Facebook domination of web page screen real-estate

A simple Facebook page was created for Sledges.co.uk with some information about the Aviemore-based outdoor shop in the Scottish highlands, along with some product images from the different sections: wooden sledges, snowshoes, budget sledges, etc.

The latest step was to add and test the like button for each of the products on the e-commerce website so that visitors could share products with friends within their own facebook worlds. Also a link from website to facebook page seemed obligatory!

The emerging trend is that wee facebook icon links and like buttons (and associated html5, og meta-tags, etc) are getting peppered across more and more sites on the internet. Facebook can piggyback on the hard work people put in on driving relevant traffic to their websites by siphoning off "social" activity by visitors.

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.

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.

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.