White noise resignation

This is the sort of pish that gives SEO a bad name. Clutters up inboxes as well.

Also have been getting variations of attempted blog posts on client site. Tedious.

Google is meant to be penalising content farms that produce low quality crap, maybe this will change the course of spam river. For a while.

Must be practising - trying out a typo pattern generator using stock phrase, search engine URL (email addresses suppressed for this blog post)

Maybe these are some of the stumbling steps that will lead to true AI :)

Web Site (if any entered):
http://www.google.com/ [Valid URL: True]
Comments:
Cool! That's a clever way of loonkig at it!

Web Site (if any entered):
http://www.bing.com/ [Valid URL: True]
Comments:
Home run! Great slugging with that aswner!

Web Site (if any entered):
http://www.yahoo.com/ [Valid URL: True]
Comments:
AFAIC that's the best aneswr so far!

Hammock the week

After convoluted development process using Actinic v9, Handmade Hammocks website is now refreshed and taking advantage of some Kit Allen design work and integration with google services.

The ecommerce website sells handmade hammocks that meet Fairtrade standards to meet the prinicples of ethical trading. The company is based near Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and ships internationally

Callisti has gained a lot of experience working with the nuances of Actinic development from different locations, development by remote access, and all the joys of site exports, missing files, huge folders of backup files, cgi-bin dramas, incompatible server platforms, and payment gateway issues. The reward is a sweet-looking ecommerce site that now has more SEO potential for the new season, and a clean working environment after some thorough administration work.

Learning disabilities consultancy

As part of the foray into using Wordpress as CMS we are now setting up basic hosting services with the latest version of Wordpress installed so that clients can start from scratch and add all their own content, images and wordpress themes.

We also set up the .htaccess so that permalinks work from the off and encourage an xml sitemap generator to help with basic SEO.

The latest of these is BeaconLearningDisabilitiesConsultancy, a lengthy URL but descriptive all the same. This is currently being edited and transformed by the client.

Scottish Castles

We've now completed working through re-instating hosting provision after being dealt a hand of satellite sites for Comlongon Castle.

Due to the different angles of interest - historic, romantic, panoramic - there are a number of targeted domain names around variations on the Comlongon Castle theme.

Weighing up the balance of SEO costs and benefits will be an ongoing task.

Comlongon Castle

Having worked on SEO for Comlongon Castle some years ago it's great to get back together with the team to provide a website hosting and management service.

Rather than change for change sake, Callisti aims to streamline the existing web presence and improve the online services for the prestigious Scottish wedding venue. It's a distinctive venue, and with the addition of the new honeymoon lodge, built in a style in-keeping with the historic castle, there are good prospects ahead.

If you're looking for a romantic wedding in a Scottish castle this is well worth checking out.

Holiday accommodation in Cyprus

Callisti is now working with The Villa Group alongside Goldminedesign to assist in SEO for one of the Cyprus villa booking websites.

Cyprus is a popular island resort in the Mediterranean for Western European and Russian holiday-makers so has a wide appeal. It is also a hotly contested online market for traffic and bookings so a multi-channel SEO strategy is the way forward.

Trailer Hire in Scotland

One of the SEO challenges we face is focussing a website by domain name to the subject area it contains. The interesting case of Clydeside Rentals is that the company rent both trailers and tractor units for commercial hire, as well as holiday home rentals both in Scotland and Florida.

The domain would support both to some extent but it means the website will be fish and fowl. I would normally recommend that each theme is developed as a distinct web entity as it makes more sense to structure information this way - it's rumoured that categorical distinctions are relevant to large search engine indexing.

Galloway Tourism

South West Scotland is characterised by rolling uplands, cattle and dairy farming, sheep farming and forestation. The ubiquitous industry is tourism which takes advantage of natural features and wildlife.

Inland there are mountain bike trails (7 stanes), hill walking tracks (Southern Upland Way), and many historical monuments, most notably relating to Robert the Bruce (Earl of Carrick and Galloway).

On the coastline, which goes from the Solway estuary at Gretna (the border between Scotland and England), along past Auchencairn Bay (Dalbeattie), Kirkcudbright Bay, Whithorn Bay, Luce Bay and Portpatrick (on that iconic peninsula associated with the ports of Stranraer and Cairnryan), there are protected environments for breeds of birds such as at Caerlaverock, and many small sailing and boating clubs dotted along the beaches and bays.

Given that much of the visiting trade to the region is tourism-related, and latterly location-related (such as film companies requiring rural landscapes), there are many small accommodation providers that rely on internet marketing.

The latest requiring Callisti services have been the Annandale Arms Hotel in Moffat and Galloway House Estate in Garlieston, each being established accommodation providers in the region. We carry out SEO work for such websites as well as basic web design and content updates to ensure they keep getting found.

Rudimentary SEO

We have placed this handy guide to SEO on the Callisti website. It's criminal that the site update isn't finished yet but clients come first :)

A Hotel in Moffat

We have now improved the image SEO facility for the Annandale Arms Hotel in Moffat. The image upload feature allows for the original image filename to be preserved as the image is resized during thumbnail creation on the server.

