Unwrapped travel

Don’t want to work on what you should be? Need some procrastination fodder? Head over to Google Webmaster Tools and spend some time fixing up stuff on your site.

I’ve been spending quite a while there recently and while it is very useful it could be moreso and here are a few suggestions Google could implement to help improve matters.

Site Configuration -> URL Parameters
Like much of GWT, this section is poorly written and confusing, but what it really needs is a checkbox beside each displayed link reading “This querystring hasn’t been used within the site architecture and has been dealt with by 301 redirectes for over 3 years. You can ignore it now.”

Your site on the web -> Keywords
Where possible, the words listed as being on your site should actually appear on your site. In our case, one of the words is “Guinea” supposedly 71,000 times. Yet, of the 10 pages listed, it only appears on one, and on that page once.

Your site on the web -> Internal links
Why is there over 16,000 internal links counted to a page but in fact only 200 pages listed? Last I checked each of the 200 pages didn’t contain 80 links apiece to the parent page.

Diagnostics -> Crawl errors -> Web
Add an option to say “I fixed this a month ago, you can ignore it now”.

Diagnostics -> Crawl errors -> Not followed
Add an option to say “I fixed this a month ago, you can ignore it now”.

Diagnostics -> Crawl errors -> Not found
Add an option to say “I fixed this a month ago, you can ignore it now”. Also needs an option saying “This link is from an external site obviously managed by a cretin or a bot. Ignore it” Better still, just split the data between internal broken links and external inbound broken links.

Diagnostics -> Crawl errors -> HTML Suggestions
Add an option to say “I fixed this a month ago, you can ignore it now”.

Labs -> Site performance
Why is this chart totally different to the one in Google Analytics? Would be great to see this include average connection speed as seemingly many Travelfish.org users are utilising an abacus to access the site.

Prevailing wisdom holds that you should make it as easy as possible for people to share your content through the various social networks and there’s a gazillion plug-ins and services built around helping site owners to do this.

Save a few stragglers, I’ve just finished removing all the social icons off Travelfish save one — Facebook.

Briefly
Google+: DOA.
Twitter: Annoying extra tags that get added in – Mashable and NYT I’m talking to you!
Delicious: See Yahoo!
Flickr: See Yahoo soon.
StumbleUpon: Junk traffic. (to be fair we didn’t have SU, I just wanted to take the opportunity to say it is junk traffic).
Instapaper: Nearly all regular users (like me) use a toolbar button or widget on the phone. Very very few websites have an Instapaper button as we did.

In slightly more detail
Google+ I removed perhaps a month ago, though not for the same reasons as detailed in this amusing post — I just think it is way too complicated. I’ve removed clickable icons for Twitter, Delicious, Flickr and Instapaper, and have also removed the Facebook icon we had and instead have placed the Facebook Like/Send button at the top and bottom of much of the content. Instapaper is removed, but the clipping is still coded in, so you still get the best bits – you just need to use your toolbar widget.

This was partly informed by my personal use (as with many others, I never use buttons as I perfer to cut and paste the URL and add my own titles and blurbs.)

But it was also as a result of observations I made during a recent trip to Thailand where, over a few weeks, the ONLY social website I saw open on a traveller’s laptop was Facebook.

It was also a result of conversations with my family and some friends — most of whom, while not technophobes, are most certainly not rabid users of technology. Despite this, they all have Facebook accounts and use it semi- to regularly. None have Twitter, Delicious nor Flickr accounts.

Travelfish.org is a travel planning site – we are not a technology or social networking site. Our readership is wide and varied and for sure we have some members who are very active on social media, especially Twitter, but most members are either not into it, or have chosen not to share that side of themselves.

Why keep Facebook?
Because just about everyone has an account.
Because despite the regular moaning (including from me) it is pretty easy to master – just don’t start farming.
Because it is now our #2 source of traffic (after Google) having recently surpassed Yahoo!
Because the seamless way it allows people to share content is miles ahead of the other networks.
Because it loads asynchronously by default.

What about the other networks?
I’m a heavy Twitter user and it is absolutely my preferred network. So just use it as I do:

Cut and paste the URL into whichever client you use.
Shorten it.
Think about a suitable title.
Compose some snippet to sum up your thoughts to go with it.
Hit send.

Your followers will love you for it.

To those who may say, but now it’s too difficult to share your content, I reply, well, if the above is too taxing, perhaps the content really isn’t worth you making the effort to share it.

