Andrew's Blog

Heading back from France.

One thing I'm coming to learn about Google searches is that there is still a huge amount of good fortune/black art in getting a good search engine ranking. I've put lots of effort into our commercial site (Rooms to rent in Maidenhead - Thieves Garden self catering apartment for short term lets) and while it is doing well, it's the sites that have been knocked up in minutes (e.g. 2006 World Cup Finals) that are getting the best scores.

Looks like I need more time to concentrate on the site that pays the bills!

... this has been my obsession for the week!

After reading up, I realised that I needed to take a week off work to update the website to get search engine hits for more keywords.

One of the problems I had is that the standard tools for assessing keyword popularity don't have the data to work when you need to include something as local/specific as "Maidenhead". The only phrase they came up with was... Rooms to rent in Maidenhead.

With my new keywords established, I then had the job of scattering them across the pages; a Maidenhead here, an apartment there & a short term let under there. This was extremely tedious.

I also added some new pages and updated the menus so now I should be able to add content bit by bit whenever I find a spare half hour.

After setting up the website, I'm now reading a book on how to optimise sites for search engines - although I've certainly got a few tweaks I can make I was relieved to see that I've not made any serious mistakes. Now I just need to find the time and energy to make the changes - to make things worse, I had to spend a week abroad last week for work.

We've no tenant for the next couple of weeks (we're booked up for 3 months after that) and so I'm quite anxious to get as many hits as possible.

We've noticed that the competition for short-term lets in Maidenhead is now really heating up with at least two new companies on the scene. Fortunately, our prices tend to be considerably lower and so I'm hoping that we stay fairly busy.

It's coming up time to fill in our 2004/2005 tax returns and it's the first year that we've been in business and so we've got to go through the pain of sorting our accounts out. The good part is that there are a number of expenses that we can share between our house and the apartment/business such as the ADSL broadband and the Sky digital TV (it also gave me the excuse to upgrade to all of the sport & movie channels!).

Now that all of the content is available on our main website Thieves Garden - Maidenhead self-catering apartment I've been trying to get us listed in a number of directories and search engines (after all, there's no point in having a web page if no-one can find it).

In the spirit of not trying to get something for nothing, I'm doing this by publishing new content (a novel which hasn't previously been released; photographs and a cool tool to add World Cup fixtures to your Outlook calendar.

I'd mean to get more done over the Christmas holidays but most of the time was spent travelling around the UK and France visiting family.

Just in case we don't have enough on our plate, Anne is now suggesting that we buy a property in France as an investment and holiday home.

World Cup 2006

Rather than enter all of the World Cup games of interest into my calendar manually, I decided to create a Visual Basic script that would take a list of fixtures from an Excel spreadsheet and add them to Outlook automatically. If you'd like to add all or some of the fixtures to your Outlook Calendar then just download the zip file from my 2006 World Cup page and then drag just the fixtures you want onto your Outlook calendar or drag the whole lot to store every match.

This is just a test that I can send in clo entries from the email client on my phone.

This is just a test to see whether I can send emails to my Blog.

Cheers, Andrew.