SEO Ibiza - Superior Small Business SEO

Ok, unlike most of the Ibiza-related search phrases, up until now we have never targeted the phrase  Web Design Ibiza,  primarily because we don’t do web design as such, and so thought we’d just leave that chart to those that do.

However,  during the course of our work we obviously come across many web different designers and web design companies of one flavour or another, some that we cannot recommend highly enough, and well, the others.

We wrote about some experiences (ours and clients) with one such company, back in January, here  SEO & Web Designers - compare and contrast ..For the purposes of this post we will label this collection our “LemonIbiza” group of companies.

So after another incredibly unprofessional display this week from a long established Spanish company based in Ibiza, we feel compelled to warn the public or anyone with an interest or currently in the market for a new website in Ibiza of the unbelievably bad behaviour of some of these companies.

This particular company actually just pulled the plug on a working business website this week leaving 404 error messages over an initially minor dispute. Unbelievable.

Anyway, from an SEO Point of view, we would now say we well placed to comment reasonably objectively on various aspects of the Island’s web designers, and of their relative and likely behaviours, both with regards to your site’s potential structural SEO “Friendliness” and as in how easily you may (or may not) find trying to have more work done on the site after the fact, by them or by someone else, if your web designer turns out to be SEO Clueless instead of SEO Friendly..

SEO is of course critical during the web design stage of a website and your business success with the site will depend on this.

We are able to advise you on how your chosen Ibiza web designer stacks up,  both with the optimization of their own sites and of their client sites, and the liklihood of them successfully delivering you something that works in the search engines.

Plus, we have seen more than enough of these few to know exactly how they will be acting towards you once they’ve already had your money, few months or a year down the line, with LemonIbiza once paid, you are just a nuisance.

There are of course several very good web designers in Ibiza, but there are several companies and/or individuals that you should avoid at all costs.

Obviously we cannot publish names here but we would invite anyone thinking about having a new website built in Ibiza, by either English-speaking or Spanish speaking companies or individuals, please do fire us a quick email to check that you aren’t just signing up with one of these, as you will definitely end up sorry if you do.

We also would like to reiterate that we have no interest in getting your (web design) business in Ibiza, only in ensuring that you get a good web designer, who will do you right, and that in the event of us ever being retained for seo services on the site, that it’s not one of these “organisations” to whom we refer.

As well as the bad few we also have a list of excellent Ibiza web designers we know personally, or just know of, we compete with their client sites daily etc, who will be pleased to help you, rather than just help themselves to your money and not come up with the goods in the long term.

The LemonIbiza companies will attempt to dazzle you with techno-speak and a website with all the latest gimmicks, all singing, all dancing nonsense for thousands of Euros when often a free CMS based system would do a much better job for maybe a few hundred Euros.

We are happy to advise on the suitability, likely effectiveness and cost value of any website solution you’ve been offered or quoted for and it’s potential SEO effectiveness in the long term.

This is a free service offered to businesses or individuals  actively in the market for a new website, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us by phone or email to take advantage of this, we promise you’ll wish you had in a few months should you end up signing with one of organisations mentioned above.

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Woopra is really very cool indeed.  The spec ops team started using it on their brand of covert seo ops a while back, and we’ve been monitoring activity live when we’re around here too.

Watching people come onto the system, flick around, read, and in some cases comment etc can be a funny feeling. ..like instant Spam karma at work

..It must be funnier still for them,  because when we can see the searches they’ve done and it’s something like “dofollow seo blog” and they are then already commenting within 3 seconds (and tagging themselves in the process) we obviously know their game before they’ve even pressed “publish”

And they definitely dont seem to know our game the couple of times we’ve intervened with a Woopra style IM, saying:

“…errr, please can you not spam here..?”

..Sorry if that was you, but really, you should know better.

..And finally although we do try to leave the gloating to the (extremely irreverent) Spec Ops lot, if it hadn’t been for Woopra we would have missed the opportunity of some serious whooping (well a wry smile anyway) when we watched this one come in live this afternoon..

bit random, but well hey, real searches and hits often are, and yes we know it’s the English spelling of optimization, but it’s still the big SEO words, and it’s only 1 day away from our site’s 8-month old birthday..

…and we were number #1 !!   :)  ..so yes its possible to see how people are getting addicted to this program, we think we’ll probably be subscribing come the time.

We will be doing a proper review at some point once we can stop playing with it and think about serious useage, but that may still be a little way down the line yet in all honesty

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“Superior..”  …it’s a good word isn’t it? ..we obviously like it a lot, and aspire to be it. We write about it a lot, and we invade the Google charts for it as often as we can as light amusement and respite from all the serious work..

