Waikoloa, HI Real Estate Agents

Are Some of Googles Content Strategies Off?

By Rob Dalton, Big Island Vacation Rental Guru

(Waikoloa Vacation Rentals)

While I do keep up with SEO in general, I do not keep up with it on an ongoing basis. I just focus on making our site most usable to users and then figure the rankings will fall into place. Recently I found some interesting trends and wanted to see if anyone was seeing the same.I manage vacation rentals on the Big Island of Hawaii so most of the content we put out there is built around things to do on the Big Island, vacation rentals on the Big Island, places to see, etc. While we try to cover everything on the Big Island, our focus for content is primarily centered on things directly related to vacation rentals.One of our competitors uses a similar strategy, but has put more focus on the other items, which is return bring more traffic to their site and may be easier to rank for. Wh... 03/06/2025

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Helping Nonprofits in Your Area

By Rob Dalton, Big Island Vacation Rental Guru

(Waikoloa Vacation Rentals)

This post is somewhat informative as well as asking for input of what has worked for you. Each year at Waikoloa Vacation Rentals we try to support 2-3 nonprofits on the Big Island of Hawaii where we are. Most nonprofits we support we simply support by donating money so that is relatively simple. This year we are supporting DNA Basketball Academy, which is a basketball club in Waimea. I also help this organization so other than donating money have been trying to set up different ways to raise money. The club has put together some of the best girls and boys basketball players on the Big Island of Hawaii and those teams have been invited to be a part of the UA Future National Circuit. This circuit includes a trip to Seattle, Phoenix, and Cincinnati next year. While on these trips, th... 11/08/2024

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Are You Using ChatGPT For Your Website?

By Rob Dalton, Big Island Vacation Rental Guru

(Waikoloa Vacation Rentals)

When ChatGPT first came out I was hesitant to use it, but as more and more people began to use it I wanted to try it out. Overall if I told it to give me a 500 word article on almost any of the properties we managed it came back about 90% correct. For some of the properties it would get it confused with something else, but overall it was correct. For example, we manage properties at a complex called Kolea, which is a Hawaiian word that is a bird and used in other developments so I had to be very specific for it to understand what I was talking about.Recently I got an email from our VRBO rep alerting us of the functionality of ChatGPT and that it is a great tool to generate the property descriptions for VRBO ads.Here was the question and thought I had. For SEO purposes, one of the gr... 09/12/2023

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Are Microsites Coming Back?

By Rob Dalton, Big Island Vacation Rental Guru

(Waikoloa Vacation Rentals)

Between 2005 and 2010 microsites were a must for search engine optimization. A microsite is as it sounds, a smaller site specific to one of your keywords. For example, I do vacation rentals on the Big Island of Hawaii. I could have my main site to optimize for broader keywords and then have microsites for more specific keywords. What this looked like for me was a site that covered an entire resort and then microsites that covered each community within that resort. It worked great and I had top rankings in most of the keywords I was going for. Then around 2015 Google began to give less weight to the microsites and more weight to sites that had more content, which pushed companies to move all their content to one website. They also gave less weight to the domain name itself. I used... 06/24/2023

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Does AI Properly Describe Your Business?

By Rob Dalton, Big Island Vacation Rental Guru

(Waikoloa Vacation Rentals)

I recently starting using ChatGPT to see what it was all about. At this point it seems to offer a little more insight than Siri, but can offer a lot of information. Here is what it had to say to describe the area where we manage condos. Does it properly describe your location and business?Kolea at Waikoloa is a luxury resort community located in the Waikoloa Beach Resort area on the Big Island of Hawaii. It offers a collection of upscale vacation rentals, including villas and townhomes, along with a range of amenities and access to the beautiful surrounding area.Kolea is known for its prime location near Anaehoomalu Bay (A-Bay), which features a stunning sandy beach and offers various water activities such as swimming, snorkeling, and stand-up paddleboarding. The resort community its... 06/01/2023

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Where is Real Estate SEO Headed

By Rob Dalton, Big Island Vacation Rental Guru

(Waikoloa Vacation Rentals)

I have been doing the SEO for our vacation rental company for the past 20 years and the complexity of it has grown enormously to the point that I am not sure where it is headed.On Site Keywords and Meta DataSEO seemed to really start out pretty simple. What your website was about, what your domain was, what your URL was, and what your title and meta description was seemed to really directly effect your rankings. You could make a simple change to the title of a given page and you would see your rankings increase.As people began buying all the relevant domains and keyword stuffing everything Google moved on to........Links, links, and more linksWhat sites and how many were linking to your website had a drastic effect on your rankings. People begin to buy links from anyone and everyone.... 05/26/2023

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Telsa Homes: Good Choice or Not?

By Rob Dalton, Big Island Vacation Rental Guru

(Waikoloa Vacation Rentals)

On the Big Island of Hawaii Ainamalu was the first development to promote Tesla products to all their homeowners. Just about all the people that purchased added solar panels as well as batteries in the garages. Within the first six months of installation close to 50% of the homeowners reported problems with the Tesla systems. Most issues related to the interaction between the panels and the batteries. Most owners that had pools installed had problems with the operation of the Tesla system.The greater issue was that the follow up support from Tesla was next to non existent. Almost all homeowners reported being able to get a hold of Tesla support on the mainland, but although appointments would get scheduled no one would show up to them. Ainamalu is over three years since the homes ... 04/29/2022

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Hawaii Vacation Rental Bill 108 A Year Later

By Rob Dalton, Big Island Vacation Rental Guru

(Waikoloa Vacation Rentals)

Just about a year ago we saw the County of Hawaii implement a vacation rental bill to attempt to address many of the growing issues the vacation rental industry on the Big Island of Hawaii has seen. Through the first few months it was a learning process for everyone. Glitches had to be worked out in the application process while thousands of applications were coming in. Within that process we also found out that many of the "zones" were becoming an issue. A portion of Waikoloa Beach Rosort was actually not zoned a part of Waikoloa Beach Resort and a part of Mauna Kea Resort was actually not zoned to be a part of Mauna Kea Resort.After close to a year I am wondering if more issues got made than what existed prior or if things are getting addressed. I still see home being built in n... 03/31/2020

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