Financial & Travel Musings

Although you can pay a whole lot of money to some consultant to soup up your website, there’s an awful lot of free seo tools knocking around which can go a long way to checking out what needs doing (if anything).

Free doesn’t mean low quality either. There are excellent tools around to analyse the keywords on your site and compare it with those of your competitors. In years gone by that would have cost your serious money but these days very good tools are around to do it free.

In fact there are a whole raft of excellent free tools. The problem is working out what to do with them, what the results mean and what you can do to correct any problems that are thrown up. Take, for example, the incoming links. Although more is better, how many is “enough”? That depends on what your competitors results are (you can use these tools on them as well as on your own site). If you don’t have “enough”, what do you do about it? That’s easy too: just subscribe to one of the many directory listings services and stand back as the incoming links start rolling in.

Popularity: 2% [?]

It hardly seems like a week since we were getting seriously annoyed with the UK court system but it is.

This is quite a busy time for us in a lot of different areas and for a variety of reasons.

Since we weren’t too pleased about the approach taken by our UK hosting service re the above, we took the opportunity to move the key blogs over to America where the First Amendment gives writers and free speech generally a whole lot more protection than the UK does in some areas. That was a surprisingly seamless transition but has had the effect of seeming to change the composition of our readers for reasons that aren’t readily apparent at the moment (it’s not the geotargeting of searches as that usually doesn’t affect blogs that much).

That move has had the side-effect of creating another blog for us back in the UK should we want to use that though we’ve not thought a whole lot about that as yet.

Separately from that we’re starting to gear up for John starting school here in September. It seems like a long way ahead at the moment but already we’ve a couple of appointments at the school in May relating to that.

I’m still plugging away with the Child Development course (ED209) which seems to have ramped up the quantity of work required of us over the last few weeks. At the moment it’s almost as though it were a 90 point course rather than a 60 point one. I’m still currently sticking (just!) to my schedule which is running 4 weeks ahead of the official calendar but I can’t see me keeping up that lead much longer if the quantity of work doesn’t go down a little. On that front, the next book is on children’s learning of language which I did a lot of during the English course last year so, in theory, that should be easier to get through. What it has taught me is to investigate further when comments on a course say that it’s “hard going” as this one did. Fortunately, next years course doesn’t have comments like that!

Tomorrow’s a public holiday here so we’re heading off somewhere or at least hope to if the weather is reasonable which, at the moment, doesn’t seem too likely (after all, it is a public holiday so what do you expect?).

Popularity: 48% [?]

When people first start out with their plans to make a fortune online one of the first strategies is to maximise the traffic to their site.

Fair enough, but no matter how high the traffic to the site may be, it doesn’t mean that you’ll actually make any money from it simply because the high traffic doesn’t equate to high conversion of viewers to customers. That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in.

That’s a big term for a big area. What’s entailed is a very full analysis of your site to ensure that it’s properly planned, the text is professionally written to maximise the impact for potential customers combined with analysis of how well it’s all working. Even small enhancements can mean quite substantial improvements in the effectiveness of your site in terms of converting views to actual customers.

Popularity: 53% [?]