If you are looking for something different in the form of learning a foreign language whist travelling and putting a little charitable work in at the sam time then there is something going on down Argentina way that might take your fancy.

Spanish Lessons Buenos Aires may sound exciting enough for most of us but how about ading a humanitarian aspect to it and combining it with charitable work in Patagonia or Argentina and volunteer in Latin America to really emerse yourself in the Spanish language.

It seems that just using a language school Buenos Aires just isn’t jazzy enough although I have always thought that B. A. would be the place to go to learn the Tango

One of these days you’ll be learning Spanish whilst doing the Tango with a Patagonian villager…who knows

When you read about SEO. Thats Search Engine Optimization for the uninitiated or the profession of trying to put a website at the top of the organic search results for any given keyword.
Having just read the first line of this article I have realised just how much jargon we use in this industry and that for the novice, and we were all novices once, it must be somewhat confusing.

So let me simplify. If you have a website it is normally because you have a product or service that you wish to sell to the public. To achieve sales you need people to visit your website. Your visitors are called traffic. The best way to gain traffic is to appear in the organic search results of Google, (and other Search Engines) for search terms that are relevant to your business. For Eample I own a website for Estate Agents in Spain to list their property on a MLS. The Biggest search term for this industry is Spanish Property, which receives about 10x as much traffic as any other search term. Therefore in a perfect world my aim eventually is to reach No 1 position for this keyword. In the interim you must aim to reach a Page 1 position for smaller traffic keywords which are less competitive and more easily achieved. Think of your keyword goals as a Christmas tree with the most competetive as the fairy on the top. The least competitive and most easy to achieve are at the bottom of the tree. There are many more of them to choose from so be selective, but a wide base of keyword terms that bring you a visitor a day is easier to achieve than trying to rank for one term that will bring you a 100 visitors.

Now most articles that you will read will start to talk about the fact that to rank for any given keyword you need to build links pointing at your site from other sites with the keyword you are trying to rank for in the anchor text of your link, (thats the clickable part of the text that sends the visitor to your site) . This is all true. You will read about the need for Directory submissions, writing articles, reciprocal linking strategies and many more ways to gain links from your piers so that you may build your link popularity and get your deserved place on the first page of results for the keywords you have chosen.

I will leave all those noble strategies to other for now and focus on a method of obtaing as many links as you want for yourself without going outside the remit of your own website. Do not get me wrong. All that you read about in-linking is bona-fide and should be persued as part of a multi faceted approach that is necessary for successful placement in the Search Engines. This article is designed however to highlight the importance of internal linking strategy of your own site that can make a great effect on your Search Engine position. It is an overlooked subject and often missed by many site owners. It is often the key to out ranking your competition but also should not be confused with a tradition of spamming the content of your web pages to gain position by stuffung the content with meaningless keywords and links.

Those strategies have pretty much been taken care of by the Search Engines in their algorithms.

When linking your pages internally there are some guidelines to consider.
These include,
The percentage of links pointing at any given page with the same keyword anchor text. If the percentage is too high it may be deemed to be spamming, so always keep your link texts varied leaving the most important keyword links coming from the most important pages of your site.

Use your footer to carry links to your most important pages. That way you are linking your most important pages from every page on your site. These can also be used as a baseline link for a generic keyword creating a good number of links to an important page. If you then link in content links with a more specific target keyword from an internal page you will gain good points for the important keyword along with recognition for the baseline links in your footer.

A final example as this subject will need to be extended later.

If you create a hundred pages of quality content about your site subject or product and you have 1 link in the footer to your homepage. Lets say its a site selling property and your footer link is property homepage. In the text you carry a link for Spanish Property for Sale also to the homepage. You now have 200 links pointing at your homepage with 50% of them tartgeted at your keyword.

If the assumption is correct that Google allows and reads up to 100 internal links on any given page without penalty then you can see that by interlinking your pages in an intelligent manner you could end up in our example with 10 000 links from a 100 good pages of content.

Whilst it is by ne means the only thing to consider, it makes a good start.

Travelling light…that’s my motto. If you give a bag to an airline these days it will probably end up having a better holiday than you, so why put up with the hassle and only take what you can carry.

Saying that, I left my one carry on bag recently not in the clutches of airport baggage handlers but in an airport parking lot…the poor little thing didn’t even make it to the terminal building. If you think this seems a little wierd then let me elaborate.

I started the day in the Birmingham Airport Parking lot. well, not literally started my day…I had just flown in from Atlanta and was looking for my hire car. I was in a rush because I had booked the flights to save money and was now stuck with an hours drive to get to Luton where I would drop off the hire car in Luton Airport Parking before catching my onward flight to Spain…with me so far….good

I found the car and got on my way. As usual the M1 was a bumper to bumper experience at 80 miles an hour with regular 0 miles an hour stops for road works. by the time I got to Luton I was running late and dumped the car at parking and rushed into the terminal.

One glance at the board told me I was in trouble. The flight had been cancelled. I ambled up to the Airline desk only to be told that there were no more flights out of Luton that day and if I wanted to get to Valencia before tea-time I would have to take a trip to Stanstead where there was a flight leaving in 31/2 hours.

I took it. I had been travelling for so long now I thought…well I didn’t actually think anymore…I just kinda grunted and automated my limbs in the general direction I was going.

I got on the bus to Stansted and fell asleep. I was awoken outside Stansted airport parking. I stumbled off the bus and squinted at the general direction of the terminal building and finally had a thought…I might just get home…might…

It wasn’t until I was standing at the check in counter I realised I had no baggage.

I know at the beginning I said that I don’t carry bags…but this was the one small bag, the carry on…it was gone..

But where…

Its a subject that we have visited before and its always worth coming back to. Cheap and reliable web hosting may seem like a dicotomy but it is the Holy Grail if you need to keep expenses down when managing more than a few web-sites.

I have mentioned in the past that web hosting reviews such as found on webhostinggeeks.com can be a great place to start your search.

If you take a look at the hostmonster review against the yahoo review and compare the bluehost review to the numerous other companies that are put through their paces you will start to get a feel for what good and bad points stand out in each contract.

it is easy to plumb for the cheapest hosting you can find and hope that the uptime keeps up with your expectations. It is rarely the case that cheapest is best, but dont dismiss a gift horse until you have spent a little time checking its teeth.

Web Hosting reviews can help with the orthodontistry and may save making a mistake with a pin!

I am not sure if travel-ling anywhere would help me speak better Spanish! Unfortunately I am one of those people that don’t have that certain part of the brain that deals with language learning in the ‘On’ position. They say that if you are exposed to multiple languages between the ages of 3 - 11 years old on a regular basis that you stimulate a part of the brain that allows you to learn languages without difficulty for the rest of your like. So, Spanish lesson Buenos Aires sounds like a great experience but whether it would aid me in my pusuit of multi-lingual achievement I am not so sure.

You can combine learning the language with a program to volunteer  in Latin America combining a language school Buenos Aires with volunteer work in Argentina and/or Patagonia.

It is sure that if you emerse yourself in a country and its language that you have a much better chance of success than by attempting to master the intracies from a book or tape.

Whichever method you use I am sure your success will out-way my feeble ongoing struggle, and with that I will say Gracias y Buenas Noches!!