We’re not saying we are superior, just that we try very hard to be a superior business to deal with, on a daily basis.

Let’s start by taking our definition of superior from Answers.com  …and have bolded the ones we especially like

adj.

1. Higher than another in rank, station, or authority: 
2. Of a higher nature or kind.
3. Of great value or excellence; extraordinary.
4. Greater in number or amount than another: an army defeated by superior numbers of enemy troops. (or just superior troops)
   
5. Affecting an attitude of disdain or conceit; haughty and supercilious.
6. Above being affected or influenced; indifferent or immune: “Trust magnates were superior to law” (Gustavus Myers).
7. Located higher than another; upper.
8. Botany. Inserted or situated above the perianth. Used of an ovary.
9. Printing. Set above the main line of type.
10. Logic. Of wider or more comprehensive application; generic. Used of a term or proposition.

n.

1. One that surpasses another in rank or quality.
2. Ecclesiastical. The head of a religious community, such as a monastery, abbey, or convent.
3. Printing. A superior character, as the number 2 in x².

Our version of the wiki definition of  “superiority complex” is that we want to rank for as many variants of the word as we possibly can   ..something about feelings of inadequacy if we dont have #1’s for “superior + absolutely everything”

So a bit like our seo demonstration list over on the spec ops blog back in March, (when this blog was still a twinkle in an SEO Warrior’s eye) here’s what’s going down..

Currently we have under our control the following:

(all #1’s on Google.com,  ..won’t bother listing the many more top 10 combos) Do the searches if you can be bothered, or you can just take our word for it, currently we are.

(links don’t trigger searches in this instance)

• superior seo
• superior seo services
• superior search engine optimisation services
• superior small business
• superior business seo
• superior seo business
• superior seo packages
• superior onsite seo
• superior seo training
• superior seo blog
• superior blog integration
• superior seo power
• superior seo theories
• superior seo design / by design
• superior seo techniques / skills
• superior seo demo / demonstration
• superior domination /seo domination
• superior seo troops / combat / war / tactics
• superior seo tools / seo resources / seo facts
• superior Ibiza
• superior seo on the beach
• superior seo for video

We do still have some more bigger and better “superiors” (..superior superiors if you like..) on the list but these will just continue to cruise in naturally as we hunt down our bigger targets announced in the penultimate  seo demonstration post.

There have also however been some fluctuations with some of these, so this post as with all of our ramblings on here is an attempt at a “superior seo experiments” we now want to create a central “superior node“, to which all variations of the theme are now tied from this point onwards.

If we’ve done this right this should be pretty much nailing down the coffin lids on the enemy on the superior fronts for good now.. (once again, sorry Butch, but you’ll really have to try harder than that )

And finally a quick shout out to our friends (and the latest of our blog integration projects Smithblog)  just starting to really gather pace and coming to terms with their newfound ability to announce their every waking thought straight into the the first pages of the charts, with these posts about something else obviously very dear to our hearts and theirs, superior coffee and the best coffee in London. Ranking any less than #1 for this will just not do guys,  we expect great things from you now.

Ciao for now Amigos..

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We interrupt this program to bring you big SEO news.  Google have fired a shot across the bows of Wordtracker and the other keyword tracking tools by finally introducing the real search traffic figures to their external keyword research tool here:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Previously the tool only showed little bar graph representations of the search traffic and didnt really tell you very much, although the advertising competition data did always give a reasonable idea of advertising competition and hence how profitable the area promised to be.

We had wondered for a while how long until this happened, and indeed with all the data Google gather, why they hadn’t done this earlier.Maybe they felt sorry for the little guy…

We expect the owners of Wordtracker, Wordze and the many smaller firms doing this are crying into their coco tonight.

Update 14.07.08 - we can”t help that chuckle that for a variety of keywords beginning with “Google upgrade” we’re also the Google authority on this topic..

Oh the responsibility..

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Ok, against all best advice from the seo spec ops commando team about “being the grey man“,  “flying below the radar“, not inviting competition, etc, etc, it’s time for an open declaration of war on the SEO Serps in general.

We’ve gone on (endlessly, and bored most stupid, no doubt) in the past about our site being an ongoing seo demonstration showcasing what we mean by by SEO by design, right from the outset.

Well, truth be (finally and fully) told, we always had some very ambitious plans for the site, and as we approach the 8 month old point, (and especially as somebody slipped up in the previous Video SEO post!!)  it is finally time to let the angry cat out of the bag as to our ultimate goals we set ourselves  at inception.