There are some other SEO strategies we'd like to put in place but it may require a change in the hosting service.

Old fashioned values

Some basic SEO do's:

Think about your domain name and how information is going to be structured on your website. Use each page on your site to deal with specific aspects of your content. Try not to duplicate content but make use of anchor text links to the relevant page within your site. Visit wikipedia.

Research your web audience. What keywords are people using to find information contained on your website. Are you trying to reach a local audience who know your brand? A national audience who doesn't know who you are but wants a service that you provide? Think about it.

Don't assume that strangers to your website will know what you're trying to say. Spell it out - explain acronyms, describe your process, define your terms. You'll find that keywords will occur naturally when you write your copy like this.

Use meta tags to help categorise each web page clearly for visiting search engine robots and crawlers. The more unique and relevant the meta tags and content are, the more relevant your page will be for searches using those keywords.

Remember that search engines can't see images or videos but they can read filenames and descriptions and tags surrounding such media. Everything on your website should be considered as "indexable" in some way.

Some basic SEO don't's:

Keyword stuffing - why do this? It's ugly, unreadable and unnatural. Would you like to visit a site like this or would you be suspicious?

Overuse of bold text - see above.

Hidden links - this is ugly and suspect to search engines as they see things we don't. Websites can be penalised for shady tactics.

Link schemes - links between relevant sites are good but trying to generate millions of irrelevant links is long term bad. Links to and from your site should help enmesh your website in a relevant context of websites and related information, not background fuzzy noise.

Duplicate content on different domains - generating unique content and web copy is work and "copy and paste" can seem attractive at the time but this can dilute your pages' unique relevance to a subject and can be un-user-friendly if many pages are identical.

Google webmaster tools is worth checking out - remember what Google does shapes the way we use the web - learn what you can from their advice.

Change your face today

Your website is your company's face. What sort of expression is on that face?

Are you communicating effectively? Remember your face is being read by friends, strangers and robots continuously.

Wanna talk about it? Contact our SEO and website management service

(Just testing the email to blog service offered by Blogger)

Page Rank update

Thought it was an April Fool, but noticed after some optimisation work that Google had re-cached the Callisti pages and the SEO website is now PR4. G'night...

Badger Surveys in Dumbartonshire

Stuart Spray Wildlife Consultancy is carrying out badger surveys in Dumbartonshire this weather. They are also concentrating bat surveys in Glasgow, and bat surveys in Perthshire.

This is in line with SEO Geo-targeting updates to the website content. Throughout the year the survey work will be carried out in different areas of the UK so the content and news needs to be updated to reflect this.

If we stick to this strategy we can measure how effective this is and how quick the response is with search engines and resulting traffic.

Organic Farm in the Scottish Borders

Current website development news:

Organic meat from Liddesdale Selection is a website outlining the farm produce and services of a farm in Newcastleton in the Scottish Borders.

The web design is being signed off and will be converted to xhtml and css compliant brochure website for the organic farm produce in the first instance.

We'll then monitor and move on to developing an ecommerce website as required with any SEO work ongoing.

Garden Hammock

Callisti is working on the seasonal hammock project for a local Galloway company and embracing Actinic 9 as an ecommerce solution.

The website design is trying to capture a fresh outdoor feel which should be an improvement to the legacy look of the original website.

Interestingly, the search term 'hammocks' is very seasonal especially in the UK and we are now noticing the rising traffic to the website as the spring equinox approches. Some of the Adwords tools from PPCBully, keywordcountry and keywordspy.com show the value of a click for this keyword and also who the competitors are. Tough market!

As usual we will be applying Callisti SEO philosophy to the site so that the internal housekeeping assists in keeping CPC down and ROI up.

Hypnotherapy Treatment

Currently we're working on a personal consultation and training website that is based on hypnotherapy and the use of hypnosis techniques to deal with stress, helping to quit smoking and performance anxiety.

The back end has been developed to allow online course booking with secure payment and has a user area where registered users can log in to administrate.

There is an Callisti SEO friendly philosophy behind this so even the image names are aiming for search engine friendliness!

Managing conflict is another course on offer which could be a growth industry in the current economic climate...

Hammocks

What could be more idyllic than swinging idly in a hammock on a sunny afternoon?

It's a subjective thing, granted, but there is that image in the mind. Callisti is now working on a project for Handmade Hammocks, based near Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway, with SEO work and a complete redesign of their Actinic-based shop.

This will be ongoing work and we hope for a productive relationship with our new clients!

Birthday gift ideas

Jumbo PageRank bonus at New Year boosted the gifts ideas and wish lists, or MyWishWand's, status to PR3 from 0.

This should mean the site will now start to draw more attractive traffic and some Callisti SEO recommendations were carried out by Osborne Brook developers so looking forward to better news this year.

Christmas presents for boys and girls

It doesn't get more straightforward than this:

Christmas presents for girls and Christmas presents for boys.

We've found that implementing SEO recommendations does actually improve search engine performance. (check Stuart Spray Wildlife Consultancy and JBA Seed Potatoes) We urge all our clients to consider what they are aiming to achieve from their web presence.