Recently we launched a new website for Sentro Orto Fisiko Korsou (SOFK). SOFK is a center for high-tech prostheses and orthotics run by Tom de Windt and his wife Mieke. Tom is the prosthesist and Mike is a physiotherapist. These people give hope to people who have lost a limb or have a physical defect (by birth or by accident) by giving them the means to cope with their problem. We are very proud that we could help them with their website.
For some time now I have been working on the website curacao.com. As the work I do for this site is apart from Dragonfly Media and as it is more technical in nature I never blogged about it here before. However, lately it is starting to become more interesting to blog about because the Tourist Board (owner of curacao.com) has started up an SEO make-over campaign.
The Tourist Board and I have been talking about it for some time now and they fully realize that optimizing your website is one of the most effective ways of getting more visitors (on-line AND off-line). The SEO report I made for them outlined a set of actions which would help in getting better rankings for the targeted key phrases. Once we have pruned the list of keywords and phrases to target, we will start implementing the suggestions.
The Curacao Tourist Board has graciously allowed me to report on the results in this blog so you can expect periodical updates here about the status of this campaign.
Disclaimer in the interest of full disclosure: Dragonfly Media and I have no authority whatsoever when it comes to the contents of curacao.com and associated websites. Any questions regarding the contents of and/or advertising on curacao.com should be directed to the Curacao Tourist Board or the companies/people that they have charged with authority in this respect.
The sad thing about making websites is that they are, by definition, temporary. At the speed the internet is moving, you just know that the website you made yesterday is not good enough anymore tomorrow. But then again, this is marketing and that’s the way it works. You need to move forward and renew yourself, and your company, every day to be able to stay ahead of the curve.
When you redesign, reorganize or rebuild a website the URLs of the individual pages will usually change as well. This becomes a problem when you think of all the links into your website and the link juice you’re throwing away if you don’t redirect these links in an SEO-friendly way. Sure, you can catch the errors people are getting and redirect them to the proper page or your homepage with links or JavaScript, but these methods don’t work well for the search engines. This is where 301 redirects come into play. Read the rest of this entry »
Last Thursday we launched the new website of Curacao publisher Loket 1. This website is only three pages in size so it’s not the biggest project we ever did, but it is the first website within our partnership with BKCC. Bas did the design and we implemented it into a website.
The idea is that we will be doing this more often. BKCC is more at home with print work and marketing concepts than we are (he has been doing this work for 15 years now) and we are more adept at creating websites. This makes Dragonfly and BKCC natural partners that do not need to bite each other. Furthermore, this also gives us and BKCC opportunities to work more efficiently and to exchange information and ideas.
The Curacao marketing & advertising professionals meetup of last Wednesday was a big success. In the true Caribbean fashion everybody was at least a half hour late, but the turn out was great.
We counted about 40 people (which is a lot for such a small island) when everybody was in. There were marketers (off-line and on-line), advertising agencies, photographers, designers and all kinds of other riff-raff. We hope that next time some more of the other web design agencies will also be able to come because the web should not be underrepresented here. Read the rest of this entry »
About two years I spoke with a friend of mine who was working with one of the big development/marketing companies in the US. He did some work in Curacao and saw a lot of potential; not only here, but also in the Latin American market. He pitched his idea of setting up an office in Curacao to explore and service the Latin American market to his boss but she shot his idea down. The reasoning was that they didn’t see a lot of value in that market. They did not want to go beyond the Caribbean Sea which they could service from Miami.
About two weeks ago the second Search Engine Strategies (SES) Latino happened and it looks like my friend was right on the money. The Latin American market is growing and has even been a #1 priority of Google for the last year. This specialized SES was the result of this growth and potential. Read the rest of this entry »
Dragonfly Media has been trying to promote Search Engine Optimization on Curacao for a while now. We have been talking with (potential) clients, we did our Curacao SEO Project and we have some other plans to improve the general level of SEO on our little island.
We are seeing some progress in the amount of people that know something about SEO here and more and more clients are asking us for this specific service.
Our work is far from done though when you take into account this post on SEOmoz about how Search Marketing Education still has a long way to go. And they’re talking about the US which is usually about 5 years ahead of Curacao when it comes to the internet!
One of the blogs I read regularly is garrycon.com. Last week Garry posted a somewhat panicky post about how he thought that he’d been doing all the wrong things on his website.
He wrote about how he thought schemes like Text Link Ads were bad, links without rel=”nofollow” would make him lose PageRank and how duplicate content on his own site was making pages in his site go supplemental. As Andy Beard told Garry in the comments; he was effectively the victim of Google FUD.
FUD is an abbreviation for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. The idea is that you use people’s fears to sell a product by casting doubt on the competitor’s product. IBM used it very effectively during the 70’s to discredit Amdahl. Even though Amdahl’s products were better and more cost-efficient than IBM’s products people preferred IBM computers because of the FUD.
Google FUD is slightly different though. Google uses it to spread fear in the hearts of SEOs that try to bend the rules. The method is that they tell webmasters just enough to know what is the right way to do things but they leave room for speculation. Then when people address the holes or, try to, take advantage of the apparent holes in the algorithm they hint that those tactics might get people banned. Read the rest of this entry »
We were having some problems with the sidebar in the blog. It just stopped halfway through on some occasions, gave errors on other occasions and even worked fine sometimes as well.
We weren’t sure why this was occurring (we’re guessing that it’s probably a question of a too heavy load). Someone here on the island told me that maybe upgrading to the newest version would help and because I don’t like all the work involved in moving websites to different hosting plans I thought I’d give it a shot
So, we’ve got ourselves a brand new, spiffy blog. If you see any errors, could you please let us know so we can fix it or move to another server.
Curacao has its own set of rules on “how to do business”. Just like in all other countries, you need to know what’s acceptable behaviour and what’s not. One particular rule here is a real pearl of local wisdom (and a pet peeve of ours): “a competitor is a competitor is a competitor”.
We feel that if you see your competitor only as a competitor you’re limiting the progress of the line of business you are in. The result is a group of backward companies that are mostly concerned with what the competition is doing, instead of working to improve their own product.
The adherence to this rule is changing though. Especially in the more internationally oriented businesses there seems to be a trend towards cooperation (with a healthy dose of competition) instead of raw, unabiding competition. A shining example is of course the hospitality business, which is internationally oriented by default, with the CHATA as its Curacaoan flagship.
An attempt is being made now by Tamira La Cruz to also strengthen the ties between the marketing & advertising professionals on the island. Read the rest of this entry »
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