As part of a new series of articles on the topic of successful websites, I want to share with you information from behind the scenes of successful projects that have won a place in the fierce online competition. The first one is the largest Czech catalog of private accommodation on the Adriatic Ubytování v Hrovatskú.cz . What is the story of this site, how did it come about and how does it deal with international competition? Read an interview with its operator and creator Boris Debeljak.
boris-debeljak
Hi Boris, could you briefly introduce the UvCH.cz project? How did it come about, what is your position in the market and what are you planning for the future?
This could be for a long time. We started back in 2002, when we had the idea to present private apartments on the Czech Internet. At that time there was already one similar site, but since we had the advantage of knowing both languages and I had been on the Internet since 1995, it was easier for me to promote and use all the learned “SEO” tricks. Back then, I created static websites (only html) and the project was profitable in the first month, so then it was (and still is) a daily job of many hours a day.
Could you briefly give some statistics about your project?
At the moment, I can say that we are number one on the Czech market when it comes to accommodation in Croatia, and last year owners in Croatia received 625,967 inquiries through us. In the future, we definitely intend to maintain this position, although it has become increasingly difficult recently due to multinational platforms. We want to further develop within the greater automation of the inquiry and order process, as well as improve promotion in other markets.
You mentioned that you have experience with the Internet (building websites) and that the original pages were static. What stage did your website go through after that? Do you still edit pages and other tasks yourself, or do you use someone else’s services for this?
For the first three years, I managed it myself and created a page for each accommodation manually and added it to the website, including linking. I then found a student to program the administration and auto-build for me, and even though every other programmer told me they’d like to rewrite the whole thing and do it from scratch, to this day we’re basically working with the same basics, which we’re successfully developing and tweaking on an ongoing basis. For the last five years or so, I have had uae phone number data a permanent programmer (a Czech living in Cyprus) who takes care of programming and editing, and sometimes I also edit something myself.
You also mentioned SEO and various gimmicks
How big a role do search engines play for you? If you had to evaluate the differences between how you optimized years ago (or at the very beginning) and how you optimize today, what would they be?
Search engines play a huge role for us. I saw this for producing very long videos myself when a few years ago our website was completely removed from Google and I found out that such a thing could bring down the whole business – and we also have Seznam here. In the beginning, SEO was very simple and search engines were stupid, so all you had to do was put a lot of keywords on the page and have enough cz lists supporting pages and link to each other from them. Anyone (like me) who had perhaps a hundred simple websites was able to use footer links to get anything from them to the first pages of search engines.