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How do you stay ahead of the SEO Curve?
This video of Trent Blizzard’s presentation at RezFest 2008 in Aspen CO, will help you understand SEO strategies and techniques.

Trent’s presentation features topics on link-building techniques, on-page keyword techniques, conversion and ROI measurement, local search strategies and mobile search strategies. Special attention will be paid to new and emerging SEO opportunities that are relevant to Vacation Rental Management who are located in competitive markets. For more information you can view the blog from RezFest.

Good news for all of our customers that are enrolled in our Specials Updater program. We have released our Blizzard Editor program to make it easier for you to update the selected page(s) on your website. The video below has been produced for our customers to learn how to use the new program. Please visit and watch the video as often as you need to.

Watch the training video

This is Part III of III of a Presentation by Trent at the VRMA Western Meeting in October 2006.

Recently Mary Bowling and I were asked to participate in an online talk show aobut local search.  The folks over at EmarketingTalkShow were great and we had an awesome time doing it.

EMarketingTalkShow - Local Search Engine Marketing Strategies

You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the small arrow or visit EmarketingTalkShow.com for more podcasts and information.

One of the lesser-used features of blogs are trackbacks, probably because they are not something that is easy to get your head around.

Trackbacks in simple terms are links. They are not like a regular links though, they are special in that they will send a comment to a site from your site, when used.  This works both ways, if someone writes about an article on your blog, and uses your trackback link then you will receive  a notice in your comments area showing text from the other persons post. It is a way for you to know that another person has referenced your article or post.

Ok, so that sounds good, but how do you find the ‘special link’ and what to you do with it?

Ok, let’s use an example. Go to the link http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com and look at any of the articles on the site. Notice, that when you view the home page, or a category or archive page you are viewing an excerpt of the article, so to view the whole article you need to click on the title. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the Best Size Image to Use?

To keep the download time to a minimum and to have a good quality image, make sure that your image is no bigger than 500 pixels along the longest edge and no smaller than 150 pixels.

How Can I Change the Size of my Images?

Here are some free software programs that we have used and find really good. You can use any of these to edit your images. Both require you to download software to your computer.

The Gimp – an Open Source software program with many of the same features as Photoshop. Available for Windows, Unix and MacOS X systems.
Cost: Free

Picasa Photo Editing by Google – free software from Google that allows you to locate and organize photos on your computer. Has simple editing tools to add effects and edit images. Gives you the option to share photos online. Available for Linux & Windows systems – no MacOS version yet.
Cost: Free

If you would rather not download more software onto your computer, then try the Flickr site. This online photo site will resize your images when you upload them to your account. For a more detailed explanation go here – ‘Using Flickr to Resize Images’.

For more info on other editing tools visit the About site at Top 8 Free Photo Editors for Windows.

OK, onto the tutorial: (Sections of the editing area and Buttons are written in Bold, while actions are in italic) Read the rest of this entry »

Google Link toOnline Marketing for 2007

Presentation at the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association 2006 Conference (VRMA 2006) in San Diego. By Trent Blizzard: “Staying Ahead of the Curve: Online Marketing for 2007 and Beyond”. This segment is about Wiki, Wikis, Wikipedia and Wikitravel. It is Part II of III.

You’ve decided to start a blog on your favorite topic. Great! Where do you start? There are so many options out there – what steps do you go through to make sure your blog is set up in the most user and search engine friendly manner?

Recently, we started a blog about travel destinations across the US, Canada and Mexico. I kept a journal of the stops and starts we made along the way. I’m not going to go into the details of my endless pages of ranting about my very flat learning curve – but I wanted to share the things that helped, and the things that DIDN’T help to alleviate some of the frustrations I felt in the beginning.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is in reference to a post Matt Cutts made about a year ago on seeing nofollow links. He shows how Firefox can be used to view nofollow links without digging through source code. A full time blogger or SEO could potentially save hours per week using this tool.

I would change Matt’s code a bit in order to make nofollow links a little less in-your-face. This will give the links a white background with a blue border and blue font.

a[rel~="nofollow"] {
background-color: white !important;
color: #7097BE !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
border:1px solid #7097BE !important;
padding:2px !important;
text-decoration:none !important;
}

Trent’s presentation from the Vacation Rental Manager’s Association (VRMA) in October 2006. Topics include: Online Marketing, Google, Link Building, an Introduction to web 2.0, wikis, wikipedia, photo sharing, flickr, travel review sites, tripadvisor, tags and tagging, and Google Alerts.

ifilm Link toInternet Marketing Trends