Blood from a stone

Sometimes in life you have to deal with people or organisations unable to carry out any task with any thoroughness or efficiency, either deliberately or because they are simply incapable.

Latest sites in a long line of rescuees are:

Motors Local - a resource for buying and selling cars in South West Scotland. This also carries pages for Troqueer Garage and Top Ten Models (phew!)

Dumfries Bed and Breakfast - currently a simple contact marketing poster for the Abarglen Bed and Breakfast in Dumfries but with designs to become a more useful resource for tourism in the region.

Fancy an Italian?

When Ivano first arrived in Scotland over 20 years ago from The Tuscan town of Lucca, he brought with him a knowledge of Tuscan Italian cuisine and a skill for home made cooking.

Little did he realise that he was to meet a man from Callisti through forces unknown and end up with a website to help with the marketing of the already successful Italian food take away business in Dumfries.

Callisti can fervently recommend the Penne Speciale, the Pollo Salsa Rosa (or Surfer Rosa as we sometimes call it in our throwback ways), and the pizza bases. Pizza eaters may know what this means.

They also have a holiday home in Tuscany that is available to rent should you ever need to visit North West Italy and the home of the renaissance in Florence or whatever...

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...

All things Tesla

Remember Command and Conquer? Tiberian Sun? I used to love getting a base built up with an matrix of Tesla Coils (and several power stations) to take out incoming hostiles...

Also O.M.D. had a song called Tesla Girls - I always wondered what that was about when I was younger...

Online shopping for busy parents

Since the last round of development updates, MyWishWand is now easier to use, and works by letting you create and share gift wishlists - normally by parents for children.

We are currently building up the adwords campaign to target specific landing pages so that visitors can navigate quickly to what they're looking for.

If you're stuck for gift ideas there's now a wider selection of lists for events such as baby showers and christenings. The gift-finder tool is another way you can find the "perfect gift" – based on the recipients age, gender and interests.

Members now get access to money-saving offers from retailers including Graham and Greene, Early Learning Centre, Boden, John Lewis, Waterstones, etc.

The celebrity approvals so far have come from Jools Oliver and Mr & Mrs Johnny Vaughan and there have been write ups in Daily Candy Kids, Country & Town House magazine, Junior and Practical Parenting as well as YummyMummyJobs.

Personal Health and Fitness

This is a litmus test for an Edinburgh-based Personal Health Screening provider. The market is a mixture of employers requiring employee health checks and private individuals needing professional health and fitness testing and advice.

Emotional Freedom

The Delves personal training website finally went live today after a lot of finishing touches. Callisti played a key role in the organic SEO strategy for this site starting with the initial design and development.

The site offers training courses for Managing Workplace Stress, EFT or Emotional Freedom Techniques, NLP for practitioners, and many other personal and corporate courses which you can book online.