Avid Travellers Barbados Guide is the latest blog on Barbados by Calum Glenny, The Avid Traveller. Calum has some advice for anyone considering a visit to or already on vacation in the island: One of his suggestion is to check out regional beach bars, restaurants, and shops. The island is made for outside living, nature, and an enviable way of life. There is much to do outdoors both at day and night, from stargazing to exploring the nooks and crannies of the island that only local Bajans know.
Calum shares many of his favourite attractions like Janelle’s Homemade Natural Juices and her delightful ginger and sea moss beverage and several more creative personalities.
Avid Travellers Barbados Guide Meets Janelle
Calum Adds: “It’s with Joy to see my Barbados guide published om Markhat, Barbados.org, and Rogues in Paradise, Markhat , and TravelWatchNews, amongst others.”
The Avid Travellers Barbados Guide, by Calum Glenny is a personal account of his experience Going Local in Barbados: It is an “Absolutely Charming” account of the wonderful people who make the island special. His journey takes you to many parts of the island with a focus on the people; the vendors, guides, taxi people, chefs, entrepreneurs and everyday folk, who are the story of Barbados
SEO & RankBrain Merging Technology and Social Distancing
SEO-RankBrain to your aid?
COVID-19 has ushered in the digital age like nothing that came before it. Digital has become the primary media for advertising and we are reaching critical mass in digital connectivity. Over 50% of the world is now active online. Source: see The Why of Digital Media
The Pandemic has made eCommerce leap forward and has affected not only the established online vendors but also local brick and mortar stores. Consumers can buy local via smart phones and can either pick goods up or have them delivered. It has enhanced business in untold ways. Online and offline technologies are merging to create conveniences and efficiencies that are as yet unknown. Yet all is not quiet on the western front!
Video SEO & RankBrain – a Digital Dilemma
While Digital Media Marketing takes center stage with social distancing and lockdowns, it is also undergoing tremendous shifts as modern technology gallops off with the goal post.
As you will notice in this video, Google is not indexing all social media. It’s just too much. With so many marketers posting endless content on the same subject to hundreds of sites, social indexing has lost its value.
Press releases have also fallen into this trap. With social media posts and sharing, the old days of authority journalism have faded into a case of “anything goes”.
The press release was supposed to be NEWS. But social media experts took over and the established media created surrogate sites for all of them to post to. At the time, it protected journalists’ integrity but the surrogate sites soon lost all authority. They too failed to be indexed by Google.
What is Indexing and Why it Matters
Google Indexing
Indexing simple means that your site is added to the Google database.
Google says: “A page is indexed by Google if it has been visited by the Google crawler (“Googlebot”).
It is analyzed for content and meaning, and stored in the Google index. Indexed pages can be shown in Google Search results
(if they follow Google’s webmaster guidelines).”
If a page is not indexed it will not show up in Google Search results. If you are trying to rank your page in search results, having quality links back (backlinks)to your page will help.
Not long ago marketers created these backlinks using social media to share content and post links back to your site and pages. Now many social media accounts and pages are not indexed. The rule is not universal. Authority sites like Facebook, Scoopit, YouTube and several other pages do show up in search results. This happens when the site is considered an authority and the page content is unique and valuable.
From the point of view of ranking, Social Media pages are just not as valid as before.
Is Social Media & SEO Still Relevant Today
Absolutely! Like everything else it is changing and some parts rise while others sink. Indexing is just one part that is preforming differently.
Social media is far more important today than it has ever been. It is a powerful communication and marketing platform. Your post, shares and advertisements on top social platforms get seen and help build your visibility. They deliver your message and can build traffic to your website and your sales funnel.
Even if the post is not indexed by Google it still counts as social signals that are taken into account in ranking. As noted above posts that are unique, add value, show expertise will rank and help build your authority and your brand. You just can not rely all social media backlinks to impact your search engine ranking. The key to success in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization is in producing top quality engaging content, shared to top authority platforms and sites. Your digital footprint will include all digital media platforms: Videos, blogs, articles, news sites, social media, trade specific publications, reviews, magazine, academia and popular consumer channels.
SEO is vital if you want to get ranked in search engines. It is an essential part of Search Engine Marketing. There are many factors that effect you success in getting ranked. Social Media backlinks still count but far more important is the quality of your content. There are several tactics in building quality content that will help get it crawled, indexed, found, featured, linked and followed. All are detailed in my Book Digital Mediaand its Bonuses such as Advanced topics in How to Optimize Content
What Works Now & What Does Not
As the video notes, it all works if you do it right. Content marketing works but not if it is a knockoff of others’ work. Content has to be Expert, Authoritative and Trustworthy (EAT). RankBrain and AI now evaluate all content ranking on this basis. Cut and paste spun content does not work.
