newsletter out!

Finally I have finished the newsletter. It is a big challenege to write it especially for me. Thanks to the excellent fellow owner who gave me a hand on editing my English!
So, nesletter is created. How do I send it? Lets see, I have 1200 users in my database right now. I used before service from company Vertical Response and it was bad. it reported that only 17 emails was opened from 897 sent and I know from my stats it was much much more!
So this time I decided to use another company - ConstantContact.com. The company is not showing accurate numbers too, I can see from the stats that amount of refferals from emails was much greater. But they reported much better numbers - 487 out of 1122 sent opened and read a newsletter, 12 were not available anymore (have to check with them) and 3 opted out.

Competitors and vacation rental market

Today I counted how many portals are out there for vacation rentals. I counted 51 in USA. Some are really big and some are not that big. I am pretty sure there are more, I just got tired on the page 5 of the search.
So what is it I need to do to make my site the best?
I don't really need to invent the weel, all owners need are inquiry and fast help.
1. Customer service.
I hear all the time on how frustrated owner can be if there is something on the listing that he can not do and he has no help to do it. Our site definitely is in need of good HELP section. I started one here: HELP, so this is a start.
2. Inquiries.
Currently we are researching on all possible feeds to classifieds and directories. After we did HTML make-over we lost in traffic. But XML feeds and bulk submissions should bring it back. And also the new HTML coding should kick in soon. We hade 400 visitors yesterday, our goal is to have 2K by summer.

SEO and all that jazz

    I am sure everyone by now is familiar with the term SEO. If not, I want to assure you that this is not a rocket since.

Short for search engine optimization, SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a
Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.
    If your site is ranked higher in the results of a search there is a greater chance for your visitors to find your site. The research is shown that most of users will go not father then 3 pages in the search results. And this is what all webmasters are trying to achieve when they are working on SEO.
    We just updated Vacation Rentals Listed with SEO friendly links, titles, keywords and descriptions. Right away we had a challenge – we are having a step back from the search engine positions that we had before. From all indications, this is a temporarily thing and we should rank much better by May.
    I also started a blog for some useful tips and tricks for vacation rental owners, you can read it here:
http://vacation-rentals-help-for-owners.blogspot.com.