Moving ahead in 2007

We at Bed and Breakfast Co-op hope you had a joyous and prosperous holiday season. It seems the holidays just get more and more packed into them - but we survived and we hope you did as well.

Now 2007 has arrived ready or not. We had some major challenges to hurdle in 2006, but we are now ready to roll. We want to take a few moments of your time to give you a short overview of what we have accomplished and to answer a few concerns some of you have expressed to us in emails.

Overview:
We have done (and continue to do) a number of things that we hope will expand our “ranking” or exposure on the Internet. Our goal is to become one of the most inclusive and most useful bnb and country inn directories on the Internet. But as you know, SEO is not an exact science because the search engines are constantly evolving themselves.

One of the major tasks we had to undertake was to change our all of our menus. We originally built them using Java Script. This required that all of the cities and your bnb or country inn names be included in a separate file. During the design phase of our website, research was ongoing concerning Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We discovered that Google, Yahoo! and other search engines usually ignore those files. Not good! We wanted to gain exposure for your bnb or country inn – not try to hide from the search engines! So we felt we must take the time to rework our menus. This was very time-consuming and caused us to delay further marketing of our website until we got this corrected. This is accomplished.

We are continuing to make every effort to include your bnb or country inn name on our website as many times as possible. We are currently including:

1) Your free link – your bnb or country inn name and a hyperlink to open your website.
2) Meta tag – your bnb or country inn name is included in our meta tags.
3) Your name is included in the section labeled “Comments from satisfied patrons.” And
4) We are currently changing “Comments from satisfied patrons” to “Quick Facts, Maps and Comments from satisfied patrons.” This includes a link to facts about your city, and your name with a link to Google maps to show your location. (We discovered that potential bnb and country inn customers really wanted this information to be readily available to them.) This project is about 50% complete. And by the way we are providing these services at zero cost to any website.

2006 was a busy and significant year for us.

As we were introducing our website to you, we received some very useful feedback from many of you.

A frequent question was something similar to this one, “What do you mean by co-op?” Some of you wondered if fees would be charged to be on our website to be a part of the co-op. We are here for one purpose – to help you gain exposure on the Internet for your website. In order to introduce our website to you, we offered a free link to any bnb or country inn who wanted it to remain on our website. That link was free, it continues to be free, and will always be free. We hope that is plain and clear.

We use the word co-op as a shortened form of cooperation. To quote from an article available on our website: “Co-op is a derivation of the word cooperates. To cooperate has a number of similar meanings. Some of them are: to participate or assist in a joint effort, to accomplish an end, to act or work with another or others: to work or act together toward a common end or purpose; to collaborate, join forces, cooperate, get together.” So by using the word co-op we are simply expressing that we want to build a synergy that will work for all of us.

Let me build a word picture to illustrate what we are trying to do. Imagine that it is a hot summer afternoon (something some of us long for at this very moment). The sun is beating down so you sit down with a frosty iced tea under your favorite shade tree. What makes that tree so pleasing to you? It provides a needed function – shade. It has one large trunk with a lot of branches. And of course, it has a huge number of leaves. Would you have shade if you only had leaves without the trunk and branches? Not likely, what would hold them in place? In a similar fashion you wouldn’t have much shade with only a trunk and branches. There must be a synergy between the leaves and the trunk and branches to achieve the desired result: cool, refreshing shade.

Bed and Breakfast Co-op wants to be the trunk that holds a lot of individual leaves (i.e., your website). Just as in the tree illustration, we really have little useful purpose without you. And, it is harder for an individual website to acquire ranking without being linked to other websites. Here’s a reality about the Internet - one website containing a few pages will have a very hard time being seen because it is competing with literally billions of other pages on the Internet. That’s why search engines are so important. They look for websites that have a lot of other websites that link back to them. When that happens, the search engines think that a website that has a lot of other websites linking back to it is an important website.

Let me quote from Bruce Clay, Inc., Internet Business Consultants: “On the subject of popularity — we consider links vital to long-term Search Engine Optimization and ranking. The objective is this: if you get a site to link to you then you gain popularity points. If that site has a lot of quality sites linking to it and it links to you, you get a lot of points, but if that site has few quality sites linking to it, you get only a few points… In essence, if enough quality sites link to you then your site becomes a quality site by association.”

This is why link exchanges are important today on the Internet. But the important thing is not to link to just any website. You should endeavor to link to sites that relate well with yours. That’s what we want to accomplish together as a co-op: everybody linking together to gain more exposure for all of our websites on the Internet. As a result we all become more effective by working together. We are trying to do our part (outlined in the first part of letter) to cooperate with you, and we will continue to do all we can to promote your website.

(However, we don’t want to leave the impression that everything on Bed and Breakfast Co-op will always be free. What we state up front is free will never have any strings attached! We are a marketing company, and in the near future we will be offering advertising space on our website. Whether you want to participate with that will be your option. But now, it is more important to us to become the kind of quality site Bruce Clay, Inc. talks about.)

As you know, we have chosen to provide our free link to your website with the physical location of your city. Some of you have objected that nobody knows where your city is and that you would like to have your website associated with a more favorably known area. We understand your concerns and have come up with a plan. To see what we have in mind go to http://www.bnbcoop.com/Pennsylvania/pa_sosy.htm and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You will see this ad:

Saddle Ridge B&B
an 100-acre gentleman’s goat farm; near the temporary Flight 93 memorial

Another similar ad is at http://www.bnbcoop.com/Ohio/oh_tz.htm:

Patrick House Bed & Breakfast The elegant atmosphere will make Patrick House your favorite bed and breakfast experience; also, we’re on the National Register of Historic Places!

This ad contains the name of a bnb or a country inn with a link to their website and short description of their bnb in 25 words or less. For a short period of time we will offer a similar ad to you at no cost for one year. (In a spirit of cooperation, we do suggest a link exchange mentioned above. Put our name and a link to our website on your website: Bed and Breakfast Co-op (http://www.bnbcoop.com/). The important thing is that you can tell us on which page of our website you want it to run. For example, if your bnb or country inn is in one of the little Amish towns in PA but you feel that people may be more familiar with Lancaster County, PA, and you want your ad to run there, just tell us what you want and we’ll do it.

Send us an email to bnbcoop@gmail.com. Include the following information:
1) your bnb or country inn name
2) your website address
3) your ad (25 words or less)
4) the page on which you want it to appear (Tell us the city and state where you want it to appear and we will place it on the correct page. If you want the ad to remain on the page where your free link is you may do so, but indicate your city and state anyway so we may be clear about your intentions.)
5) If your bnb or country inn is in a well-know vacation area and you want to suggest a heading that others in your area may want to use also, we will consider what you suggest.
6) If you add our link to your website, let us know where you put it.

As we said, this ad will run for 1 year at no cost to you. At the end of the year you will have the option to renew the ad at that time (the cost for this ad is only $12 per year). We hope this addresses your concern.

We at Bed and Breakfast Co-op desire to do all we can to address your needs as well as the needs of your customers. We desire your feedback and suggestions. Have a great 2007!