Have you tested your search engine ranking lately? Put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and try to find your own B&B. If visitors do not know the name of your Inn, what terms might they use to locate you online? After you search, count how many results are ahead of your listing – if you are not in the top ten, you may need to consider buying pay-per-click keyword ads – at least temporarily. It is easier than you think – google has figured out that they need to make it easy if they want our money! Go to Google.com and click on the link that says Advertising Programs. On the next page, click on the Learn More button under Google AdWords on the left side. There you will find everything you need to know to get started.

If AdWords are not in your budget, then here are some things to do to your Web site to get better “natural” search engine rankings. Some of these will require help from the person that built your Web site.

Have some pages with at least 250 words on them that talk about your B&B and about things to do in your area. Make sure to use terms in your text that people use to search and find you.

Have your Webmaster use H1 and H2 tags for your headlines.
Write a descriptive title tag for each page. (Don’t just say Welcome or repeat your name).

Get other sites to link to you – in our industry that means sites like bedandbreakfast.com and bbonline.com. You may need to upgrade your listing to include the link to your site, but it is worth it. Consider joining madeinsouthdakota.com for that reason, too. You may never sell a gift certificate there, but they link back you your own site is very valuable.

Also, one free place that will link to you is dmoz.org. On that site, browse to a category that fits you and then click on the suggest a site link. Dmoz.org supplies many search engines with data for results - it is very important that you are in there.

Good search engine ranking is hard work, but is worth its weight in gold!