I have a few apartments in Barcelona I rent over the net to mostly
-English Tourists. Got my own web site
www.apartments-in-barcelona.com
People can view the apartments and book them instantly on-line .The
site has been up and running for over a year now . I advertise  the 
flats with individual paid ads on sites like
www.holiday-rental.co.uk
These ads costs over $300 each for a  year. Once I get an enquiry
forwarded to me from the paid ad sites, I direct people to my site
where they can book the flat with their credit card.
These large sites get a lot of web hits through their own paid ads. Up
untill now I have not gotton a booking just through someone seeing my
site on a search engine. As I want to put more flats on there, I now
want to try and invest my advertising dollars not with paid ads for
each flat, but with advertising which advertises my  web site. Either
through advertising on flat rental agencies which boost flat web sites
like mine, or through regular advertising which raises my site up the
search engine result pages. Or perhaps to employ a small and
inexpensive company which will help solve my web search ranking
problem.
   A little side note to all this is that  as I am from Ireland, I
would like to try and target irish tourists , through the net and dont
know how to do  that.

Declan

Hi there,

I've checked your site and I saw there isn't the ALT info for the
images (used for these search engine spiders to best position your
page). You can check others way to improve your web position in this
URL: http://www.search.com/guides/submit/content.html

On the other hand, and in order to get the best results in Ireland and
the UK, I suggest you to navigate around the main portals and search
engines in that countries and submit your site there. Google and other
portals position your web not only by the content of the web page but
also by the number of clicks you get. So it is a matter of time, and a
day by day work, to get a good position in that search engines. And
remember the search engines are only a part of your potential clicks.
There are other sources like web blogs, discussion forums, reverse
links, ....

In case you need more deep information, just let me know.

Albert

Hi,

I don't know if these expired questions still get reviewed but here's
another comment. I do some work in promoting apartment rentals in
Barcelona ( www.bcn-apartments.co.uk ), and generally speaking, I've
found that if you want to promote to English visitors, go for a .co.uk
and Irish .ie

It might be worthwhile developing sites to promote these apartment
rentals for each target market, with a TLD and hosting in the
appropriate country. That will help you get picked up by local search
engines.

Note that each site must have unique content, as duplicate content is
penalised by the search engines.