B&B website

Wick1

Can anyone recommend a web design company to design and host a basic website for a B&B, at a reasonable cost?

trickobrien

Wick1 wrote: »

Can anyone recommend a web design company to design and host a basic website for a B&B, at a reasonable cost?

I will have a chat with you about it

snuggles09

I've sent you a PM:)

pfurey101

Next to trying to enter the SEO business, the accommodation business is a very tricky and difficult one to get found and to rank highly in the search engine result pages.

If you are looking for a website - just to have a website, grand!

If you are looking for a website in order to generate bookings, revenue and be found by the search engines, you have to make sure that website is properly structured, that each page is fully optimised, that you know the phrases that your potential customers will use in the search engines etc.

You can get a 5 page website with keyphrases optimised and full onpage/offpage SEO for around 400 quid.

Cheers,

Eoin

pfurey101 wrote: »

If you are looking for a website in order to generate bookings, revenue and be found by the search engines, you have to make sure that website is properly structured, that each page is fully optimised, that you know the phrases that your potential customers will use in the search engines etc.

For those reasons, I wonder would the OP be better off looking at getting their site hosted with a dedicated B&B website that can do all the bookings and already has good search engine rankings?

pfurey101

Eoin wrote: »

For those reasons, I wonder would the OP be better off looking at getting their site hosted with a dedicated B&B website that can do all the bookings and already has good search engine rankings?

You can do both.

Remember that they are in with rest of the local b&b's and the B&B will take a cut. This is a good thing!

But for E100 per annum you can also have an keyword locality optimised with either a .com or .ie

As I said it is a cut throat business, especially with hotels offering rooms at the same rates.

You need to do a bit of marketing relative to the catchment area!

Have a look at which non-website-directory (i.e. websites owned by the proprietor) come up for these search terms and why do think they top the rankings (take note of them cos u may need to ehhhh borrow some bits :rolleyes: ) :

bed and breakfast (locality name)
bed & breakfast (locality name)
b&b (locality name)
accommodation (locality name)

Is the facility near somewhere big and/or popular that attracts the tourist? Do you think they may include the word "near" in their search term relative to this big and/or popular attraction !

You should probably buy something like www.bedandbreakfastlocality.com, its debatable whether or not having the keyphrase in the url but Google seems to love highlighting those words in the results page!

tricky D

Best to do both. The hosted solution is constraining and is crowded by other local listings having the competition, but has some booking and availability functions though it takes a cut. The dedicated site affords much more flexibility and significant SEO advantages. That's as long as the right info is provided on the site which should be straight forward yet is often lacking.

Don't forget the 'guesthouse' keyword.

€400/500 is about the mark for these sites IF the designer actually knows what they're doing and the client does the leg work re content and photos.

Wick1

thanks for the helpful hints and the e-mails, the website has been up and running some yrs, i purchased the domain name and it is currently hosted on yahoo web builder, it costs approx. 30 per month which I think is pricy, wanted to see could I get it hosted for €100 or so per year, currently works well in search engines, maybe by chance more than anything, hope to get in touch with 1-2 replies I got soon

Fanny Cradock

I'd get away from yahoo as soon as possible. They are not competitive. You could get super cheap hosting with a company like go daddy ($3.99 per month). If you want to support an Irish company you could try Blacknight (€4.95) or Register365 (€2.95) or any number of other companies. While the prices seem to vary, the devil is in the detail, of course. The products sold are slightly different (some will have more space, bandwith and even free domain registration etc.) and it's a good idea to compare because the cheapest isn't always the best. But I would personally go with any one of those I've mentioned (preferably an Irish company) over Yahoo.