t free. I’m sending some tips to my vacation rental subscribers later today and you can catch them too if you sign up for my free guide.

I’ve been thinking about ways to keep my customers returning to my vacation rental websites. I’m 99% sure you’d agree this is a good thing to do. If people are returning to my site this means our place is staying fresh in their minds and we’ll increase the chances of them asking to stay with us again.

That’s a good thing, right?

The problem is that people tend to only research their vacations a few times a year. They may only be interested in our site in January when preparing for a summer trip. This is bad news for return visitors through the year.

So what should I do about this? More importantly, what can you do?

I could remind customers about our place at the same time of year as our last contact – maybe with a message from our autoresponder. If they contacted us last February and stayed at our place in the summer, we might want to remind them about it again this February.

Can we afford to leave it for a whole year though? What if they did their research already in January? If we miss them by a week, we’ve lost a potential booking.

What we really want is to keep customers coming back to our site throughout the year. This will keep us and our place in their minds and maximize the chance that they will think of us again when they are planning their next vacation stay.

So over to you. What can you offer your visitors to keep them coming back through the year? If your site is just a few photos of your property and some description, I’ll guarantee its not going to be too compelling for them to come back to!

OK – here are some things you can try:

1. Write a blog about the holiday location. Heather Bayer does this really well at the cottageblogger.com Write about events, new offers, places to visit or updates and improvements to your place. Keep it fresh, open it up for comments and get involved in some discussion!

2. Build a discussion forum around your place. Give customers the chance to talk about their experiences, share vacation tips and tell stories. This is a great way to build interest, and it also shows that it’s not just you who thinks your place is great.

3. Use an autoresponder to send out regular messages to existing customers. Keep customers updated with availability offers and new information about your property

4. Try and catch them on Twitter or Facebook

5. If none of these work, use a calendar and pick up the phone!!

When you get customers back to your site, you can welcome them back with a personalized welcome message or some special info that only customers can see – maybe some special offers or some photos or a private discussion forum.

Of course all of this assumes you’re providing a great place to stay and that your customers want to book with you again…