We’ve used the standard military tactics of surprise and diversion, smokescreens and outflanking up to this point, to mask our true intent, which was always:

to get top 10 for the big SEO terms, by the one year old point.

We’ve gone on and on about the “battles” for fairly easy and uncompetitive terms like “SEO Demonstration“, “Superior SEO” etc, and at times we know, invited ridicule or at the very least, patronising and condesending remarks from various forums and their resident “experts” and somehow always managed to bite our tongues (not in our nature at all ) about our true goals.

….however had we stated them out loud back then, people would just have laughed even more…  Well, we’re 2/3 of the way into the mission now, and we believe that people may take it a little more seriously now,  as our strength grows exponentially, along with our clientbase.

So it’s now time to come right out with it, and put it all out here, that we’re going all out hell for leather, sh*t or bust..

We want a top 10 for “SEO“, or “SEO services” or preferably both, by the site’s first birthday.  How about that then eh?  Dumb or what? 

We may fail, or we may succeed, that remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure, we’re going to keep pushing, right up until Nov 17th 2008, when www.seoibiza.com becomes a precocious one year old brat.

But at 2/3 s of the way into the mission, to us it now looks more possible than it ever has up until this point, and even during the first dark days back in Nov 07 when the site was first launched, we never gave up the vision.

By comparison to back then, we’re now on the home straights..  ..Take a look at Google’s Webmaster Tools reports for last week, and we’re higher still again this week.

Now obviously we still have a long way to go, and the higher you go, the harder it gets, and we have and only 4 months to do it in, but frankly as our clientbase expands, and we get to work on bigger, better, older, stronger & more authorative and powerful sites, and the happy owners all keep linking back to us as a gesture of appreciation for a job well done, and for our outstandingly good rates, the whole thing just keeps gathering pace..

Like a runaway train, with the throttle stuck open, going down a steeper and steeper incline..  ..What do we all reckon? anyone taking any bets?

At the one year point we are committed to stopping working on the site actively, and just leaving it to fend for itself as it gathers age.

At the one year point we will also be writing up a comprehensive SEO case study on exactly what we did, and how we did it..

…because we think if we do manage to rank the thing top 10 for SEO or SEO services in less than one year, in amongst what should really be the cream of the SEO world as our competition..

…well, we think quite a lot of people may sit up and pay attention?

..At the very least we expect they might be curious, and it will be free as well, not just another eBook.   ..The only caveat will be that you have to read it on our site…

We’re using nothing but white hat methods, and making friends with everybody we work with of course, but we do think we have a pretty good handle on what works and what doesn’t currently, which ultimately is what SEO is all about.

Obviously we know the site’s we’re engaging with now, and who will be contributing their votes for us in due course, and we also know that the SEO spec ops group are currently preparing some major linkbait with the help of the very fit young lady seo assistant we have on our side now…

and we think it’s about 50/50 whether we can get there or not, and so still all to play for.…

..Obviously any outside link help is always more than welcome,  but we got here pretty much by being nice to people (except spammers in our way obviously, and in our comments - you know who you are!!) and by knowing our stuff, and we will continue down the righteous path…

Hasta Luego Amigos, …Blog HQ over and out.

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Video and SEO for video has been one of the SEO buzzwords for some time now, but we tend not to jump straight on the latest trends, just because everyone else is doing so, we always prefer to have some valid reason for doing it whenever possible…

Well now we do, we’re teaming up with what we believe is a great site, belonging to a thoroughly nice guy, that has everything going for it, except the kind of results it deserves.

This is hopefully win / win for both of us for several reasons.

• It gives us the chance to get truly stuck into the modern world of Google universal search and start really getting our heads around the do’s, don’ts and the amazing potential of SEO for video, without having to go down the (often very dull) SEO blogging route that so few can make work well..

• It gives us new friends in Amsterdam (our second favourite place after Ibiza,  indeed if they had the required weather and beaches, we may have actually moved there instead )

• It gives them the chance to start really maximising the potential of their site (which I’ll get to in a minute)

• It hopefully gives our budding “fittest seo assistant in the world” the opportunity to get the training she needs to become the truly awesome linkbait we need, to propel us from around the #100 +/- 10 mark currently, into the Google Top 10 for SEO & SEO Services by our one year old aniversary on November 18th 2008..

