Holiday Site Builder. Your own holiday home website. Simple.

A new site is ripping off Holiday Site Builder's designs and charging a huge amount for the privilege!
Take a look at our design next to the imitation:

The other company is ripping off their customers as well - look at their prices!

Holiday Site Builder charge £149 per year for everything - including hosting, email, web statistics etc!

And to top it all they have got the page name wrong on the site that looks like ours...

Check out page 65 of the following link or go and buy a copy of the June issues at your local newsagent!

http://aplaceinthesun.uk.net/JC-FP79-1VHUG-63V5K-1/c.aspx

The June issue of A Place in the Sun magazine goes on-sale 26th May. It has the following article from Holiday Site Builder customer, Rowena Sait:

* Cyprus - reader Rowena Sait recently talked us through her off-plan buying experience in Paphos. Now she has the keys to her new townhouse, she describes step by step how she has kitted out her property for holidaymakers, how she plans to manage the property and what her marketing strategy is.

Cyprus has been sent a ‘reasoned opinion’ by the European Commission to lift restrictions on holiday home purchases by European Union (EU) citizens.

This is the second step in the EU’s infringement procedures and will give a lift to Europeans hoping to get a second home on the Mediterranean island.

The restrictions were only supposed to be in place for five years after Cyprus’ accession to the EU in 2004. The commission is now acting to put an end to the limitations which violate EU rules on the free movement of capital.

Refusal to lift the restrictions could lead to Cyprus appearing before the European Court of Justice and having to pay fines until the law is changed.

We have had a couple of customers ask about 301 redirects recently. We thought we should do some further investigation and write an article to explain what 301 redirects are and why you would use them.

One of our customers came to us after looking at www.aboutus.org. The site allows you to run tests on your site to work out if you could be doing more to help with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and we even recommend the site in our SEO section on Holiday Site Builder. Aboutus had told our customer : "This website can live at www.ParadiseLets.co.uk or ParadiseLets.co.uk. It's best for your site's visibility to live at just one URL, or web address. You'll want to create a 301 redirect to the URL you choose from the other URL." Click on the following image to see it full size. It shows all the text from Aboutus.

Now this all sounds logical, but click on the link that explains 301 redirects for more info and you'll find that the important thing is how you link to your site. Some people type www.Example.com and others type Example.com. Without a 301 redirect search engines treat the www.Example.com as a separate site to Example.com. However, if you and others are consistent in linking from other sites you won't have a problem even if you don't have 301 redirects. This is because when the search engines are looking at all the links to your site they will all be either www.example.com or example.com. You can obviously control links you create to your site on forums etc, but you can't control others linking to your site...

We love Google Webmaster central, which is why you can set your site up to use it in the SEO section on Holiday Site Builder. It has the clearest description we can find on 301 redirects and even has a video! The video is very clear that 301 redirects will not increase your site's ranking on it's own. The more imporatnt aspect is having interesting content that others want to link to!

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LR8H8pn1M

Here is what Google says:

If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommended that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location.

301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances:

• You've moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible.
• People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways - for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com - it's a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL. You can also use Webmaster Tools to set your preferred domain.
• You're merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages.

Conclusions

1) You need links to your site before you need to worry about 301 redirects

2) You can achive the same result using Google Webmaster Tools, where you can set your "Preferred" domain - either www.example.com or example.com

3) Holiday Site Builder will start work on new functionality to automatically create a 301 redirect to a customers preferred domain. This should be easier than using Google Webmaster Tools and will work for all search engines - not just Google.

A PLACE IN THE SUN MAGAZINE

You can preview the latest issue here - http://aplaceinthesun.uk.net/JC-A66T-1VHUG-3ZIX8-0/c.aspx

Use the following password when prompted -  'apitsltd21'

We apologise if your site was slow or down this evening — we had some network issues. We've fixed the problem and are taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again...Thanks for your patience and, once again, we're sorry for the downtime.

Holiday Site Builder has offered Google Analytics for some time, but some customers have been cautious about using it as it is often seen as "Enterprise" orientated. It is used by many of the major websites in the world, however it is also used my a huge proportion of small websites and users do not have to be technical to pick it up pretty quickly.

Take a look at the following video to work out if it is for you:

http://www.google.com/analytics/tour.html

If you decide you want to use Google Analytics, click on the "Web Statistics" tab and follow the instructions.

Click on the following link to start watching a great video on Link Building

Want to get to the top of Google immediately! Well now you can with Holiday Site Builder's Google Adwords functionality. It may cost, but it has guaranteed and instant results.

Click on the Google Adwords tab once you have logged in and follow the instructions.