A couple of hundred miles WNW into the rain forest from Buenos Aries is one of the worlds natural wonders. The Iguazu River, near the place where Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil touch, drops over the edge of a fault line and plunges into a series of gorges and fault layers producing one of the world’s greatest waterfall complexes.
These giclée prints are available in several sizes, custom printed for each individual order on archival, museum grade paper using fade resistant inks.
Join us as we visit historic treasures, natural wonders and vibrant cities set against backdrops that are endlessly changing and visually magnificent. Celebrate a world of travel experiences with these posters that are perfect for framing.
On the surface it’s difficult to believe but Helen is the third most-visited town in Georgia, with Atlanta number one and Savannah two. Even more difficult to believe for a population of less than 1,000 people!
A town in Indian country and part of America’s second gold rush, Helen first gained success as a logging town. By the 1930s, the timber company and the sawmill abandoned the town of Helen, and the town began to die. Its first rebirth started when the Federal government created the Chattahoochee National Forest, creating some tourism and new lumber opportunities in the 1950s.
Late in the ’50s and early ’60s, Helen again began to die. With the town again in trouble, local businessmen created a plan to revive the tourist business.
Turning Helen Into A Destination.
Those businessmen and town leaders got together in 1968 and proposed turning their town into a recreation of a Bavarian alpine village complete with chalets with gingerbread trim, cobblestone alleyways, and old-world restaurants and shops. It quickly became a destination city known far beyond Georgia.
The Helen of today celebrates its created Bavarian heritage with a number of German and alpine- Bavarian festivals each year. Since 1972, Oktoberfest has been an annual tradition in Helen, providing one of the best known celebrations of German culture anywhere in America.
Stop By For Lunch Or Stay A couple Of Days
Today the town offers up a number of good restaurants like the Haufbrauhaus that serves authentic German cooking. Helen boasts a couple of wineries of note along with great hiking trails and tubing on the stream that flows through the town. And don’t leave town without picking up some Bavarian souvenirs.
This is the second in a series that explores what little I’ve learned about the world wide web and my attempts to grow traffic on the internet.
Over the past four or five years I’ve read hundreds of articles and subscribed to services promising to show me how to increase traffic with SEO tips. The biggest result I’ve seen is huge increases in my incoming emails but nothing I can point to regarding improving traffic. I’ve used an SEO plugin that evaluated every post. A vast number say the same things over and over and pretend that they are offering unique insights. The plugins seem to follow the usual set of rules as well.
Areas I intend to going forward and cover include:
Traffic data reports
SEO best practices
Using social media
Issues with WordPress and other hosting options
The echo chamber
Paid traffic services
The technology con
Who Am I
This site is my hobby TheIntentionalTraveler.com (Intend2Travel.info). I was a photographer, I’m retired, in my seventies and I live for travel. Six continents, over 80 countries and islands and every one of the worlds oceans. I started a free WordPress site over four years ago to let friends and family see where I am and where I’ve been. It was free and had nothing to do with money. As people visited and subscribed it may have become about validation. Fame and money started becoming a possibility but it was still my hobby.
Today I manage two additional free websites, a paid WordPress site (I ran out of room) two online store sites (only marginally successful) and almost a dozen social media sites along with two Etsy outlets. After all that, I confess that I understand very little about how to succeed on the web and it starts to seem like an addiction…
I’ve Experienced A Recent Change in Traffic
Information from the previous article and starting at the end and working forward. Just in the past six months my travel site experienced some serious growth. Following is a chart showing results reported by Google data compared with the contributions from other search engines.
Looking at the data it raises some interesting questions:
The Google impressions show major changes in growing, peaking in May and falling off again.
The percentage of clicks per impressions also grow (from about 1% to 1.5%) with a peak in June and falling off again.
The percentage of Google clicks to all other search engines starts at about 27%, grows to almost 57% and drops back over 3 months to 27%.
What do I make of this?
First, Google clicks seem to correlate somewhat with reported total impressions but do show growth in the percentages indicating a deviation of about a half a percent (same bell shaped curve) which suggests an anomaly.
Second, various search engine contributions as a percentage of total search referrals seem to remain constant when averaged over two months of results. The only exception is the Google contribution. Google’s share starts at just under 28% of total search referrals, grows to almost 47% in May and drops gradually back to under 28% (the bell curve again). Statistically it should have stayed at under 27% in alignment with the additional 5 other search engines.
SEO On The Website
Most suggested SEO efforts focus on 4 areas in post creation. Two or three years ago when I was using free WordPress hosting I made a mirrored site in an effort to understand what practices produced results. Each new post was added to the mirrored site.
There are millions of articles about using SEO:
Titles – Pick words that have meaning in the article. Insert call to action words in every title. Select words like you’re picking high value tags.
Headings – Use section headings like you pick titles but don’t repeat words that are in the title.
Tags – Use a hashtag online search site for relevant high popularity tags. Don’t use tags that are already in your titles. Always try and find at least 6 tags, Regularly use the hashtag # symbol. Use no more that 12 tags. Don’t use the #. Use as many tags as are relevant regardless on quantity. Never use more than 4 tags.
