Foreign Perspectives

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One thing that constantly surprises me is that there are quite a large number of “professional” website designers around who produce websites that are both very amateur and almost entirely ineffective in terms of findability in the search engines. How do they do this?

First they create a lovely picture to grace the homepage. Why’s that a problem? Well, usually the picture is very large, filling the homepage and there’s, at best, a line of text saying “click to enter”. This causes problems in that it takes ages to download the picture and as far as the search engines are concerned the only searchable text is “click to enter” which is hardly a phrase one is likely to use to find a site.

Second, they produce pages filled with lovely photos, often animated. That’s not a problem if the photos are small enough but usually they put them on full size. One example I looked at this morning had so many photos that it crashed the browser which implies that nobody will be able to look at those pages. They also had only photos ie no text so the page was blank to the search engines.

Finally, they put everything in graphics. This has the effect that the page takes longer than usual to download but more importantly, it’s completely blank to the search engines: in some cases you can’t even find the page by searching for the name of the place.

These designers are professional only in the sense that they charge for their services. Don’t be taken in by them!

Popularity: 15% [?]

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One thing that constantly surprises me is just how little care people put into their SEO efforts.

Granted, most people don’t really bother about SEO at all but of those that do quite a surprising number don’t seem to have spent more than 5 seconds on writing up the description of what their website is about. I see these ones all the time via our directory: the majority of those who submit links to it don’t read the bit where it says that links aren’t free so I just let them build up until I get a proper entry that I enable and whilst I’m doing that I run the delete script to get rid of the junk (of which there’s over 1000 awaiting deletion at the moment!).

What’s sad in some ways though is that quite a lot of people have gone the extra mile in registering various permutations of their name yet they miss out on the final hurdle by selecting the wrong spelling. So, for example, Dennis C Carey used the version of the sitename with the hyphen in it but doesn’t actually use that particular website as he seems to have been running with the non-hyphenated version instead.

Popularity: 18% [?]

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Much as we try to keep a broad focus in the areas of travel & finance here I’m sure that you find that it wanders quite a bit. Therefore what I’m planning on doing is to split it in two with ForeignPerspectives retaining all the travel postings and another blog picking up the financial ones that don’t also fall under the travel/expat headings.

Now, the question is: what to call the new blog? I’d have quite liked FinancialPerspectives.com but unfortunately some plonker has already registered that for one of the junk sites that you seem to get under every decent name these days. Anyway, I’ve been hunting around and still haven’t found anything that seems “just right”.

Popularity: 32% [?]

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