Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Although the main customer base for my listings sites is essentially the English speaking population of Europe, there’s an even larger English speaking population just across the Atlantic that don’t see the sites as often as they should since they’re hosted in the UK.

I have tried the sites on an American host in the past and it was a complete disaster because the main interest at the time was from people in the UK and Ireland.

However, roll on three years and I’d quite like to create a foothold in America. Not with all of the sites, of course, but rather a small selection of the sites so that I could pull in some guests from America and, for that matter, add properties from Americans too.

As a taster for this, I’ve set the geographic target for a couple of the sites in google to America and they seem to have pulled in a different audience than they had when they were fully based in the UK. However, that’s just with google and I do pretty well on both yahoo and msn.

So, I’ve been looking for a cheap hosting service that would let me move over one or two sites and I think I’ve found it in the form of 3ix who charge $12 per year. Now, “all” I have to do is to work out how to have the site over in America but with the database that supports it still in the UK.

After you’ve been blogging for a while you tend to find that some of the articles you write could be collected in a series.

So, for example, this blog has a series on living in France, another about banking, and so on.

However, I’ve been thinking of doing a blog for the listings sites which is quite different. For one thing, it’s a blog with quite a narrow remit ie to write about the listings sites themselves. More significantly perhaps is that I’m planning to do it as a blog consisting of a collections of series right from the start. Today starts off the series on marketing your property which will be an ongoing thread but there’ll be several other threads intertwined through the blog as time goes on.

It’ll be a while before that becomes apparent though as it’s not going to be a daily blog by any means (there just aren’t enough hours in the day for that).

It seems like google hand you pagerank when you’re not looking for it so I’m going to run a little trial on another blog domain to see if I can pick it up delibrately.

What I’ve been doing in the past has been to use a test domain when trying out new versions of my listings sites and after a while those domains have tended to pick up page rank which I don’t really understand as I obviously don’t run any promotion on them. In fact, I don’t even link to them so I’m confused as to how some of them are even picked up by google to begin with.

Anyway, for the trial what I’m doing is moving my beta testing of the new version of the listings sites to part of ‘tother blog domain (which I’ll not mention as I don’t want to pick up links to it from here and thereby muddy the waters).

Page rank usually takes a few months to acquire so it’ll be a while before I know if it’s working or not.

Online everyone tends to assume that there are infinite resources behind every website and, of course, that’s just not the case in reality.

For example, we like to be as helpful as we can to those properties listed on our holiday accommodation listings sites and to that end we offer a range of free services notably including a free website review. In practice though few people actually take us up on them normally but when we mentioned a few of them in our recent newsletter we had rather more response than we were expecting.

Now, in itself the response wasn’t overwhelming but the reviews that we did highlighted a number of common problems and so we did a followup mini newsletter telling people how to perform one of the key checks that most sites were falling down on which in turn generated rather more response than expected although again at a level we could deal with.

What we’ve subsequently done is to enable a feature we call “marketing assistant” which basically generates a short e-mail advising people as to changes that they could make to their own website to improve how it performs in searches. In fact, that’s phase one of that particular feature as we’re hoping to develop it further.

The problem is that as we move into the peak booking season, the number of e-mails generated is starting to rise and so too are the number of enquiries that we’re getting from them. So much so that we’ve had to switch the facility off for a few days to catch up.

It’s something to be mindful of: once you move out of the field of total automation online, you can easily find that you’re swamped with the responses.

Reading the original research presentation of google highlights a number of points where the weakness of the algorithm can still be exploited and those cracks are starting to become very obvious.

One thing that they never allowed for was that once money came into the equation then people would pay to manipulate how their site was ranked in terms of pagerank. As we’ve seen late last year that has now become a significant problem for google and so they have begun to crackdown on the payment for links beginning with sponsored posts. How effective that will be given that there are now over 600,000 (yes, six hundred thousand) directories offering links is hard to say but sales of links are sure to remain with us in one form or another.

Then there’s the assumption that people would use large letters and bold fonts to highlight what was important on the page. As is plain, this is easily manipulated and is on quite a widespread basis in some quarters.

They even neglected to consider that some people would simply click on their own pages because clicks are a factor in pagerank (they know if you’ve installed the google toolbar). That’s quite noticeable if you “legitimately” do it when developing a website and one assumes that many more people are doing it for less innocent reasons.

That they’re having problems is obvious: they shouldn’t need to crackdown on the blogs and yet they appear to need to do that.