Dragonfly Media Curacao

Sentro Orto Fisiko Korsou is the practice of prosthetist Tom de Windt on Curacao. SOFK helps people that need a prosthetic limb. He helps local people as well as people from abroad that want to combine a holiday with getting a new prosthesis.

It looks like nothing much has been done on the website for the last few years and it is past due for an overhaul (or at least a content update). The website has been around for a while (since 2000, domain registered in 1998). Seeing that the first Curacaoan websites stem from 1997/98, 7 years is a respectable age here. Read the rest of this entry »

The last two weeks were pretty busy with client work so we didn’t have much time for the blog. Four posts in two weeks is way too few. The coming week will be a bit quieter though, so we can spare some more time for the blog again. Some of the stuff that happened the last two weeks:

• We got some new clients from Curacao for the web design department and had a lot of requests for quotes. So far, this month is looking very good :)
• When analyzing the statistics data of our latest redesign (Dive Operator Caribbean Sea Sports) it turns out that their first month with the new design is their best month so far in terms of visitors and search engine referrals. The amount of search engine referrals has actually doubled this first month. How’s that for a return on investment!
  The coming week we’re going to train two of their instructors on how to use their blog and we’re really expecting great things there.
• Dragonfly Media’s website is the most visited website in the Netherlands Antilles according to Alexa (for an explanation of their biased information see our article on Alexa’s idiosyncrasy).

Curacao Actief is an environmentally conscious tourism company here on Curacao. In effect, this means that they organize tours and activities that go easy on the environment and help people understand the importance of conservation and the beauty of nature.

For a long time people have only taken advantage of nature on Curacao without giving back. It is good to see that eco-tourism is also on the rise on Curacao so our children can enjoy nature here as well.

When looking at their website we get the impression that Curacao Actief is a professional company with a vision and the business-savvy to turn their vision into reality. The homepage has a lot of information and a clear, straightforward structure. The internal pages are filled with information and are easily digestible. So far, this is looking like a well-made, functional website. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »