Dragonfly Media Curacao

P.J. Fusco wrote an article for clickz.com a while ago about Web 2.0 and how it affects your SEO strategy. We saw it today (yeah, shame on us, we’ve been busy) and I think it sums up some of the key reasons for incorporating Web 2.0 concepts in your website.

To succeed on the Web today, you must engage your visitors so they return repeatedly. Toward this end, some Web 2.0 platforms could be your site’s savior; others could be its online demise. Either way, much of the discovery depends on your search channel.

This article will be old news for people in the know, but the people that are just starting out in the wild and wonderful world of SEO and Web 2.0 will find this very interesting. Here’s the link again: How Web 2.0 Affects your SEO Strategy.

Two weeks ago we posted about our efforts for getting some pages out of Google’s supplemental index. The theory was that pages that have gone into supplemental are not getting enough internal link love. This theory was backed by material from Michael Martinez, Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin so we were pretty confident that this would work, but you’re never sure in SEO.

We decided to use a Wordpress plugin called popularity contest to display a list of most visited posts on every page in the blog. As a result of using this plugin every page on the blog would add a link to the ten most popular posts in the blog. This means that those most popular pages would get link love from about 100 sources and every new page would add another link. (more…)

Jeugdfonds Nederlandse Antillen (Youth Fund Netherlands Antilles) is a charitable organisation that wants to improve the life of children in general on the Netherlands Antilles. They do this by searching for partners to finance projects and by setting up new projects and grants.

JENA (short for Jeugdfonds Nederlandse Antillen) focuses on

• Projects that contribute to the necessities for improving youth welfare work in general
• Enhancement of chances and opportunities for young people to improve themselves
• Helping with continuity and safety in instituionalised activities in youth welfare work

These are all very worthy goals of course and luckily there are many people here on Curacao and the rest of the Netherlands Antilles that contribute with money and sweat to further their cause. Besides our monetary donations we also wanted to help with something we’re good at. Hence this report. (more…)

For some of the websites that we work with there are notable differences in the way they rank in Google and in Yahoo. For instance; a website might rank well in Google for a specific search term and be 10 to 30 places lower in Yahoo, or the other way around.

The problem lies in the fact that the search engines are fundamentally different and, because they don’t tell anyone how they work, nobody really knows what all defining factors are for ranking. So, the result is: everybody’s guessing at the differences between Google and Yahoo and nobody’s sure about how to rank well in both at the same time. (more…)

SEOmoz.org has a special section for people who want to publish their content on the SEOmoz-blog. The content in this Youmoz-section sometimes rivals the posts in the official blog in usefulness. One of these very useful articles was posted a week ago by Vincent Goldsmith.

In this post Vincent talks about what he has learned about SEO. In doing so he gives a very accurate account, in our eyes, of some of the fundamentals - as well as pitfalls - of SEO today. He sums up what he has learned in 6 bullet points:

1. Planning matters
2. Text is king
3. Content isn’t everything
4. Google isn’t everybody
5. Update regularly and be very patient
6. You can’t ever stop

Read Vincent’s complete article at Youmoz or at his own website.

Curacaohouses.com is the website of Curacao real estate agent Caribbean Villas & Yachts (CVAY). They sell and rent houses and villas throughout Curacao and the rest of the Caribbean. As the name of the company suggests CVAY also sells yachts. This is done through their sister website cvay.com.

Real estate is hot on Curacao right now. New houses and villas are being built all over the island and are being sold to locals, Americans and Dutch people alike. It seems like every week a new real estate agent sets up business on Curacao so the older real estate agents really need to market themselves to survive this onslaught of new businesses. One way to do this is by using the internet of course. (more…)

The term link baiting sounds wrong. It sounds like you are about to land a vicious hook in somebody’s lower lip and reel him into your boat, flopping about and all. The practice has also gotten some bad press because there are people that forget that just having a great title and a savvy introduction is not enough. The content itself, the article/post, needs to be link-worthy as well.

Tropical SEO, Andy Hagans, is said to be the master baiter (pun by Stuntdubl). He appears to have it figured out how to make content go viral easily and get those links pointing his way. When you read his blog you will understand that link baiting is an art and a lot of work, but if you have the method down you should be able to reap the benefits of those incoming links. (more…)

One of the industries that has changed the most due to the power of the internet is the travel industry. In the ‘good old days’ when you wanted to travel somewhere you would go to a travel agent, load up on brochures and book your vacation with a travel agent. Your opinion of a destination was based on those brochures and the recommendations of travel agents and your friends’ stories. If nobody in your circle of friends had ever been to Thailand and your travel agent didn’t actively tout it, chances were that you would never go there. Some adventurous souls would grab a Lonely Planet and chase Phileas Fogg around the world, but the majority of people just spent their holidays on the well-beaten path.

The internet has changed all that. Roughly 80% of travelers research and book their holidays online and this is expected to become 90% before this decade ends. If you are in the hospitality business you need to be where your guests will find you and the internet (read: Web 2.0) is a different ballgame than the travel agents. In the days of the travel agents and the brochures potential guests could only listen to what you said, but now you need to listen to them and join the conversation or suffer the consequences.  (more…)

1. Cleanliness & Simplicity
A good website design has to contain text and images in balanced proportions. As a rule; pages that only contain text (or even only 50%) have a hard time retaining the visitor’s attention. Also you should take care with adding a lot of dynamic effects, java applets and flash because they can create problems in the visitor’s computers (problems with the pugins, etc.). Pages with a lot of effects can be dense, tiring and boring.

2. Defined Structure
A good design needs a clearly defined structure with an easy to understand navigation that allows the user reach all the information of the website. (more…)

Alexa has been around for just over 11 years (110 years in internet time). During this time it has evolved from a simple indexing system to a huge database of information about sites worldwide. It takes them 2 months to index 4.5 billion pages from over 16 million websites and they continuously do this. To find out what they need to know, they do not solely rely on links to find and categorize websites like the search engines do; they also use the Alexa Toolbar and other toolbars that use the same technology.

One of the ’services’ that Alexa offers is their traffic ranking. This is basically a website ranking based on the amount of unique visitors to a website over the past 3 months. These visitors are not counted through logfiles or JavaScript counters, but by the Alexa toolbar of the visitor to the website. So, if I visit a website with my Alexa-enabled browser my visit is counted. Bo and Oscar do not use one of these toolbars so their visit is not counted. As a result their information is biased and not overly reliable. The fact that our website is the third most popular website in the Netherlands Antilles according to Alexa is testimony to that. (more…)