Alternative Text – Use these to tell the web crawler what’s in the pictures. It also helps to comply with requirements for blind visitors.
While search engine traffic was growing slowly, there had been some growth and I applied many of the SEO suggestions to the mirror site and none to the original site. After six months the traffic on both sites showed little difference.
There are a number of videos on YouTube featuring Google engineers with good information on selecting tags worth watching.
Using Social Media To Improve Traffic
Most discussions regarding SEO put some emphasis on setting up social media accounts to bring traffic back to the website. The focus is on the established names:
facebook – Create a dedicated page for your website (you need a personnel facebook page before you can add a business or site page) and either manually add a post on each new posting or set up an automated link.
Twitter – Add a twitter account for your website and either manually add a post on each new posting or set up an automated link.
Instagram – Add an Instagram account for your website and either manually add a post on each new posting or set up an automated link. Instagram can also be auto linked to a facebook page.
Pinterest – Add a Pinterest account for your website and either manually add a post on each new posting or set up an automated link.
My experience regarding additional traffic from links from these social sites has not been great. They represent only a little over 1% of the total traffic and out of 20 referrals 12 have come from Twitter, 4 from facebook, and 2 each from Instagram and Pinterest.
To set up auto-posting to social accounts IFTTT.com has some good applets you can add and there are a number of plugins available for WordPress. These may be difficult to deploy to free WordPress sites.
What Does Make A Difference?
After four years I’ve found that the only real thing that does show results and increases search traffic is the frequency of posting. There is a direct link to frequent posting and search engine traffic. Also subscribers become a significant source of traffic once you get above 200 or 300*.
Another area I explored was joining groups. Facebook has a number of travel groups and I have worked three different groups (more later)*.
*This has a huge impact on what I call the “echo chamber effect” which I’ll get to soon.
The Isle Of Wight Is A Popular Holiday Destination For The English
Almost any reference to the Isle of Wight includes the iconic Needles and the famous chairlift taking you up to view the Needles Rocks and the colored sands in the cliffs behind the beach. The famous landmark has much more than just beautiful views. The areas attractions include that great chairlift ride, going from that overlook above the Needles past those colored sand cliffs to the beach. The beach includes concessions and paddle board rentals and if you want to get closer to the Needles take one of many boat trips. One option is onboard the High Speed “Summer Rose” or “Wild Rose” offering 15 minute high speed trips under the 400 foot chalk cliffs in Alum Bay with views of the gun slots, smugglers caves, Needles Rocks and the Lighthouse. These boats operate from Easter until fall, running every 20-30 minutes starting daily from 10:30 am at £15 per person
There is also the sand shop where visitors make their own colored sand souvenir jars using sand collected from the cliffs at The Needles. A 3D Cinema adding surround sound and an added feeling of motion.
There are a number of options for getting to the Isle Of Wight. You have choices of car ferries at Southampton, Portsmouth and Lymington with frequent service. Available fares include cars, individual passengers allowing you to bring your bike with you. For faster service there’s the Red Jet from Southampton into Cowes, the Wightlink catamaran from Portsmouth to Ryde or the Hovertravel hovercraft from Southsea to Ryde. All island arrival locations connect to public bus service.
If you’re traveling without a car the visit to the Needles can take some time. By ferry from Southampton to Cowes costs about £25 per person round trip. The biggest problem with going without a car on the 20 minute ferry is that once you arrive at Cowes it will require a bus trip of over an hour and a half to get to the Needles.
It’s much easier to travel as a passenger traveling from Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight because there’s a train station at both ends. You’ll arrive at a sandy beach in Ryde and you can travel down to Sandown or Shanklin by train in about 20 minutes.
Sunset at a very special beach. Erected in the surf at the invasion beach designated Omaha, this memorial is dedicated to the allied soldiers who stormed the beaches on June 6th, 1944 in Normandy France. Still today it remains the single largest seaborne assault ever, involving 156,000 soldiers being put ashore that day along with an armada of countless sailors at sea and airmen in the skies over the English Channel.
These giclée prints will soon be available in several sizes and styles, custom printed for each individual order on archival, museum grade paper using fade resistant inks.
Join us as we visit historic treasures, natural wonders and vibrant cities set against backdrops that are endlessly changing and visually magnificent. Celebrate a world of travel experiences with these posters that are perfect for framing.
The tropical American islands you can drive to. In the Keys most people are looking for Sun, turquoise waters, sand and lots of fresh seafood. There’s plenty of Sun, water and great seafood but if you’re looking for beaches, you’ve gone too far. Unlike the expectations , the Florida Keys have very little in the way of beaches.
Beaches In The Keys
Unlike the miles of white sand beaches in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and the Florida gulf coast, the Keys have very little to offer when it comes to beaches. There are a few good small beaches that include:
John Pennekamp State Park located in Key Largo is more noted for its coral reefs and mangrove coast but it does have a small sandy beach.
Key Colony Beach is located on the Atlantic side of Marathon and has one of the longest stretches of beach in the Keys. The town offers an number of beach front motels.