If you do want to share it, you still can — and we’ll love you for it!

Just to be upfront, I’m happy to say I’ve never used Triberr — I’ve only had the misfortune to have been on the receiving end of it. From the first moment I heard of it, the spam implications were obvious and today I continue to believe it undermines the social foundations of Twitter. My view is simple: if someone tweets something and I read it and like it or think it is worth retweeting, then I retweet it. That’s how and why Twitter works.

Now that I’ve got any questions of bias out of the way…

For those unfamiliar with it, Triberr describes itself as a “reach multiplier”, declaring that it “solves the No 1 problem 99% of bloggers have. How do I get more eyeballs on my content?”

“Triberr is crap” – Gary Arndt.

Sounds good right? In broad strokes, what it does is allow Twitter users to create or join “tribes” of like-minded people. The tribe then becomes a repository of tweets from the members and these tweets are then sent out on an automatic or manual basis under each member’s Twitter username.

Triberr appears to consider this to be a form of tweet curation.

Tha attraction is obvious. In the traditional model, you’re relatively new to Twitter and have 50 followers. If you post a link in Twitter, in theory each of those 50 people may see it and perhaps retweet it. That road be the slow road.

“I’ve always been really well supported by the Twitter community, and specifically other travel bloggers who have retweeted my stuff — sometimes nearly every post I wrote — for years now. I wanted to repay the favor and perhaps in my small way, highlight the travel writing that I felt was the strongest.

At first, it seemed to work great within our niche. But as more and more people began using Triberr, and maybe retweeting people they didn’t really feel strongly about, people within the community got sick of seeing the same content retweeted, without merit, dozens of times.

If I was the only one using it, then it would probably still be great with our niche. But instead it became like this wall of content with mixed levels of quality and I think people have largely begun to ignore it or even to block it completely in Tweetdeck.

Finally I had to turn it off. It’s disappointing because I felt it had potential, but as it grew, there wasn’t any attempts to address the issues of over tweeting, quality and volume.” – Christine Gilbert

With Triberr, the same person gets invited into a tribe that has someone with a far larger following in it — say 50,000 or 100,000 followers. Every time the new member posts a link, (assuming the larger player is on automatic) that link goes out to 50,000 or 100,000 followers. This be the highway baby!

There’s no denying that as an amplification tool, Triber works. At least initially, your tweets will reach far, far more people — many of whom will have no idea who you are.

And that is the problem.

“At first triberr seemed like a fantastic idea. Automatically tweeting the posts of other bloggers who I enjoy reading, without me doing a thing!

After a few days I saw the truth – my feed was filled with impersonal tweets I had no control over. I tried to swap to manual in Triberr so that I could read the articles first and add personal comments. It didn’t work, the tweets continued to go out automatically. I removed myself from the group but tweets continued to flow. Deleting my triberr account had no effect. Another group member accidentally deleted the whole triberr group and even that didn’t stop my tweets. Someone else recreated the group and added me back in. I realised then Triberr was alive and possibly possessed.

Eventually I blocked triberr from within Twitter, stopping my tweets but not the other group members from tweeting my posts. Now I’m just left with feelings of guilt that they’re still tweeting my posts and the realisation that there’s no escape … ever! ” – Tracy Burns

The Triberr Experience

The Twitter stream I follow day-in day-out is my Twitter stream. I select who I want to follow and who I don’t want to follow. Of course people who I follow may RT others into my stream — that’s how it works — and I assume that, for the most part, these RTs are done on a manual rather than industrial basis and the retweeter has either read or at least skimmed the post they’re retweeting.

When Triberr hit the travel blogging scene I suddenly started seeing tweets in my stream from people that I was not especially interested in, and in some cases that I had blocked. How was that happening? How was my stream being polluted?

Triberr.

What happened was people who I did follow had joined Triberr and that was the source of this sudden wave of oft-duplicated tweets I had no interest in.

While there’s no doubt that the people whose tweets I was suddenly seeing were not specifically targetting me (they weren’t actually targetted to anyone), the conduits, or people I did follow and whom were also part of Triberr, were effectively allowing them to bypass my own efforts of “stream curation”. I was being spammed.

“Triberr is a successful tool if you are looking at Twitter as a means of projecting your voice. It’s a megaphone for your own posts, and an agreement to use that megaphone for the others in your tribe. But the utility of Twitter – and why I love it as much as I do – is its ability to be used as an RSS feed of news and information and a way to stay up to date in the world.

