Let us know if you have any feedback / issues with signing in to your VillaSeek customer area….

Tom
VillaSeek website team

We’ve added a few more feature icons to the Villaseek Villa search pages. We’ve added icons for villas with barbecues, for whether the villa has air conditioning, and for whether there are bikes available at the holiday property.

Owners can turn these icons on for their holiday properties, by logging into the villa management area of VillaSeek, clicking the holiday property they’d like to edit, then pressing the edit villa link.

If you have any other ideas for icons you’d like us to add to VillaSeek, or for any other features you’d like us to add to the villa info pages, just let us know in the comments!

Tom K

We’re expanding the Greek villas section on VillaSeek. We’ve split it down into several regions – so that you can go directly to holiday villas in Crete, Corfu and Paxos, Skiathos and Skopelos, and many of the other Greek islands.

We also list some holiday villas on the Greek Mainland. We’re always adding new villas, so keep checking back for new holiday destinations.

I’ve been working on some more individual / tailored pages for the villa directory on VillaSeek.com. The eventual aim is to get an easy-to-navigate page for every region that we list, which links to articles here on the blog, and pulls in some more useful info about the region. If anybody has regions they’d particularly like me to focus on, drop a comment on this blog and I’ll add those… within a couple of weeks there will be a tailored page for every region.

As an example of some of the pages I’ve got up and running take a look at the listings pages for luxury villas in the Caribbean, and holiday villas near Disney…. Do drop me a comment and let me know any improvements… I’ll be working on getting all these up and running in the coming weeks.

Tom

The Thailand and India section

Hi everyone

Just to let you know, I have rebranded our Asia Pacific section on Villaseek, to better reflect the villa listings within the section. It’s now simply the Thailand and India section. You can also access the two countries directly, by clicking through to Thailand and India.

So, the change doesn’t actually affect any of the villas in the section, but hopefully will make it clearer to people who are looking for self-catered accommodation in Thailand and India.

On your customer control panel (http://www.villaseek.com/customers), there’s a “Keywords / Photos” page for each villa. As well as uploading up to eight photos, you can also enter keywords and a description for your villa.

These are embedded into your listing page as meta data, where Google can read them — potentially enabling your individual listing page to appear higher on Google when people search using those keywords.

The main advantage is on VIllaseek itself, though. If potential holidaymakers enter a keyword (eg. “sleeps 4″, or “near sea”, etc.) into the search box on the front page of Villaseek, then your villa will come up if you’ve also entered those keywords.

So it’s a way of adding more information to your villa page, and increasing its visibility when people do keyword searches.

The best way to use the keyword search area is to enter a comma-separated list of potential keywords into the box on your control panel, and then press the update button. This adds the keywords to your page, and also to our search system – ready for people to find your villa when they search using the appropriate keywords,

As always, drop us a comment below if you need any more info about the system – or feel free to contact us via email or phone if you’ve got any specific questions!

Tom

We’ll be making an official announcement about this in a couple of weeks, but we’ve just finished an upgrade to the Villaseek site that will allow all villa listings to show eight photos of their villa. I’ll be testing out this functionality over the next week with a few villas. If you currently list your villa on Villaseek, and would like to have more photos, drop us a comment below with your reference number, and I’ll get in touch to add your extra photos… Once we’ve tested it, we’ll add the functionality to the photo-upload page on everyone’s control panel.

If there are other areas of the site that you think could be improved, or features you’d like us to think about adding, drop me a comment and we’ll get to work on i!

Tom K

I’ve added a new section on Villaseek featuring villas in South Africa. We’re hoping to add more villas to this section in the coming week, so if you’re planning a self-booked holiday in South Africa, this should be a great resource for you!

I’ll also be adding a few more of the travel articles we’ve written on South Africa (from Holiday Villas magazine) – I’ll let you know via the blog when we’ve got them up on line!

Tom K

We’ve made a few little updates to the way that the villa search works on villaseek.com. One thing we found is that a lot people wanted to be able to type the name of a country or region into the box on the front page and get a list of all the villas there straight away. This is now working – so, type Greece into the search box for example, and hit return and it take you straight to the Greece section:

http://www.villaseek.com/find-villa/Greece

We’ve also made it a lot easier to search for specific things. Try the following searches:

• Villas near Disneyworld in Florida (http://www.villaseek.com/find-villa/Florida/Disney)
• Villas near golf courses in the Algarve (http://www.villaseek.com/find-villa/Algarve/Golf)
• Beachside villas in Greece (http://www.villaseek.com/find-villa/Greece/Beach)

It should now be a lot easier to get to the villa you want. Let us know / drop us a comment below if you have any more feedback about options we could add to the villa search!

Tom