George Gray of The Tenerife Property Guide kindly invited me to write an article for him on the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

In cases where a business owner decides to leap into the breach and design his own website – something that is becoming easier every day – it is quite normal for  search engine optimisation elements to be missed off entirely until he or she starts looking into why their newly fledged baby is not flying quite as high or as fast as they had hoped.

In time some will realise that their website is missing the ‘keys’ that would open the door to search engine visitors. Others will never find that out and instead simply assume that internet marketing is a load of hyped up garbage.

That is unfortunate because there are no other methods of marketing as cheap and effective to my knowledge as internet marketing.

It must be even more upsetting for those who pin their hopes on a website for which they have paid a designer in the expectations of it coming out the box shiny and new and ready to take on the world. Unless the designer has incorporated SEO elements into the website that is not going to happen.  So again they may investigate and discover the benefits of SEO  or they may never know the reason why their new site never gets off the ground.

In the latter case, the paying customer only sees a loss of money and thereafter considers the internet to be waste of budget and time.

Most web designers today will include the basics of SEO but if you are currently unhappy with the performance of your website that is the first thing you ought to look at.  Is your site being found in the search engines for terms related to your business (and by that I don’t mean by your company name). If not, why not?

Read The Tenerife Property Guide – SEO – Help is at Hand

What’s happening in Tenerife translates to Lo Que Pasa en Tenerife which niftily happens to be the name of a Spanish language blog about the island. It often reports on environmental matters and raises issues that may not be aired on ‘holiday’ type sites. For example today they report on the new policy at the Alteza supermarkets to charge a small amount for degradable plastic bags and  reusable cotton bags (which can be replaced free of charge if ever broken). This compares to the policy at Mercadona and Hiperdino whose plastic bags blow about the countryside like confetti after a wedding.

Another story comments on the insufficient margin allowed at some bus stops accompanied by the photograph of a young woman waiting for the guagua who looks dangerously close to becoming road kill.

The Lo Que Pasa En Tenerife website covers not only the big events that happen here but delves into the minutae of life on the island that has an effect on us all – tourist, residents or Tinerfeños born and bred. I’ve added a link to LQET on the nav bar under Sites in Spanish so you can always find it easily there.

Oh, what a flaming nightmare I have had for the last week. It started with a couple of emails refusing to send on OUTLOOK and snowballed into no ftp, an unstable and dead slow internet connection and culminated in no internet whatsoever and me having kittens about my inability to get my work done on the internet.

I’ve been back and forth with a lovely lady in the US where my sites are hosted. I’m sure if she was within striking distance she would have given me a cuddle and a cup of tea she was so sympathetic (thank you Sheila of FQ) but unfortunately there was nothing she could do.

John of Sorted Sites lent me a sympathetic ear too and recommended I call ‘his computer guy’, Col, who talked me into getting a grip and pointed me in the direction of how to properly do a full system scan (get off the internet for a start).

After scanning and scouring the pc with assorted anti-virus and bug killers all weekend I was sure that the computer was clean and would now run like a well oiled racehorse (or something like that) but to my great frustration the damn thing still sat there like a fat slug, refusing to do more than creep on to one page of the internet before keeling over in exhaustion once again.

Telefonica were useless. I knew it was their router that was at fault. I tried to tell them that. First call resulted in me being sent packing to the English department. The lady there must have a hot link to the technical depatment though because she bounced me back to the techies quicker than I could say ‘Then what’s the bloody use having an English Department?’

To cut a long (long, long, long) story short about three days and a million calls to Telefonica later we were still no further forward. George at The Tenerife Property Guide had had an earful of my plight when he called me mid-week and kindly offered me the use of an extra router he had lying about.

I cantered down to get it yesterday full of hope and pondered for a moment or two over the odd bits and bobs that are to be found in George’s store room. I knew better than to try and plug and play the router myself because by now I was beginning to suspect that aliens were emitting a magnetic frequency through me that were frying any computer equipment that I came within five feet off. That turned out to be a clever move because then I couldn’t get the blame when His Nibs tried to install it and it didn’t work. (heh!)

But before the abortive attempt to get the replacement router installed there was an added little twist to the day. Our car had just been brought out of the garage that morning having had repairs to the driver side door. It had gone through the car wash and was sitting there in the car park looking all shiny when three little yobos came along and stoved in the passenger side window! My neighbour saw them do it. Thankfully she did not intervene as I would rather have a stoved in window than a duffed up neighbout but can you imagine!

Anyway, George’s router did not work last night and by this morning there was no choice but to call in the cavalry. Cue Ackie who arrived at 9.00 am to find me clucking over the computer like a worried old hen and left at 10 having changed the router and got my pc singing like a lark again. Thank you Ackie and Hello World!

I came across a word I didn’t know today. Nothing surprising in that, I do it all the time. In Spanish it is more of an event when I come across a word I do know. But this is a word I should know and that should be part of the lexicon of anyone who is regularly online in Tenerife and interested in improving their Spanish speaking skills.  Surprisingly I have never seen it before (in this context) and neither has my 40,000 entry Español-Inglés dictionary.

The word is bitácoras and it means blogs. If you are living in Tenerife and trying to pick up a bit of Spanish, scanning Spanish blogs is a great way to do that. Just as in English you will find a blog for every interest so too there are countless Canarian blogs covering every conceivable subject from birdwatching to bizarre events on the islands to lifestyle and trends.  Finding one in a niche that interests you is a good way to build up vocabulary and contacts in that subject.

If you are at all a follower of football and live in Tenerife, you have either read Colin Kirby’s scribblings on the subject or seen him cheering his team on to glory in the stands. Colin is a freelance writer who covers many of Tenerife’s attractions and distractions on his informative blog as well as posting about his first love – football.

In his latest post on the subject Colin is as excited as a new father on the birth of the Armada Sur footie fanzine.

Whew! They do say don’t believe all you read and that is SO true when it comes to following instructions you find on the digital highway.  What was supposed to be a one-click import turned out to be quite a bit more involved than that. Still, after a bit of faffing and blowing here we are in Tenerife Tattle’s new premises and although some things got lost in the shuffle (mostly video clips) I’ll get them reuploaded in no time at all.

What is more of a worry is the effect the move might have on Tenerife Tattle’s visibility. I can track down and ask any webmaster’s that have links back to specific posts to please update them but whether they have the time to do so is another matter.

The design of the site will have to evolve too. This plain blue shell is the Wordpress default and though I like the simplicity of it, it doesn’t scream Tenerife does it? SO please bear with me. I’ve got quite a bit of house-cleaning to do after the move and TT will be a work in progress for a while. But then, a website that stops being a work in progress is as good as dead anyway, right?

You can help me get the blog settled into the new domain by linking to it from a website if you have one.  Google loves links

I want to move Tenerife Tattle to a new host. At the very least, that would drop the ugly .blogspot suffix on the url and would open the door for other future changes. I am a bit nervous about the prospect though and TT is not the only blog up for re-homing.

A while ago I took a flyer on a new hosting service out of India and placed a handful of sites there. There is no question that the host is cheap – but as my wee granny used to say, (you must use a thin and quavery Scots accent to get the full flavour…), “A cheap thing’s always a dear thing.”

Well as it happens old Emily is right again. Instead of being able to concentrate on just building these sites, it seems half the time I try to work on them, the server is down. Quite demotivating and the sites have suffered because of it. It’s time to move – though I am not looking forward to the process.

Here’s hoping I don’t break anything…