Triberr directly detracts from this curatory usefulness as it auto-RTs posts that people haven’t even had a chance to read. While some might manually RT using Triberr (to me this is tantamount to reading and scheduling the post – why do you need Triberr then?), most end up automatically retweeting the same fixed group of sites. This completely undermines the honed voice that Twitter lets you have, to make your stream into an extension of your brand.

And as a result, I don’t usually click through links sent “via triberr” as I’d rather know that there’s a personal endorsement behind what someone posts to their feed.” – Jodi Ettenberg

Triber is a tool to get your tweets, en masse, in front of people who have not asked for them. Think of that description in terms of email. Rhymes with ham.

Initially I just blocked Triberr on Tweetdeck, but then as Twitter for iPhone has no block function, the only way to take my stream back was to unfollow Triberr users.

“It’s a festering turd stuck on the shoes of social media.” – Dave Dean

It didn’t matter who you were — if you used Triberr, you were off my list. Some were friends, others were people whose travels I had followed closely and had linked to extensively from Travelfish.org — it didn’t matter who you were.

I like my Twitter stream far more now.

PS. You’ll note the above opinions from others on Triberr are generally quite negative. Unfortunately as I’ve unfollowed everyone who still uses it, positive opinions didn’t come knocking.

There are a few other good posts I will direct you to though. Stubbornly Clinging to the Organic Web by Pam Mandel is a great post and one of the first I read on this topic. Far more recent, Twitter is Dying — and it’s all your Fault, by Neicole Crepeau, is solid and, as with Pam’s post, the comments are well worth reading — in both cases they include comments from the creators of Triberr. Then just today, new travel blogging site Travelllll.com asks Can we blame Triberr if we’re tweeting like robots? Seems it’s a bit of a topic for now.

If you’d like to learn more about how to spam your friends on Twitter, the Triberr site is here.

Tonight I received an email from the Australian arm of Livingsocial — a deals website. It offered a seemingly amazing deal.

If it sounds too good to be true it is probably BS

Sounds good. $1,556 reduced to $425 for a deluxe room at the Samui Buri Beach Resort near Mae Nam Beach on Ko Samui.

So then I went to the Agoda site to check for a comprable rate. They’re offering Samui Buri for $109.32 a night (before tax).

That's a pretty good rate too!

The $23.20 tacked on in taxes on the booking screen brings it to a total of $132.52 per night — or $397.56. So about $30 cheaper than this Livingsocial deal.

Gotta pay the taxman.

Though to be fair, the Livingsocial deal includes airport transfers and a couple of massages, so you’re going to save a few dollars with Livingsocial I guess.

But that’s not really my point. What I’m curious about is the $1,556 — the purported full value of this glorious deal.

Agoda listed the non-discounted rate as $234 per night, Add 21.5% for tax and you get around $280 per night — or $840 for three nights — just over half the supposed Livingsocial value.

Hmm, perhaps Agoda has some special discounted rackrate or something. So I went to the official website for the hotel.

Cheaper as well!

They list the room as costing 4,200 baht for one night and 12,600 baht for three nights. That equates roughly to A$140 and $416 respectively.

So in summary, here are the rates:

Livingsocial
Original rate: $1,556
Discounted rate: $425

Agoda
Original rate: $840
Discounted rate: $398

Hotel
Rate: $416

So perhaps Livingsocial is working off one of those wishful thinking ratecards that has absurd rates that only the United Nations pays, but it’s pretty dodgy to be offering a rate that is discounted off a rate that nobody with a brain would actually pay.

One note, the photo on the Livingsocial page displays a pool access deluxe room, which costs roughly 20% more, but given the Livingsocial copy specifically states “Deluxe room” rather than “Deluxe pool access room” I went with the text over the glossy pic. The math is similarly dodgy.

One more note, the Livingsocial deal does include airport transfers and massages — perhaps it is a very pretty car and an especially special massage.

So next time you get an offer from Livingsocial — head to Agoda — lowest rate guaranteed!

If someone from Livingsocial happens to stumble across this post, I’d really appreciate it if you could add in the comments where you got the $1,556 from. Thanks!

Bounce rate is defined by Google as “the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”

What this means is it measures the number of visitors who arrived at a page and went no further into your site.

A bounce need not mean something bad. The visitor may have landed on a page that completely answers their question, may have clicked on an advertisment or perhaps just got up to go make a cup of coffee and forgot to come back.

