23Musings

Came across this excellent link last night that gives a visual representation of the top 100 links in Google and Yahoo for any one search term. It also displays links that appear in both and where they position. It’s really useful, especially if like me, you’re trying to optimise your site for specific high volume search terms.

Have a look at the tool here.

It’s incredibly useful for a company in travel as there’s so much competition online, not just from competitors but from affiliates etc as well.

For example try ‘dubai holidays’; you can see that the Dubai Sands hotel does incredibly well for that term as they position top in both. But then try ‘dubai holiday’ and the Dubai Sands is 4th in Google but doesn’t even show in Yahoo (so maybe they’re not quite so good).

Then try ‘all-inclusive holidays’ and there is still quite a lot of crossover (although not as much as the Dubai term). But if you change that to ‘all-inclusive holiday’ there are only 3 sites that appear in both, so potentially an opportunity for others to focus on that term for both engines and get good coverage.

For an example of someone who’s doing this pretty well try ‘package holiday’ and ‘package holidays’. You’ll see that www.holiday.co.uk position high up for both!

Anyway, enough of that, I need a holiday now…

These days whenever I book a hotel, holiday or pretty much buy anything else I check the web for reviews and people’s experiences.

In travel this is especially prominent with the rise and rise of Trip Advisor and tour operators allowing customers to post reviews on their websites it’s only going to get bigger and bigger.

My personal favourite review site has to be Holiday Watchdog. They saved me from a holiday from hell last year, I read a review on their site which made me nervous about the hotel in question, after much digging around and emails I managed to track down the person who posted the review and they confirmed that the hotel wouldn’t have been for me. They even recommended a more suitable hotel in the same resort which I then booked and had a fantastic time.

So I owe Holiday Watchdog a big debt of gratitude. Check them out by clicking the logo below!

Just got sent this list of domain names and thought I’d share, unfortunate or just plain stupid??

A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com

Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net

Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at
www.therapistfinder.com

And now, we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales:
www.molestationnursery.com

Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church. Their website is
www.cummingfirst.com

Then, of course, there’s these brainless art designers, and their whacky website:
www.speedofart.com

Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe? Try their brochure website at
www.gotahoe.com

Thought it was about time I put up this little holiday search which was on another of my personal sites and has been doing quite well. It’s on the right hand side, right down the bottom (click here) so it’s not in your face or anything, but it is worth a try as there’s some really good last minute holiday deals available!

Yes, you guessed right it’s an affiliate search engine but all in a good cause as my employers product is listed on it (along with a lot of competitors).

Anyway, I can highly recommend it, I even booked my own package holiday through this very search engine! There’s a great range of package holidays on offer. Caribbean holidays are particularly well represented also Florida and Orlando holidays.

So if you’re looking for a late deal holiday and are having difficulty elsewhere give this a try!

It amazes me everytime I visit Google just how many major travel companies don’t appear when I perform the most basic of searches! For example I search for ‘holiday in spain’ and only one of the companies I’m expecting appear in the top 20 natural results. Change that to ‘holidays in spain’ and it’s slightly better (two more appear). The same applies for terms such as ‘caribbean holiday’, again some of the big players are no where to be seen (again, change that to ‘caribbean holidays’ and they fare slightly better).

So I go off to have a look at some of the big players websites….. So many of them never change their page titles as you browse through the site, it’s constantly ‘such and such, the number 1 for holidays’ or similar. A simple change to make the page title specific to the destination a user is browsing would help dramatically (eg. ‘such and such, the number 1 for Florida holidays’ etc).

There’s so much that these companies could do to position better in the major search engines both quickly and easily. It’s certainly not rocket science, it’s actually very easy to get yourself at least in the top twenty for most of your terms and not impossible to get top ten!

labs.google.com/accessible

This is really good news!! Google is testing a version of it’s search for users with sight difficulties or disabilities. Basically it prioritises results based on whether the mark-up used is deemed accessible or not. In their words ‘In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully — pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests’.

There are two reasons why this excites me:

1. The travel website I manage positions amazingly well for all our key search terms in this engine (eg. for some destination names we position 1st when in normal Google we position in the 60′s). This is a real testament to the quality of the code and the developers involved and makes me very happy

2. I can see other uses for this type of search. There is the potential to extend this kind of results parsing and filtering to push sites that look like they are advert filled to the bottom, or to pick out phishing sites and not display them, or to get spam and gateway pages out of the results altogether.

It would be fantastic if Google are working on some ways to clean up search results in the Labs. While I love Google and it’s my starting place of choice I’d really like to have more relevant results and less dross (affiliate sites, spam, gateways etc) and this could be a step towards being able to filter those out (or at least drop them down the list).

I was lucky enough this weekend to tag along with some friends to the Glade Festival. My friends were playing live at the event so I managed to blag a free VIP pass to the event.

Had a fantastic time. Many years ago I spent most of my summers following artists from festie to festie but now with work and family responsibility I don’t get the chance to do it as often as I’d like. It was really refreshing to see that the artists I met were still as up for it as they were in the 90′s and the music itself is as fresh and exciting as ever.

Saw some excellent bands and heard some fantastic dj’s over the weekend. It was great to meet up with people I hadn’t seen for years (bumped into one DJ I used to know and hadn’t seen for 11 years).

Would highly recommend the festival to anyone who likes electronic music and is familiar with the Glade area at Glastonbury.

There appears to be an emerging style associated with web 2.0 sites. The large text, drop shadow, curved edges approach while clean and definately easy to read is getting a bit stale in my opinion and seems to be a safe option being taken by many designers. Could this be due to designers spending more time with developers and taking usability a little too much to heart (sites can be usable and still inspiring in design)?

I’d like to see a bit more variety and invention in the designs appearing at the moment. I like designs to be edgy and different, while still usable and sticking to standards. All this is possible but seems to be getting overlooked at the moment.

So, first it was River Island with their Flash only site with no alternative for those of us who cannot view sites in Flash and now Diesel, one of my favourite brands, have done the same.

Diesel however, have performed the cardinal sin of not only making it Flash only but also not implementing it very well! I have Flash player 9 on my laptop and 8 at home, it doesn’t work with either if you go to www.diesel.com in either IE6 or Firefox. However if I enter the direct address of the SWF file it works fine (although pretty slowly).

Now I find it extremely narrow minded of these brands not to consider the disabled or blind user by not giving an alternative format, but to then not implement their sniffer code as well is unforgiveable for such high profile sites. I’m amazed Diesel haven’t been picked up for this as River Island got such a slating, I’m expecting all you bloggers to make sure people know!

Have a look at the Diesel site and let me know if you see any more than this:

So the world cups just about finished and suddenly traffic to travel websites has rocketed (or at least ours has). I find it hard to understand why people have waited and booked later this year, there seems no sense in it as it’s just people booking for the school hols so that wouldn’t have been affected by the WC. Bookings have increased in the last three days due to this new influx of people with strange booking habits, which is great, but it would be nice to not have these unexpected lulls in volume.

The lates booking season has started with earnest and everyone has sales and excellent deals on offer.

Within an hour of England being kicked out the world cup one well known tour operator sent out an email newsletter using the sad exit of England as a headline to grab attention (amazing the impact footie can have).