Optimistic? well, yes, impossible? absolutely not… 

This site has a lot going for it, firstly, if “Content is truly King” as so many would have us believe, then this site is the as-yet uncrowned Emperor of Dance Music Video sites. It is run by one of the coolest Americans we’ve ever met.

It should be clearly stated here for the record that our general “anti American vibes” do not apply to US expats who have seen the light, shed their robes of oppression and “done one” from the homeland to find a better place to live, and in particular the (ex) Americans who make it to either Ibiza or Amsterdam and stay there, are appointed honoury European status in our eyes. They generally hate the US’ warmongering as much if not more than the rest of us and the world do, and that makes them just fine in our eyes..

The site is also old, well old in web terms at 7 years,  being launched in 2001, and it is chock full of 100% ORIGINAL video content.

And when we say “original” we mean it, in that the guys go out with cameras, they go to the world’s best clubs, plug into the decks, record the world’s best DJs sets, playing live, and film them, and the crowds, in the clubs.

So if you are into Clubbing & Dance Music, well, it doesnt get much better than that, does it?seriously this is the online music site for you.

The site is www.dancetrippin.tv 

And they’re not some lame corporate brand trying to skank you out of as much of your money as possible, they are genuine dance music fans, Will Johnston who owns and runs the site is a resident DJ at Bora Bora Ibiza and has poured his heart, soul and life savings into this over the years, because he loves it.

This is exactly the type of organisation we want to work with and are going to do everything we can for them on this, for gratis, just because we thoroughly support him & his cause of the little guy over the Global Corporate (read sold-out) brands that dominate the dance music business online.

For far too long now, there has been, and continues to be, far too much “Business” in the dance music business for our liking.. watch this space.

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So the SEO v2.0 sites are launching fast this week, one a day so far..

This one belongs to a friend of ours and another expat and is the version 2.0 site of an SEO by Design site we originally built back in Dec 07, but for Malta not Ibiza.

We’ve already mentioned it on our main site a while ago, here SEO Malta but it finally went live yesterday. The original site we built was just used to incubate the domain, and gain a little pagerank and authority, while he had the proper site built.

We then 301′d the old pages across to the new and can now crack on with making sure it can be found..

You can see it here: find property in malta or gozo and we will be using this as a reference site to advertise our seo services across the Archipelago, by placing it as high as we can in his searches and letting people find us the way they have been thus far..

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Ok so not withstanding the trials and tribulations of the previous post, it’s onwards and upwards for some more of the more business savvy company owners who do recognise the advantages of using SEO to drive your business forwards through your website.

The latest of such is www.internationalvillas.net, whose core business is Ibiza Villas rentals, although they also deal with villas in South Africa & St Tropez.

This is an interesting one, because they have a whole new site currently in development, and are aiming to really take this market to the next level now.

The new site is being developed by our very favourite web designers - d3r who fortunately do understand and “believe” in SEO (..if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be working on the kind of sites that they do, of that there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever )

So our brief now is to give the old site as much of a push as we can manage in the meantime, some 6-8 weeks yet, which we are confident is enough to make a substantial difference.. We will then 301 the old pages to the new pages and continue onwards and upwards..

Frankly we think even the old site is still one of the nicest of it’s genre, and having seen sneak peeks of the new one, we’re fairly confident that they’ll be setting the standard in this market for a while to come now.

Have a look at the “old” site, it’s actually so nice we might ask if we can have the flash and moving pictures for something else.  & we’ve seen the new one too, it is of course awesome as is everything that comes out of D3R these days, as they really do seem to have the ability to produce both stunningly beautiful, powerful CMS driven sites that also work great in the search engines..

We have a feeling the new one will end up on our page of Ibiza Reference Sites because frankly sites like these make us look good, and all we have to do is give them a little push to put them at the top of their searches, which in comparison to the skill involved in building them in the first place, is child’s play.

Without meaning to sound too full of it, if we were the competition in this field now, we would be getting a little worried and thinking about a site rebuild

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We have written previously about web designers, and the different types we come across in our work, from the “SEO friendly” who not only understand and embrace the concept of SEO and optimising sites for the engines, and work in close contact with SEO’s for the benefit of their clients. These guys are generally the cream of the web design industry, and could do every bit as good a job as most SEO’s but just dont have the time.

..Through to the “SEO skeptical” types who have reservations, but are at least open to the idea in theory…

…But rarely in this day and age do you come across the absolute dinosaurs who:

“simply do not believe that there is any such thing..”

This would actually be immensely funny, if it were not:

• true

• sad

• for the fact that we’ve had to battle tooth and nail with one in particular now, for several months.

