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.

Florida Holiday Villa for the family

The Clydeside Rentals website now has the holiday accommodation aspect of the business included.

Interesting mixture of florida resort images and tipping trailers but the holiday rental side of things is sectioned off so that the holiday cottages in Scotland and the family villa in the Tuscan Hills resort, Davenport, Florida USA, have their own pages.

One aspect of the design template is that sub page menus aren't obvious so it doesn't allow for a page heirarchy without hacking.

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.

European elections

Who you vote for is a matter for your own conscience. That said, I've been doing some work on the Mike Russell MSP website, based on a nice Atahualpa theme. The theme administration is a class above so well worth checking out...

One feature of the site is RSS feeds for Mike's voting history and his Parliamentary Questions which took a bit of fiddling to create successfully using a combination of feed43.com, publicwhip.org.uk, theyworkforyou.com and some feed-building tips.

It's reassuring to know that the information on our elected representatives is there but you have to go data mining for the more juicy stuff.

Tip for the day: always remember to sort out your application pools in IIS before tearing your hair out with URL rewriting on a Windows server.