It can though also reflect a poor reader experience — people arriving at your site and finding the content just doesn’t answer their question, or perhaps your website doesn’t look right in their phone or browser, or stories are overly paginated, or the colour scheme is awful or any number of other reasons that would generally connotate a “thumbs down” experience.

Some site styles, such as blogs, often have a higher bounce rate due in part to a combination of reader behaviour and poor site architecture, with others though, for example affiliate landing pages, the whole purpose may be to send the reader elsewhere.

So keep that in mind.

For a general content site like Travelfish.org, bounce rate matters. It matters because reading a single page on Travelfish is not going to answer every question you have about travel in Southeast Asia! There is always another question that can be answered or further information that can be imparted.

With that in mind I’m going to write a bit about three areas where we see a bounce rate that is significantly higher than the overall site bounce. I’m slowly making changes to address some of the worst offenders!

But first, how to measure it. We use Google Analytics for most of our statistics needs and, with a bit of refinement you can get some useful bounce data out of it.

You can also use this data to pick your battles. There is less value in spending 12 hours rewriting a page that gets 4 visitors a day and has a bounce of 80% than a page that gets 4,000 visitors a day and has the same bounce rate.

Note also that not all bounces are equal. A bounce with an average time on site of five seconds suggests “Recoil, evacuate!!!” while a bounce with an average time on site of five minutes suggests “Thanks, that really answered my question.”

So pump up GA and click on the “Pages” tab under “Content”. This will give you a chart showing you your ten most popular pages with time on site, bounce, exit etc.

Then click on the advanced filter, make the average time on page less than say 90 seconds and the bounce rate over say 60%. (Obviously select variables that fit with your readership).

This will give you a list of pages that people spend an average of under 90 seconds on, with over 60% of them leaving your site. Order the result by pageviews, increase the number of results to 50 and you’ve got your homework for the week!

Each of the pages may be bouncing for a different reason, but in Travelfish’s case, three of the main reasons (in no particular order) are:

1) Question is answered
2) Unanswered forum questions
3) Blog pages

Question is answered
Just one example area for this, we have hundreds of FAQ questions on the site. Stuff like “Are the ferries in Thailand safe?” or “Can I use ATMS in Thailand”, or “Can I use drugs in Cambodia?”

Each of these can be answered with about three words. (in the above cases, Mostly. Yes. Yes, but don’t.) What this means is if the person Googles “Are the ferries in Thailand safe?” and they get sent to our page, then they’re going to get the answer in about 6 seconds, and unless we do something about it, they’ll leave.

So what can you do?

We’re in the process of expanding pages like this to try to second guess other questions people may have. Again staying with the above, we could suggest “Extra reading” along the lines of:
Popular Thai ferry routes
Photos of Thai ferries
What ATM fees are there in Thailand?
What cards do ATMs accept?
Are drug overdoses common?
What penalties are there for drug use?

And so on.

Obviously this can be a bit hit and miss and not all topics can easily have more topics associated with them, but you’d be surprised just how many can.

Assumming the extra answers you’re providing are accurate, useful and value adding, then you should start to see bounce rate reducing.

Unanswered forum questions
We’ve got around 15,000 questions and 70,000 answers on the Travelfish forum. And while most questions now eventually pick up an answer or three, some don’t, and this was especially the case with the older questions, when we didn’t have quite as many active readers as we do now.

The “problem” is that many of these unanswered questions have been well indexed by Google, and visitors continue to Google “How do I get from A to B on a Tuesday by horsecart”, and get sent to us, where there is a question that exactly mimics the search query, but unfortunately has not been answered.

This is a poor reader experience. I find it annoying when I Google something only to be sent to a page that asks the same question but has no answer — and I find it doubly annoying to be subjecting others to that same problem.

There are two obvious approaches to this:

a) Mark as NoIndex/NoFollow any forum thread that doesn’t have at least X number of answers. This means Google will not index the question until someone answers it.

b) Go back through and answer the unanswered questions.

I’ve slowly been following the second option. Adding a post at the bottom saying something along the lines of “This is an old thread but if you end up here, here are some links for further reference. If they don’t help. please ask the question again on the main forum” And then I lock the thread, meaning no more comments can be added.

With the first method, the bounce should drop off severly as you’ll stop getting any search traffic to these pages, with the second you’re trying to steer readers to other parts of the site. If we don’t see a significant drop in bounce we’ll switch to the first method, but for now, answering and locking seems to be helping.

