Dragonfly Media Curacao

By Andy Beal
Source: Businessweek.com

If you’ve watched any professional motor sport, you’ve likely witnessed the following scenario. The early leader loses ground to other racers as his car’s tires begin wearing out or the engine starts smoking. A pit stop will initially cause the driver to fall even further behind. But ultimately the time taken under the care of mechanics helps the driver pull back into the lead. If the Web’s search engine industry is the race track, Yahoo has just taken a timely pit stop to try and win back ground lost against the new leader, Google.

On Feb. 5, Yahoo! (YHOO) started moving all of its paid search advertisers over to a new ranking model, informally known as “Panama.” The aim: Gain some much-needed momentum on Google’s more widely used AdWords platform.

It took Yahoo many months to create the new model, effectively rebuilding the system it acquired with the $1.6 billion purchase of Overture Services. Although Panama is just getting off the ground, there’s reason to believe this time in the pit has done Yahoo good (more…)

Source: Entireweb.com

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. (Wikipedia)

This definition of SEO sounds simple, but beware! Search engine optimization is a minefield, even for professionals, and although necessary to a business, should not be undertaken lightly. Below, is a brief look at the top 10 mistakes and how to correct them.

1. Non-Relevant Linkage.
External links to your site play a large part in most of the major search engine algorithms and can be considered an endorsement of your site. But if you are being linked to from sites that have no relevance to your content, then that is now considered a negative endorsement and will not raise your ranking in the search engines. Ensure all links to your pages are from relevant sites. Be wary of link builders who acquire links from gambling, pharmaceutical or adult themed sites, especially if your site is not of the same theme. Link building is as much a science as it is an art, one we take very seriously. (more…)

By Philippe Suchet, Philippe Suchet, Kefta

Every day, millions of people type keywords into a search engine, follow a link and land on a marketer’s Web site.
Most people will think I’m talking about pay-per-click campaigns, but did you know that 87 percent of commercial traffic comes from organic search? Though the majority of consumers come to your site from an organic search link, few marketers create a strategic organic search program. Last year, marketers spent eight times more money on paid search than they did on organic search. In essence, marketers spent nearly $6 billion on a minority of their search traffic while they nearly ignored the majority.
So far, most marketers who have taken on an organic search campaign view the strategy as quantity - they write content with a bunch of keywords and links on their site and hope crawlers rank it as high as possible. Improving these campaigns typically means boosting their site’s position in the rankings, instead of focusing on converting visitors who come from organic search links. But is this the right strategy?
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This is the second installment (of three) of a series about moving the hosting for a domain name to a different server. For some reason we still hear from clients that they couldn’t see their website or get their emails for days because the hosting of their website was changed. This does not have to be the case!!

This installment is specifically for those brave souls that try to understand how they should set this up for their clients. These are the on-line warriors that call themselves systems administrators. Well…., aspiring systems administrators because an educated systems administrators would start jawning after the third paragraph.
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Dragonfly Media’s preferred partner for photography services, Eef Photography, has won the photography contest of Antillaans Dagblad. The subject matter of the contest had to be the Curacao Carnival’s Gran Marcha which took place last sunday. Eef Ouwehand’s picture of Darlen Manuela got raving reviews from the judges and the general public.

The Hitwise monthly travel category report for January 2007 is in.

Hitwise monitors statistics and search engines to create specialized reports about certain on-line markets. This specific report is about the popularity of travel(-related) websites and specific search phrases people use to find travel websites.

You can download the report from hospitalitynet.org.

Sometimes we get a little carried away when writing about something we feel strongly about. As a web developer I can ramble on for hours about how to best set up a PHP application and Oscar will defend a design he loves till death. The article I just finished writing is one of those articles that you want to keep short, but becomes too long because there is so much you want to convey. For this reason we will split it in three parts and post the parts separately. This is installment no. 1, the basic explanation of the setup of a domain and its hosting.
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There are companies that want a new website every two years (sometimes even every one year) and there are companies that stick with their website for years/decades on end. Why fix it when it isn’t broken?

The ‘problem’ with websites is that companies usually don’t understand the inner workings of their website. They may like a design and feel that the design accurately reflects their marketing message, but they don’t always know what their clients think, how their clients are using their website and if the website is being found through search engines. Most important of all, they usually don’t know how (in)effective their website is in bringing them revenue.
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Source: NYTimes.com

WITH more hotels guaranteeing equal or better prices to travelers who book with them directly, online travel agency Web sites like Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity aren’t always the bargain bins they once were for hotel rates. In response, the agency sites are forced to concentrate on other ways to keep and attract customers.

It used to be that you would book through an online agency because of the savings,” which for one night “could have been upward of $30,” said Lorraine Sileo, an analyst at PhoCusWright, an online travel consulting and research company. The cheaper rates often came with stricter cancellation policies and requirements for full payment when booking. Travelers accepted those conditions because the savings were significant.

“That was yesteryear,” Ms. Sileo said. During the travel slump after the Sept. 11 attacks, hotels were eager to work with discount and travel agency sites to fill rooms. But now that the economy is stronger, the hotel companies have been working to cut out the middleman. (more…)

By Jonathan Barsky and Lenny Nash
Source: HSMAI.org

The Market Metrix Hospitality Index, which is based on 35,000 consumer interviews conducted each quarter, includes a variety of measures about the hotel-reservation experience, both online and offline. This data provides special insight into the growing popularity of Web site usage and the satisfaction with the online experience.

The growth of online booking as a percentage of overall reservations continues to grow dramatically. More people are booking online and less people are booking through central-reservations telephone numbers and offline travel agencies. For example, over the past three years, Best Western International has seen online bookings grow from between 10 percent to 15 percent of overall traffic to around 40 percent today. At Choice Hotels International, nearly 60 percent of reservations now come from online bookings.
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