Vindicated

The Cyprus Holiday Villa market is pretty saturated. A Callisti client had challenged us with the task of building up quality web traffic for a young website to attract a share of the Cyprus holiday online booking market.

The challenge involved using only "white hat SEO" techniques, no Google Adwords or sponsored links, and work within a tight budget on a "shot to nothing" basis. The work is now paying off :)

After investing time in reducing pagerank leakage, making more friendly URLs, optimising meta tags, sourcing website and blog links from external and relevant websites, utilising a rich Flickr photostream, and tweeting when appropriate, etc., the bookings are now starting to come.

A strange feeling of satisfaction results.

External Links

One of the strategies of SEO is building a relevant network of external links to the target website(s). Now, how to do this without being spammy?

A genuine strategy is to optimise the site in question, submit it to the relevant engines, find related sites and cultivate links from them, build supplementary sites on different servers and link from them, engage in social networking stimulating interest and discussion, make use of all the different search channels (images, local business listing, video, news) and generate relevant and timely press releases as appropriate.

You can then embark on a paid strategy using the major search engine sponsored link programmes but this is best used in tandem with organic SEO as it disappears as quickly as it appears.

But the genuine strategy often seems like pissing in the wind unless you can get access to a strong existing link source. How to do this? Answers on a blogcard please...

When to use Adwords as SEM

We recently got a number of requests for online partnerships from adwords-based URLs so it seemed appropriate to add more detail on what our position is towards using sponsored links as part of a search engine marketing (SEM) strategy.