Foreign Perspectives

To get well ranked in searches you need to have loads of the key keywords in your title, description and text which is easy enough to do. After all if you were targetting “making money online” then all you’d need to do is to continually repeat the phrase “making money online” everywhere and you’d be right up there.

It isn’t quite so simple as that of course as the search engines will penalise you if there are too many repetitions although they never explicitly say how many is too many. Presumably I’m OK by mentioning “making money online” for a third time at this point but if the only phrase I’d used to this point was “making money online” then that would definitely attract a penalty. Generally speaking you should be OK with two and perhaps three repetitions but four or more within the title and description would be starting to attract attention.

What you can, and should, do is to add synonyms of the phrase. For example, “making a living online”. This makes sense on two fronts: 1) you are less likely to attract a penalty by using a different phrase and 2) people use different phrases when they’re searching for things.

However, even if you avoid the penalties, you have another complication: whilst you clearly need to write for the search engines, you also need to write for people who’ll come across your site by way of those search engines. Writing entries that serve both purposes well is far from easy. Just how difficult it can be is easy to see once you’ve searched for a few popular phrases such as “make money online”. Many of the sites that come up towards the top of the list have titles and/or descriptions that have clearly concentrated on the search engine ranking side of things to the detriment of readability.

Granted, that’s an unusual phrase as all of those targetting it are very much interested in attracting traffic to their sites therefore it’s more important to be high up the rankings than to necessarily have a truly readable entry. For more normal phrases you generally get reasonably readable entries although the repetition of the key phrases can be quite wearing at times eg “France gites: our gites in France are France self-catering gites throughout France with many of them listed in Gites de France” is fairly typical for a site that targets both “France” and “gite”. Note here too that grammar tends to go out the window: it should be “French self-catering gites” rather than “France self-catering gites” but since “gites france” is a more popular search term than “french gites” it’s “France” rather than “French” that’s used.

The absolutely perfect title & description is rarely possible to achieve in one go and you’re as well to test each version that you use and look at what those ranked higher than you are doing. Generally speaking it takes about a week for google to pick up a change in your title & description so the testing can be quite a long drawn out business, but nonetheless one that’s worth doing as moving up even one spot in the search results can have quite a dramatic effect on the traffic to your site.

Sometimes the upgrades that appear the most complicated turn out to be the simplest in the end and so it was with an upgrade to our listings sites which I’ve been putting off for ages.

What it does is to allow the properties listed to specify exactly which facilities that they offer from air conditioning to swimming pools.

At first glance it looked like it would be quite difficult to do but that first glance was clouded by having seen how other accommodation listing places do it. Every single one seemed to go out of their way to make it complicated by adding tickboxes and dropdowns at every turn and even then they don’t always get it right. For example, one place we’re listed with let’s you say that you take pets but if you say that you don’t then it doesn’t say anything at all about it on the website.

In fact, many of the options are like that. It’s often the case as with the pets that you would want to explicitly say that you don’t take them but, for marketing reasons, most hotel listings sites only list positive options so, for example, they’ll say that you have a swimming pool but won’t say anything if you don’t. That’s fine for the swimming pool option but not so for the pets one where you need the negative stagement to be displayed.

Anyway, with that in mind my implementation gives the owners the choice about including the negative information where appropriate.

Next up is the search facility for that but fortunately that looks like it will be relatively easy to do and in any case the existing search function will also work on the facilities list albeit taking a few days for google to pick up the new content if you change something.

School administration used to be a fairly simple affair but it has become more and more complex over the years with additional tasks added tacked on as time as gone on.

Many of these additional tasks fall under the remit of management of the school rather than the educational side of things which has traditionally been where school principals have come from and schools are pretty complex beasts to manage as well. It’s therefore becoming more and more necessary to call into play software that can keep a handle on what’s going on.

For example, the organisation of school trips used to be quite straightforward but these days they’re logistical nightmares involving negotiations with overseas accommodation, transport and entertainment. All that before you even consider the business of keeping track of who is actually going on the trip!

Fees are more and more common of course too and with fees comes the need to draw on marketing resources which in turn leads you down the path of contact management and following up of leads. Naturally these days that may entail e-mail marketing programmes in addition to the calling of bygone days.

Management and allocation of resources from teachers to classrooms, transport, etc. is of course still part of the normal school activity but no less easy to do simply because it’s better known by those involved in it. And, of course, you need to keep track of how everyone is doing so that the various performance statistics demanded by the educational authorities can be presented in the appropriate format.

However, with all those complications it’s perhaps surprising to know that there aren’t a lot of integrated school management systems around. One of those that seems to be doing quite well internationally is TEAMS which is produced by a relatively small Australian company.

I managed to get the various listings sites fully integrated in their new home just in time as I’ve just had a couple of requests for upgrades to the sites.

Back when they were all in separate places, the small amendment that I did this morning to add click-throughs on all the photos of properties would have meant several hours of work checking that I’d applied the amendments properly in each of the separate sites. This morning just one file needed to be amended and it was done across all of the sites at a stroke.

The next one up is more of a task though and it’s one that I’ve been mulling over for quite a while. Essentially it’s adding the ability for each property to specify the facilities that they provide for the guests. Sounds simple but the list of facilities is rather long by the time you consider that in addition to the pool, there’s things like flatscreen TVs, DVD players, hifi systems, saunas, steam rooms: you name it and somebody is sure to have it. Not only that, but somebody else is likely to have something that you’ve not even heard of never mind considered adding it to the potential list of facilities.

Now I could do it in the very fixed way that a lot of sites go for but that seems to be asking for trouble in the long run. Much better, in principle, to have a popup list I think and that’s easy enough. What I’ve not thought about yet is actually storing the information in the database nor for that matter how the owners might go about entering it. Still, ’tis time to do that bit of thinking I suspect before the list of little requests gets too long.

Wendy’s been looking through a whole lot of blogs this afternoon and, frankly, the quality of writing that she’s seen has been pretty dismal.

Now, I can accept that many bloggers are just scribbling down their thoughts and, yes, there will be spelling mistakes and no doubt gramatical errors that creep in now and again. Fair enough, but she’s been looking, by and large, at blogs that take sponsored posts and it’s a very poor level of writing from what are professional writers.

Yes, you count as a professional writer if you’re writing sponsored posts. You’re getting paid to write, aren’t you?

I’ll not single out any in particular but some of the writing is so bad that it amazes me that the advertisers actually pay for it. There’s people out there saying things like “i done this” when it should be “I did that” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Frankly, I’d expect better work from a 12 year old. In fact, one of the better written blogs is written by a 14 year old so it’s not impossible to write decent stuff.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to write on high brow topics every post. It’s nothing at all to do with the content. What needs improving in a major way is the spelling and grammar used.

Some of the pay per post outlets are already hinting that quality checks are coming: it’s going to be better to improve your quality of writing before they arrive because many of the bloggers out there are going to find that their blog is totally shunned by advertisers if it’s tagged as being one that consistently falls down on the spelling and grammar.

If you find that your current efforts are the best you can do at the moment and you know they’re not good enough, then do something about it. Take a course to improve your English. If you’re taking sponsored posts it would probably even be a tax deductible expense and, in some countries, you can get free or subsidised courses if your English isn’t good enough.

But make no mistake about it: quality standards will come at some point and it’s better to be prepared for that in advance.