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Structuring a small rental website for search engines

A one-page site that tries to say everything at once is harder for both visitors and search engines to make sense of than a handful of focused pages.

If you manage more than one property, or one property that serves genuinely different kinds of trips, give each its own page rather than one long page covering everything. A dedicated page can have its own title, its own description, and can be the exact answer to one specific search — a single page trying to be the answer to five different searches usually ranks for none of them well.

A workable structure for most small rental sites: a home page that introduces the property or properties and links clearly to everything else; one page per property if you have more than one; a page about the area (what's nearby, what to do) that can rank for destination searches even when someone isn't ready to book yet; an about page; a contact page; and your guides or blog, if you keep one, as its own section.

Keep every page reachable within a click or two from the home page. Search engines — and visitors — judge a page partly by how easy it is to find from the rest of the site; a page buried five levels deep that nothing else links to is effectively invisible, however good its content is.

Resist the temptation to create near-duplicate pages for every possible search variation ("cabin rental" versus "cabin for rent" versus "cabin vacation rental") describing the same property. Search engines are explicit that near-duplicate pages compete with each other rather than reinforcing one another — see Google's own SEO starter guide. One strong page beats three thin, overlapping ones.