Hunting and Fishing

Some minor but significant updates to the Raehills hunting and fishing website should see the site pages achieve more relevant cataloguing in google's archives.

The page urls have been tweaked to stay relevant to the page content and the verification tag has been updated so that search data for the site can be monitored.

Search results - Organic vs Adwords

Confused? This is humanity's normal state of being.

Google organic search results seem to be influenced by whether or not Google Adwords are running. "I thought that it said in the Google Bible that you couldn't buy position in the organic search results, only in the sponsored ads section?", I hear you say.

Well, http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/adwords/learningcenter/18911.html happily states:

"Search results appear on the left side of the page. It is important to note that Google does not accept payment to place websites or documents in search results. However, advertisers can purchase Google AdWords ads, which appear on the right side of the page, and sometimes above the search results."

What do you want me to do about it?

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...

Script free opacity

I was fooling around with the Callisti Logo and decided to make all the green squares useful in some way. Rather that start using scripts and alternative images I was able to use CSS and some opacity styling courtesy of a good resource by Mandarin Design.

You'll see that each colour uses opacity when rolled over and the links are consistent in a colour coded way. It's very out of your face (as opposed to in your face) so might be too subtle unless a visitor moves or sweeps their pointer over the logo.

Some other content updates have been made, e.g. updating the privacy statement to keep in line with Google, and some content and meta tag updates to reflect the organic shift in services that we offer.

Montenegro!

WTF!

Logging into google's webmaster tools now gives the option to set the geographical target, the preferred URL (www.domain.co.uk instead of domain.co.uk - this helps consolidate data gathered in analytics for landings the home page), Image search options (include your site images in google results), and crawl rate.

The geographical target can be selected providing you have a top level domain such as .com, .org, but not for "country specific" domains. Imagine where this could lead www.virtuo.me, the blossoming Edinburgh virtual office provider!

Domain names

Virtuo.me was cached in google on 5th January but searching for the .me domain brings up a suggestion to search for .co.uk domain instead. The concern is that .me domains aren't automatically given ranking status in google without a serious amount of linkage.

It does show up when searching for virtuo receptionist but that is an unlikely search, let's face it.

Recommendation: acquire .com and or .co.uk domain, or use an alternative relevant domain? It still doesn't explain why .me domain names are penalized but where the site is hosted can affect the performance of domain suffixes.

Google Base products

Our client JBA Seed Potatoes now has competitive product listings on google's shopping search engine where you can submit product feeds and widen the range of possible searches that land on the client site.

It can take around 4-5 days from submission to insertion (oo-er) which has significantly increased in the last 18 months but there are more e-commerce websites using this service.

Be aware that Google base UK and Google base US are different and mess around with sessions if trying to switch between them.

Another journey by train

I'm visiting a client in Bristol today where extensive media processing and testing goes on for a music video and film download site. The train journey is a bit horrendous: 5 and a half hours from Dumfries and Galloway with 3 changes.

The first train carriage had plug sockets but no power and a dodgy tannoy. Helpfully the assistant informed me that I could try another carriage as sometimes the power didn't work all the way through the train. Virgin trains keeping standards high!

Crewe is somewhere I only know because of journey transfers; what happens there apart from travelers crossing paths?

Anyway more SEO article writing for gift wishlists this morning as part of the ongoing campaign for mywishwand - the trend of the google analytics should gradually show an increase in traffic but with the proportion on free search engine traffic growing from the current 3%. There are some referrals at the moment but most of the traffic has been as a result of the offline marketing at the launch of the site, e.g. press and media coverage in related magazines and programmes.

The internet connection from the XDA has been fine but the network for o2 is somewhat lacking in the lake district - I guess network coverage is as concentrated as the population for any given region.

The laptop keeps picking up 'Free Public WiFi' on the train and I can connect to it without additional security measures. However it doesn't give me internet access so it may be a feature of the rail service - CrossCountry now.

SEO what not to do

The mysteries of acquiring a page rank are myriad but here's what not to do.
Traffic for Callisti is being picked up by Google analytics but the site has not been assigned a page-rank as yet.

Some sources say that having AdSense on when the site is launched is deemed questionable by Google but this seems a little bizarre as it's part of their website services.

So with that in mind more time can now be invested in developing the site content and describing the services more informatively.