The Bed and Breakfast Connector
Search Engine Optimization Tips for Bed and Breakfast Owners
Recently a B&B owner was complaining her website didn't rank well enough in the major search engines. I offered a short review and made some suggestions. I've decided to put most of those suggestions here for others. Hopefully you find them helpful.
The fist step is to know where you stand. What's your current page rank? How many links do the major search engines have to your site? Is your site technically correct? These few simple questions can really help tune your website to it's full potential.
How do you do that?? The sites I mention below do require some some experience to understand the results, with a little time, patience and help from your website guru you should be able to figure them out.
The first thing is to know your current page rank. An established B&B with a website that has been online for a year or more should have a page rank of 3 or 4. Anything less than that and you are probably not promoting your website enough. One way to figure out your page rank is by visiting: http://seopen.com/seopen-tools/pagerank.php.
How many sites point to your site as seen by the major search engines? This will give you an idea of how good a job you're doing promoting your website. A good tool for this is: http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/. The higher the total number of links the better. There is no single good number and it won't update every day. Check back once a month or so.
Metatags and titles are still important parts of your website. Your title tag should be clear, obvious and meaningful. Don't stuff a lot of extra key words in there. Say what you need to say, no more and no less. Your keyword and other tags target content on your page as well as words and subjects that are important to you. For example your city, state, bed and breakfast, and a few other important words. A good place to view your keywords and their effectiveness is: http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/
Our second to last technical point is the website navigation. All main pages on your site should be reachable from any other main page. The minor pages can be links off the apropriate main page. The links should be clearly displayed and easy to find.
Our last technical item is the HTML quality. Google recomends that websites are built using correct HTML. (HTML is the language websites are built in) While one or two errors are OK, less errors is always a good thing. You can view this at: http://validator.w3.org/
Now that you have the technical stuff take care of, you need to work on the content. You should easily be able to write 150-250 words about what makes your B&B great. Some information you should include is:
- Where is your B&B located?
- What makes you special?
- Why do I want to stay with you rather than a competing B&B?
- What sort of location are you in? City, Rural, by a lake?
Put this on your front page. If you're stuck on something to write pretend you're talking to a potential guest on the phone.
Now that you've got all that done, links to your site help.
Join your local and state B&B associations. Join free B&B directories, join paid ones, if you think they're valuable. One good B&B directory is The Bed and Breakfast Connector: www.bbconnector.com
Get some fliers, borchures or pamphlets done up. Put them at the airport, train station, tourism office, anywhere you can. This can be as fancy or simple as you want. A program such as Microsoft Word can be used if you don't have access to a fancier program. Make sure to include your website address and phone number.
Follow these few simple tips and your Bed and Breakfast, as well as your Bed and Breakfast website will be a success.