New Features on www.1 - Costa Rica Link.com

Despite

all the bad-mouthing and campaining of some jealous competitors (incluiding written warnings to hotels and threats to credit card companies), it is time to brag a little about www.1-costaricalink.com. Most hotels here know us, if not, you may click here to get to some personal pictures about our life and family.

New Hotel Sponsors  

As we have mentioned in our last newsletter, we are offering hotels and tour-operators again to participate on our website as sponsors. This way, reservations will go directly to them. 60 of the hotels and a few tour-operators on our site already took advantage of this offer. If this interests you, look up the rates here, copy an application and fax it to us. You can try it for one month / three months / six months or one year. If you can wait until we visit your area, there are no additional costs involved. If you are in a hurry, we need a CPL to stay overnight if the hotel is not in the area.

New Yellow Page Sponsors  

The same applies to the Yellow Pages. Lots of people are taking advantage of putting their business on our site with a "Free Ad". Some of them come from all over the world. If this interests you, look up the rates here, copy an application and fax it to us. You can try it for one month / three months / six months or one year.

New Restaurant Sponsors  

The same applies to the Restaurant Pages. We even added some new restaurant sponsors with a 'Picture Gallery Ad'. If this interests you, look up the rates here, copy an application and fax it to us. If you are not in the Central Valley area, you'll have to wait until we stop by to take pictures or mail them to us. You can try it for one month / three months / six months or one year.

New Menus

Search Engines do not like a lot of repeated stuff in the beginning of a page before they get to the real content of it. That has been the reason why we stayed away from putting a menu on top of the page. There were two arguments that prevailed and made us decide to add a top-page menu. First and most important, the people got frustrated having to go all the way to the bottom of the page to continue surfing. And second, we wanted to add some new features like Sport Fishing and Restaurants in some of the principal menus.

Search Engines

We are happy to anounce that our pages are very well represented in all the mayor search-engines. Our site gets indexed every day by about 10 of them. Despite that, the over 70,000 different search phrases with over 100,000 different key-words that produce over 7 million hits to our site in one month, do not mainly come from search-engines, but from happy customers that have bookmarked one or several pages: 75% of our hits come from these 'Direct Requests', 17% from search-engines and 8 % from other links that point to our site.

Everything is growing here

At the moment everything is growing here: Our office, the client base, reservations, newsletter-requests, our staff, Angela (6 month pregnant), pages (over 35,000), pictures (over 50,000), participating hotels, participating car rental companies, tours, vacation packages, picture galleries, and most important of all the direct requests (75%) and the amount of different search terms (73,000 / month).

If a brand new hotel listing, for instance the small hotel called Casa Siempre Domingo in Pavones, receives its first reservation request about 2 hours after we uploaded their new listing, we know that it is not because somebody looked for this specific hotel. Maybe they came to our page looking for surfing information. On this page they learned that on our beach page, all the beaches with Surf-Information are yellow, or maybe they knew that Pavones has one of the worlds largest left Beach-Breaks, so they clicked on Playa Pavones. Maybe they liked what they were reading and found a link to the hotels in Pavones. Finally on this page they realized, that the only hotel on our site in Pavones labeled (Surfing) is Casa Siempre Domingo. Once on their page they looked at the Picture Gallery. They must have liked what they saw and made a reservation.

July in past years has always been our worst month. Not so this year. As a matter of fact we hired two new people for our reservation department during July despite the 60 hotels that now receive their reservations directly.

Articles

We started to publish articles from different people that have to do with Costa Rica. These articles can be copied to your own web-site, newspaper, magazine or other publication. We, of course, appreciate getting a link to us or credit for it somewhere. Here are links to three articles:
Visiting the Last Paradise on Earth
Deforestation / Reforestation

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