Yet content is still the driving force behind building authority brands. Lizzy Hiller, Manager of Nestle’s Global Data Analytics, explains: “A robust, data-driven eCommerce strategy has become ever more crucial to brands over the past decade as they try to navigate a market that is turning increasingly to digital channels.” Source: eConsultancy
No one can doubt the value of social media but the way in which it is used is evolving. Social sites are alternatives to established media but their authority has diminished in the eyes of RankBrain. Social shares have too often sidelined true Expertise and too many lack Authority and Trust (EAT).
We don’t need a crystal ball to know how to fix this. It is a matter of creating outstanding content, publishing it wisely and selectively and knowing the channel you use. This also means knowing the tools you use and the people who help you. As the video says, too many marketers are using ‘past-tense’ tactics that are futile at best and can destroy your integrity at worst. To be sure you don’t make these these fatal mistkes grab my book Digital Media below.
Help at Hand with Digital Media Book
Seo & RankBran – the Digital Delema
Ian R. Clayton’s Book, “Digital Media”, distills 20 years of experience. It lays down, in straightforward steps, what is happening in Digital Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and the shifting sands of technology.
Written in an informal, conversational style, it is very easy and fun to read as it unravels today’s media.
Find out exactly how to make Digital Media help you with my very easy-to-review publication, Digital Media, on Amazon.com.
Source: Getaway Travel By Tiny houses in the Woods
Here is a new form of affordable getaway travel. The company getaway makes tiny houses and places them in woods just outside of the city. A great place for city dwellers to escape the noise and bustle of the city and live for a while in highly self sufficient and environmentally house in the woods and off the grid.
ehotelier – The challenges for small hotels: Greece case study.
small hotels on the rocks
While most of my personal tourism experience is based in the Caribbean its refreshing and disturbing to see that other countries in very different travel destination are experiencing some of the same issue we have in the tropics.
Philia Tounta, MBA, Ba, Di, a travel and tourism consultant and ambassador of tourism in Chania, Crete, Greece. cautions that “I believe smaller hotels better support the local economy, since they provide only accommodation and leave the guests to move into the local market for dining and other services.”
Unfortunatly the small hotel sector is not doing great in these hard times made harder by search engines, that were once a friend of small local properties, who have now made it impossible for them to get onto the first pages of organic search. At the same time the vibrant part of the market is the luxury area but its not the mass market and all inclusive in all areas are seeing growth.
“All Inclusives here have seen strong growth, and this year, many large hotels went well by dropping their prices (some to as low as 14 euro per night).” Wow – that worse than the Caribbean region.
From the travelers point of view we understand the allure of an all inclusive holiday, but it is short sighted. Its fundamentally bad for the local economy in a lot of cases, and often poor value to travelers, who are cheated out of a real local experience in favour of buffet meals of soggy vegetables and dry chicken.
It does not have t be like that and in some cases it is not but i would not go on an all-incluive just in case it is. St. Lucia is perhaps the capital of all-in holidays and there are many who will tell you how bad it is for the local economy. A couple of main chains fly in their own provision leaving the local supplies out of the loop. One of those chains came to Barbados in 2014 and the only rum in its bar came from Jamaica. Now that insulting to a country that prides itself on starting the rum business, was the largest produce at one time in the world and has some of the fines vintage rums you will find anywhere.
So much for the rant – check out the article for lots of parallels..http://ehotelier.com/insights/2014/10/20/the-challenges-for-small-hotels-greece-case-study
"China will become a big economic and cultural power and China will change the pattern of the global travel and tourism industry. It will have a huge impact on this industry."
So here is the answer to the question why Facebook bought Whataps and what it will do with it..
As this article points out “In developing countries like those Internet.org is targeting, many people rely on SMS communications due to a lack of data services. WhatsApp is already popular in many emerging markets, including those in South America and Asia where Facebook’s growth was stagnating.”
The articl;e also offer a good rational for why WhatApps sold and some insights into FB plans for rolling out internet access to the emerging markets that cant afford it.
“Connecting the world” is Facebook’s vision—one that can’t be achieved without the support of other organizations, including the six telecom companies it partnered with for the Internet.org initiative.”
The fact is that 2G and 3G data networks are already available in many underdeveloped countries byt “people just don’t understand the value of the Internet yet.”
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