We are currently starting up a project to promote local Curacaoan websites on the internet. Instead of creating yet another online directory with links to websites on Curacao we wanted to do something more worthwhile for these local websites. In this spirit we decided to help a select group of websites with their search engine optimization. In other words: we want to help these websites to be found more easily and more frequently with search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. We will be sending out emails to companies we want to invite this week.
Our idea is to analyse one website per week on the basic factors that are important to the search engines. The report is not necessarily a bad report, it will be an objective report! This means that we analyse your website and give you our findings, good or bad. We will post the report on this blog as a weekly report. You can then use this information any way you like and we hope that you will contact your webdesigner to congratulate him/her on a job well done or to work with him/her to improve your website’s rankings.
The websites we want to analyse are all local websites. Half of them will be made up of websites of non-profit companies and the other half will be commercial websites. After the report is done we will post it on our website for all to see and send the company a link to take a look at it. Afterwards we will not contact the company in any way to try to sell them our products or services. There are no strings attached.
You might wonder why we want to do this. Why would we spend time and resources on companies that we are not going to approach in relation to this project? One of the reasons is that it is part of our mission statements that we want to improve the use of internet on Curacao (in the end this is beneficial to the island and therefore also to us). A second reason is that search engine optimisation is not yet widely known on Curacao, but it is one of the services we offer. If we improve awareness of this, we will eventually get more business in search engine optimisation; maybe not directly from the specific company, but from companies like them.
If we get a lot of response from the people that we sent this email to we will send everybody an email about when they can expect the report to be ready (if we get 52 respones it will take a year for the final report to be ready with one report per week). Within both categories (charity/commercial) we will use a first come - first serve approach in determining when to create the report. So it pays to respond soon.
If you are reading this post and feel that your website, or a website that you know of, should be included you can put this website in the comments to this post with an explanation of why we should include this website.
[...] monday we will post the first Search Engine Optimization (SEO) review in our Curacao SEO project. The goal of this project is to create awareness about SEO on our island and, in the meantime, help [...]
Have you stopped this project? By now there should be more than 52 study cases but i see less than 20. I have been thinking of such when i came to curacao but after mixing with people and doing lot of genuine talkings (not commercial) i realized it may take at least 5 more years before such an initiative is truly understood.
Yeah, we had to stop it because we didn’t receive enough responses. So basically we ran out of websites to analyze. We could have gone on regardless, but we didn’t want to do this without the approval of the websites’ owners. Before you know it you’re the unsolicited smart a*s and/or the agencies that made the sites would accuse us of cramping their style.
The project was not without result though. More and more local companies are asking questions about SEO, we did some presentations about the subject and other local web design agencies advertise with knowing about SEO as well. It was a step in the right direction, but just one step, not a walk yet and nobody needs sneakers yet…
As you say, it needs time (and education)
I’m not surprised by your words. With current world (economic) events i believe we might soon experience a higher interest for SEO & Webdev. Not because businesses got suddenly educated but rather due to desperate measures. This is a trend already occuring elsewhere…
I really liked your blog! Stumbled your page now. Thanks