As many of you know, O’Vineyards opened our Bed & Breakfast this summer. We got a lot of clients online and I thought I’d share some of the easiest free resources I found, especially free B&B listings.
Why use free B&B listings
Not only do these websites serve as useful guides to their readers, they also provide valuable search information to search engines. If your website is linked to by quality sites that focus on travel and accommodations, search engines like google are more likely to realize that your website is pertinent to search requests about travel and accommodations.
Of course, it’s often more effective to pay for ads on more upscale websites that are more carefully targeting their audience. But these are free and, unless the website is doing something very wrong, they can’t really hurt you. So might as well investigate.
List of Free Listings
GPS 4 touring – This website focus on GPS coordinates and mapping to organize different travel and accommodation offers. This is a perfect example of a free listing page. It’s not trying to do any crazy SEO games or make any type of commission. It’s just a free resource. It’s not as glossy as Mr and Mrs Smith, and it won’t send you as much traffic. But it’s free and it caters to a particular kind of traveler who wants to have GPS coordinates for all their travel destinations.
Global bed and breakfast links This site is pretty straightforward. It’s an index of all sorts of B&B sites around the world. That’s nice because a lot of resources are restricted to just UK B&Bs or just USA sites. Think about finding more limited scope directories like those too! But here’s an International directory that anybody can use no matter where they are located.
My B and B This one looks the glossiest out of the three I’m listing. They mirror the site in a lot of different places and in many different languages, all of which might send traffic back your way.
Some people say that adding your website to relevant directories will help Internet surfers find your website. Not only can they find you through the directory, the links can also help search engines figure out what your site is about. This second part is only true if you use really relevant directories.
I’ve previously written about regional directories. I might add a few wine specific directories.
Well curated directories like AllTop are divided into dozens of highly specialized blog categories. I’m really honored to be included in the top wine blogs. The directory has very few winery blogs and TWO of us are Languedoc producers (the other winemaker is Iris).
O’Vineyards was also featured in the World Wine category of TripBase’s blog directory. Another honor. A quick look at the other blogs mentioned makes me feel like I’m in very good company. This sort of well-curated blog directory or award listing is very helpful.
WineBlogger is a project that has very specific categories for different wine blogs. This sort of specific categorization means that search engines (and users) will know a lot more about your site. Not only is my site about wine, it is commonly associated with these other websites that use the same types of words (typically in a winemaker’s vocabulary).
Vinography tries to keep a list of all the wine blogs out there. You have to be running for a while with regularly updated content.
The Winery Website Report has a “complete list” of wineries, but their submission form requires you to put a US state so I guess it’s not for wineries outside of the US.
Of course, I also curate a listing of Languedoc Roussillon winemaker blogs.