Financial & Travel Musings

I thought I’d try a little experiment with one of the blogs that I’ve not really used in quite a while.

What I did was to write a post matching the searches coming in to the blog and see how that did. Now, before you do that you obviously need some content for searches to find so seeing as we were in the depths of winter I wrote a few posts about that to begin with.

The first trickle of searches coming in were for things like Russian clothing and cold weather clothing. Fair enough as that matched some of the posts in a vague kind of way. So I wrote some more on the clothing angle. Next stream up was along the lines of rain wear which also seemed reasonable enough. However, a month down the line and it’s more along the lines of shiny winter clothes and girls in wet clothes which do follow the progression of the searches and subsequent posts but which seem a long way from the original ones!

As I’m only doing it as a side-line I’m only writing one post a week so it’s taking a while to bring in the search traffic but if you’d like to add it, pop on over to On a Postcard.

Popularity: 2% [?]

You’d think by now that we’ve have developed a more elegant way of putting such a fundamental concept across but many websites still continue to stick with click here as their call to action.

They don’t have to do that though and usually it’s much more effective to put a meaningful phrase in the “click here” link but seemingly they can’t be bothered to put that extra little bit of effort into their marketing. That’s a shame really as search engines generally look at the information within the link and “click here” doesn’t give them anything to work with.

Obviously it’s not always possible to put a truly meaningful phrase in the link but, usually, it is.

Popularity: 1% [?]

When Internet marketing kicked off some years ago there was very little consideration of marketing local services via the medium and for good reason: there was no easy way to go about it.

Nowadays it’s quite different of course with untold numbers of small enterprises considering that it’s essential to be online. This change came about through the wonders of geotargeting which basically lets search engines present you results that are more local to you than they would ordinarily be.

To do this they need to come at the problem from two directions. First off, there’s you: your IP address (assigned by your Internet provider) gives them your broad location. Secondly, there’s information from the web pages themselves thus you see for example, charlotte dentist being mentioned prominently on the relevant website. That second one isn’t so obvious though as many websites don’t bother to quote a physical address, relying instead on contact pages which also omit this information in many cases and thereby throw away untold numbers of customers.

Of course, there’s the perennial problem in that nobody really knows what search terms people out there will use to find a given business.

Popularity: 3% [?]