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.

Google Ad variations

Callisti has been optimising adword account ad variations for time lapse photography suppliers, Lobster Pictures, and is noticing an almost immediate improvement in CTR (Click through rate) and a reduction in CPC (Cost per click).

The best way to do this is to target the ad to the most relevant content, which usually means pages on the website aside from the homepage. By using the Ad structure you can match the search string closer to the Ad title and related the keywords in the ad copy to the landing page.

This is logical as the keyword relevance in the ad should match the keywords of the landing page. Otherwise you're not targeting your Ads very accurately!

Planting potatoes

Using a different IP address, even on the same server, is a way of creating external links to a website. We thought we'd try this with planting potatoes - a way of siphoning off specific content into a mini-website and then linking back to a client's ecommerce site where relevant products can be bought.

Chitting potatoes - now there's a phrase I never thought I'd use.

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.

Directory Listings

Is it good to embark on a link building campaign for when building your website's presence online?

There are numerous directory sites where concepts like relevant directory and page rank, non-reciprocal, reciprocal, all come to the fore. I am currently experimenting with these, especially the ones that don't require payment, but it's a murky business.

I can see that the Callisti website is listed on some of the sites as this shows up in search results. I am slightly concerned that it's wasting energy that could be spent in something more genuine. Being listed in 50 different phone books doesn't seem very substantial for some reason but maybe that's just me.

The more sites that we work on, the more courtesy links point to the site, which I feel better about as it is honourable. Let's face it, on today's date the site is currently indexed but unranked and this can take time.

I'm quite impressed with some of the automated link building systems - a collection of scripts and applications that have gestalt intelligent appearance but no inherent soul. Where am I going with that?