Dragonfly Media Curacao

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 »

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.  Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

The Wabi Club is a group of antique car enthusiasts (Wabi is the local word for antique car) who have set up a club to promote the restoration of these golden oldies. Especially in the more rural areas of Curacao many a car can be found in backyards or the “mondi” (bush) just waiting for somebody to give it some tender loving care.

The cars that are restored enter into a second life of appearing at shows and festivities with their proud owners. They even get a special license plate with the word Wabi and their number. If you’ve ever been to a festival on Curacao or have taken a cruise here, chances are that you have seen one or more of these magnificent cars.

This post is not about antique cars. It is about the status of wabiclub.com in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) terms and what can be done to improve its search enine positioning. So, let’s get to that. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last few weeks there has been a lot of debate about Google’s supplemental index which was sparked by an article in Forbes about the so-called “Google Hell”. The biggest part of this debate was a rehashing of earlier discussions and misconceptions, but some were interesting to follow.

Especially the discussion at SEOmoz.org got pretty heated in the comments to a post by Rand Fishkin, aptly named “Supplementary My Dear Watson“. The comments in this post even lead him to retract part of his original statements in a follow-up post. One of the commenters to SEOmoz’s post (Michael Martinez of seo-theory.com) said something that we think can help us get some of the posts in our blog out of the supplemental index.

Michael Martinez explained the main reason for pages to go to the supplemental index:

“linkage (Internal PageRank) determines why pages go Supplemental”

He backed up his statement with content from mattcutts.com, Matt Cutts himself also added to the debate and eventually everybody settled on Michael Martinez being right. Read the rest of this entry »

Roughly two weeks ago we launched the new website of Caribbean Sea Sports. Caribbean Sea Sports is a dive center in Curacao which offers activities like diving, boat trips and all kinds of water sports. Their old website was made with frames, had a very old design and was not very user-friendly. For this reason Tom Zeck (the owner) asked us to create a new website for him and help him with his on-line marketing efforts.

One of Tom’s dive masters (Sadie) was a project manager in a previous life so he asked her to work with us in creating the website. With her help we defined the keywords to go after and set up a new structure. After this was defined she took care of the text and we set up the website.

The goal of the new website was not only to create a more user-friendly website with a more contemporary design, but also to make sure that the website was actually found with phrases other than “Caribbean Sea Sports” in Google, Yahoo and MSN. So far this is going pretty well. Google has indexed most of the new pages and allowed us to remove the old ones and Yahoo has indexed about 50% of the new website (but retains the old pages) . Regretfully MSN has only indexed the new homepage so far.

As for the statistics: so far we have seen an increase of about 50% in clicks coming from the search engines and we expect this trend to continue (and become stronger) during the coming weeks as Yahoo and MSN update their index. The really cool thing about the clicks coming from the search engines is the fact that the most popular search phrase is no longer “Caribbean Sea Sports”, but “sea sports” for which caribseasports.com is number 3 in Google. Another (now) popular phrase is “Curacao diving” for which this website is not very high yet in Google, but we are working on changing that.

So, we can quite confidently say that this project is going pretty well and we can expect some more interesting results over the coming weeks.

Coming 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 some local charities.

Last week we sent emails to a lot of local companies and charities/government institutions and we have to say that the response was pretty good for Curacaoan standards (this is the Caribbean after all). Some people resonded cautiously with more questions about the project, others wanted to wait with saying yes after they had seen the first report, but most of them gave us a full “yes, go ahead”. The first one to respond was the Wabi Club (wabi is the Curacaoan word for “antique car”) so the first report will be about their website.

Just a reminder: the two sources of information for the report will be the code of the websites themselves, combined with other information that is publicly available on-line. We can’t see the statistics, server-side code or anything that requires a username and password.

So; coming monday the Wabi Club will kick off the Curacao SEO Project.

Even if you’re only half serious about doing SEO you need to stay up-to-date with what’s going on in the world of search engines. To do this you can spend hours on end investigating what the search engines are doing, analyze everything you see in the search results and reverse engineer the hell out of those results. You can also go and live in a cave, grow a long beard and eat raw goat because that will end your social life as fast as trying to do all of this alone. It is just too big of a task.

Luckily there are about 10 million people like you, who want to know how you can get the best rankings in Google et al. and these people have blogs as well. So, instead of doing all the legwork on your own you can remain up-to-date by reading what those other people are blogging about, add your own know-how (,intelligence, personality, insights, etc.) and enjoy a happy hour once in a while.

Everybody has his/her own personal favorites. Bo reads entirely different blogs than I do and Oscar reads all those design blogs (which I don’t understand). So, the following “Top 5 of SEO Blogs I Can’t Get Enough Of” is a highly personal list, but I think these blogs are relevant to everybody in the world of SEO. Read the rest of this entry »