Bahia Honda State Park
Bahia Honda State Park in just south of Seven Mile Bridge and has one of the best beaches of all of the state parks in the Keys.
Key West Public Beach located on the Atlantic side of the island does have a good stretch f sandy beach but it would be a stretch to describe it as white sand beach.
The Keys For Fresh Seafood
Our rule regarding Keys seafood is “the simpler, the better”. Florida’s waters are famous for Florida lobsters. They’re called spiny lobster or Caribbean lobster or as the locals refer to them “bugs”. There’s also crab (in season it’s stone crab), shrimp (lots of shrimp), grouper, dolphin (Hawaiian name is mahi-mahi) and both are beautiful mild-flavored white meat fish. Most locals have favorite hangouts often featuring picnic tables on docks or decks, cold beer and fresh-caught fish on a grill. Maybe throw in a lobster or two and a bucket of peel-n-eat shrimp.
There are more than a few good places to eat in the keys but unfortunately there are probably more mediocre and bad restaurants. In the past we had come to believe that one of the problems is the tourist character of this beautiful chain of islands. With an estimated number of Key West visitors exceeding 2.5 million and a local population of under twenty-five thousand, it isn’t hard to see why below average places survive or even thrive. Over the years we had developed our list of favorites with the majority being local places and a few with long histories and reputations.
Islamorada Fish Company, like the Island Fish Company started out by just open-air grilling fresh seafood out on the docks. A while ago the got a new neighbor, Outdoor World, that started bringing in traffic and their business exploded. Now they are all grown-up, were taken over by Outdoor World and have over a dozen locations around the country. They still serve solid seafood.
Island Fish Company in Marathon was just an open-air Tiki Hut on the water a decade or so ago. Even then they grilled up some good, fresh seafood at reasonable prices and featured live music in the evenings. We were amazed how they had grown since our last visit. You can’t do that unless you’re doing something right.
Herbie’s in Marathon has been in business forever and is a favorite with locals. There have been new owners for a few years but everyone says they’re doing a good job of keeping up the reputation. And don’t get put off by the outside appearance.
Hurricane Hole is just north across the bridge going out of Key West on Stock Island. This is a typical Keys place on a marina with lots of outdoor tables. The food is fresh and good and the prices very friendly.
Hurricane Hole
Conch Republic Seafood Company in Key West is a good choice for seafood and at a good price. While it is a favorite with the tourists and the waterfront location offers good scenery it is still a solid choice. Tip: The happy hour buy one get one beer tokens don’t have to be used on the same day.
Ship Wreck Bar & Grill in Key Largo is a little off the beaten path but worth the look. Again this place is a solid favorite with locals and while a little unrefined serves good, fresh Keys seafood and cold beer. Enough said.
Lorilei’sin Islamorada is another institution in the Keys and a favorite for watching sunsets.
Sid & Roxy’s Green Turtle Inn located in Islamorada has been a Keys institution forever. Sid and Roxy bought the place in 1947 and the current owners work hard at keeping up the reputation. The originator of Key Lime pie.
The Keys also have their share of attractions. First and foremost is charter fishing, boating*, snorkeling and diving. There are literally hundreds of charters, drift fishing boats and reef excursions to pick from.
In addition there are a number of dolphin encounter options in the Florida Keys.
Islamorada’s The Dolphin Encounter.
The Theater of the Sea marine park and Botanical Garden dolphin shows and encounters.
Key West Wild Dolphin Encounter
In Grassy Key is the Dolphin Research Center, a nonprofit education and research facility. Home to a family of dolphins and sea lions,
The Key West Aquarium – a small be really interesting facility right on Mallory Square.
Celebrate Sunset At Mallory Square – ever day tourists, locals and a fair amount of eccentrics gather on the pier at Mallory Square to celebrate the setting Sun. A daily event with a real carnival atmosphere.
Sunset at Mallory Square
In addition to the Sunset festivities there are a number of other things you will discover in Key West. First is key lime pie, a delicacy invented in the keys. Be sure to take a bottle of key lime juice and a recipe with you when you leave. The city is home to a large Cuban population that brought their cigar making skills with them. There are a number of hand-rolled Cuban cigar makers in Key West.
Key West SunsetPresident Trumans Winter White House’The Audubon House
Key West also has a number of worthy historical attractions and a few less so. John J. Audubon lived here for a number of years and his home is maintained as a museum along with Ernest Hemingway’s house and Harry Truman’s Winter White House, all open to the public. Mel Fishers Maritime Museum, the Shipwreck Treasure Museum and believe it or not a Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum.
In addition to the festivities there are a number of other things you will find Key West famous for. First is key lime pie, a delicacy invented in the keys. Be sure to take a bottle of key lime juice and a recipe with you when you leave. The city is home to a large Cuban population that brought their cigar making skills with them. There are a number of hand-rolled Cuban cigar makers in Key West. It is also famous for leather sandals (flip flops) and the oldest manufacturer is Kino located right downtown. Their leather sandals sell for $10 to $20. I’ve rarely gone to Key West without taking home a pair or two.
The Intentional Travelers 