This morning, as the new site was going live, and supposed to be a controlled migration using 301’s from the old site pages, this particular individual was telling my client (and friend) that:

• a) there is no such thing, its all bullsh*t.
  

• b) it is luck alone where google place you in the index

• c) you have to pay to be at the top

• d) my friend (client only in that we are doing the work, he is an old old friend and we are not even charging him) is being duped.

wtf??!! ..on top of this, for months now we have been stressing in multiple (unpaid for emails) over and over again the absolute importance of not going live before the appropriate .htaccess with 301’s is working correctly.

“THIS MUST NOT HAPPEN” … lol. ..so yesterday what happens?

..the site: search shows a new index page installed, DNS switched across , and 7 x 404 errors on the Google cached old pages ffs.

…Apparently it’s not important anyway, because “he doesnt believe in SEO”

What can you do? ..so this leads us to ask the question:

Just how many web designers out there actually “don’t believe in SEO” ?

..Seriously, how can someone even dare to call themselves a “professional web designer” in this day and age, and never mind not understanding the importance of SEO, but …. “not believe in it”??

..I mean we’re not talking about religion or fairy tales where there is any element of reasonable doubt ??

..is this just some random isolated dinosoar on a far flung island who hasnt looked at the internet for the last ten years? Or is it a deep seated feeling or belief held by outdated webbies who feel threatened by the new age?

Either way the SEO Meteor will be causing their extinction all too soon we think…

This particular one is certainly far more interested in anyone who should randomly happen to chance across the site knowing that it has passed “strict validation tests” on every page, and thereby immediately leaching off 2 /11 ths of any available pagerank (from every page) to & w3.org, (and another 2/11ths to macromedia and himself) than of improving it’s chances of ever getting seen in the first place.

But then of course, its “just luck” anyway isnt it? :)  truly, we are speechless.

& the world is flat too I suppose ??

So if you are in the market for a new website, whatever you do, make absolutely sure your web designer is not one of these “I dont believe in SEO” types, because truly, even in this day and age, they are still out there.

really, we kid you not.

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Having spent last week in London running SEO Training Courses (thanks for making London as pleasant as possible for us guys ;0 ) ..we are however quite glad to get home again and back to our more usual brand of SEO .. on the beach.

It was good to get home and check in on sites we havent looked at for a week or so, and in some instances have seen big improvements that we have been waiting for, finally coming home to Dada.

It’s always good when this happens, and particularly when we get to play with an established, but unoptimised site, that already has a modicum of inbound linkstrength, but unfocused onsite optimisation, because this is the main time all the talk of SEO being a slow process goes right out of the window, and you can quite often fairly launch them up the charts for the keywords you focus them at, sometimes, literally overnight. This is when clients are prone to thinking you are some sort of SEO Overlords.

We go to great pains to try and explain that they are not all like this, often it takes months of fine tuning, but they’re not listening by now, they’re thinking about who they are going to call and gloat about being Google #1 to, and of course the implied referrals for us.. …well, who are we to try & rain on their parade?

As well as, and partly because of that, that our own site is going from strength to strength, and the client list is expanding almost exponentially.

With regards to the main site www.seoibiza.com this week saw the first of the “real” (ie non geo-related) seo business hits converting into enquiries across the major engines, like:

rank better in Google (#2 Yahoo.com) …interesting search on Yahoo..?

affordable seo packages (#11 Google.com)

seo for flash websites (#10 Google.com.au)

plus a couple of geo, (but non-seo) hits, and unintended, but welcome hits like:

IT company in Ibiza - although Google.nl actually picked up small case “it” in a different context and used this snippet

SEO Ibiza are a search engine optimization company in Ibiza specialising in … website return your investment into it and drive your business forwards. … www.seoibiza.com/ - 13k - In cache - Gelijkwaardige pagina’s

and we have also come bursting into view for “simple seo” and “seo made easy” as well, (so better get on with making the video promised on that page soon now, eh?

..Its not so easy out here you know, but we promise it will be worth the wait.. we will be launching the world’s fittest seo assistant live on that page in the video, so bookmark it!! )

Overall we’re pretty pleased with this kind of performance across the board, bearing in mind some of the big searches we’re in too, and considering this site is just 32 weeks old.

So now it’s time to round up the week’s news with another long overdue seo v2.0 relaunched site here.. uk dating agencies

We’ll leave you with our favourite result of the week..

..Google.co.uk #2 for business seo, nicely tucked up there between Seomoz & Adam’s site, that’ll do for now…

hasta luego amigos…

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