Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

The number of entries from the United Kingdom on our listings sites has been growing quite rapidly over the last few months so it seemed an appropriate time to start work on a country-specific domain to represent them.

Therefore, we’ve just started running with Great British Bed and Breakfasts and Great British Self-Catering which hold all our UK properties.

One big advantage that we’ve already found is that using the new domains means that the statistics are separated out for the UK for the first time. Early days yet, of course, but it looks like the UK sites were getting a lot more traffic than we had thought they were getting which is good going since we hadn’t specifically promoted them.

On the promotion front, now that we have separate domains for the UK we can run promotion exercises on them too which we’d not been able to do before. In theory, that should mean that these new sites will become very significant for us over the course of the coming year or so.

One topic that was hotly debated up until quite recently was whether or not there was an effect on your site traffic related to where you hosted your site. It has since been confirmed by google that they use the IP address of your hosting service as a factor in prioritising the search results.

This means that one very easy way to increase the traffic on your site is to ensure that either your site is hosted in the country in which your main customers are based. So, if you target the UK then your site should ideally be hosted in the UK.

Changing hosts can be a hassle and isn’t something to be done at your busy time of year. However, one simple change that you can do in minutes is simply to tell google that the site is targetted at the appropriate country. To do this, you need to sign up for google’s webmaster tools, claim the domain, verify that it’s yours and then tell them what country it’s appropriate to. Sounds complicated, but really it’s very easy and quick.

The improvement in traffic can be very dramatic and kicks in within a week or two. In our own case, one domain had THIRTY times the site traffic when it was moved from an American host to a UK one.

Winter is the time when we get around to looking in detail at our various sites and so it was only yesterday that we noticed that one of them wasn’t nearly so complete as it could be.

An easy thing to fix and as from this afternoon our Holiday Rental Homes site now lists all the properties that it should have been listing all along. The effect of this is that the site should have a much greater profile than it did before with hundreds of new pages under it’s wing.

Whether it’ll make any difference with the search engines is something that we’ll just have to wait and see.

We’ve been rolling out our marketing campaign to pull in more entries on our B&B listings sites over the last few weeks and it’s interesting to see how differently the offers have been taken up.

First off, the Spanish began with a vast number of duff addresses which implies that a lot of them don’t bother with e-mail for their bookings. Virtually all of the addresses were from free accounts like hotmail and the Spanish equivalents which also implies that they’re not really using the Internet as a primary means of promoting their businesses. Overall takeup was really low at around 0.5% although, to be fair, it’s my first attempt to do a mailshot in Spanish so I wasn’t expecting an overlly high response. What did surprise me was that they looked at the example sites I quoted in really big numbers and also clicked on the various ads that they came across.

This was my second major mailshot aimed at Scotland. The first, about a year ago had a fairly low takeup but this one completely took me by surprise and the takeup has been over 3%. By contrast, they didn’t look much at the example sites nor did they click on the ads: they just went ahead and either signed up right off or passed on the offer.

It’s my first run at Ireland too and early days with that as yet. What has surprised me already though is that a much lower number of places quote an e-mail than I’d expected. In fact, the Internet presence seems largely to be confined to B&Bs with hotels not bothering to quote either an e-mail or a website. Still, we’ll see about Ireland over the coming week.

Next up is England and Wales which I hope to do over the coming week or two. It should provide an interesting contrast with Scotland where I went from fairly low numbers a few weeks ago to quite a sizeable and growing presence today.

One of the ongoing discussions since November in our little household is: “how come YOUR blog is OK and MINE isn’t?”.

Well, thankfully after over a month of hassling google, Cultured Views is once more back at PR2.

How did we get it back? Well, you’ve to register for google’s webmaster tools section, then claim the site and finally send a grovelling message to them saying that you’ve added “nofollow” tags to your sponsored posts and please can you have your pagerank back.

The snag is that adding “nofollow” just to sponsored posts doesn’t seem to be easily doable at the moment (ie there’s no plugin to do it) and therefore we’ve got nofollow on all outgoing links which seems somewhat counter-productive to google’s stated aim of identifying sponsored posts vs those that aren’t sponsored.