Blog pages
Trying to drag blog readers onto other entries or further into the Travelfish site, has been somewhat of a struggle, but we’ve been lucky in that with ten nearly identical looking blogs layout wise, we were able to test different features and plug-ins to see what worked and what didn’t.

Currently we’re doing the following:

Interlinking blog posts with in-context links
We do this both within each blog but also across to the greater Travelfish site.

Related posts
We use YARRP and it is excellent. Easy to configure and doesn’t use images. We position it at the end of the story and in early testing, saw an 8-10% clickthrough rate.

Search
We use search-meter with it positioned after the related posts and before the Facebook dialogue. Search Meter allows you to easily track what people are searching for which in turn can be very helpful for new story ideas and highlighting gaps in your coverage.

Popular posts
A simple Top 10 plug-in in the left column that displays, you guessed it, popular posts. If others liked them, perhaps the next reader will too!

Conclusion
The above are but a handful of means to approach bounce rate. The “correct” approach will depend on your style of site and what you’re trying to do with it.

Every reader counts and if it is raining outside and it’s tackling bounce rate or doing month-end accounts, I know which I’d rather be doing.

Got a suggestion? I’m all ears!

PS I know I said I was going to be writing about sprites, but I put my back out through the week and wasn’t up to figuring all that out. Will do soon though!

A common refrain regarding Travelfish has been that the site is slow. People using the site would complain, Google would tell be at every possible opportunity it was slow (apparently about 80% of the sites on the web were faster) so over the last couple of months, as time has allowed, I’ve been reading up on what’s involved and slowly making changes to the site.

This is a bit of a work in process, but I thought I’d blog it as others may have some useful suggestions … plus the power is out so I’ve got nothing else to do but run down the laptop battery.

Broadly speaking there are four main choke points:

A picture says a thousand words
And a picture is about a thousand times the size of a single word.

Getting close to your readers
Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to make sure that your files are being served from a data centre close to your readers.

Don’t ask too many questions
An average browser is configured to request no more than 8 files simultaneously.

Doing the loop the loop
Optimising your database code and following best practises in your scripting. Caching is your friend.

But what’s the point?
Well if someone is motivated enough to email me to complain about the site speed, then it just needs to be addressed. How many others just left.

Travelfish.org is in part an advertising-supported website. What this means is that in some cases the more pages people look at, the more they learn and the more we earn. For a content site like Travelfish, the mantra seems to be the faster the pages load, the more pages people will read. Makes sense really — do you look forward to returning to a restaurant with glacial service?

Since we added the destination blogs earlier this year, the overall site bounce rate has increased significantly. In part due to their design, but also reader behaviour, blogs tend to have higher bounce rates than a “normal” site. Again this is something I hoped to address through speeding up the blogs — the faster I can load a page, the more chance I have they’ll see something else of interest. I also made some changes specific to the blogs to assist readership, I’ll be covering that in the coming weeks.

So in summary, in speeding up the site we’re hoping to address an issue readers have complained about to help them get the most out of the site. While simultaneously improving our bottom line.

So what have I done so far?
I signed up with Amazon’s S3 and Cloudfront Content Delivery Network. This allows me to store files on their servers (which are considerably more powerful than my setup) and make use of their CDN.

This is a double whammy in that S3 is fast and Cloudfront, with data centres in the USA, the EU, Tokyo and Singapore means that my files are being served a good deal closer to you. (The actual Travelfish.org server is in Texas, USA.)

While I haven’t shifted all the files yet, I have moved a lot, including many of the images, all the Javascript and all the Stylesheets.

Making this change alone, improved load time on my main testing page (http://www.travelfish.org/country/thailand) from over 11 seconds to under 3 seconds.

Not bad.

S3 and Cloudfront take a bit of getting used to, but Labnol has a fabulous set of S3 tutorials that were of immense help. There’s also a S3 Firefox plugin that is very helpful. And, for WordPress users, Tan Tan Noodles has a near perfect WordPress plugin for S3 image uploads.

I am stuck on one thing though in this area. When I upload an image to S3 I can set an expiry date long in the future (this assists with caching) and when I request the image from S3, the header is correct. BUT when I request it from Cloudfront, no expiry date is set. I’ve been trying to find an answer to this problem to no avail — suggestions welcome

Update at end of the entry regarding the above point.

Don’t ask too many questions
If you look at the output from Pingdom for the subject page, you’ll see there is a stack of files being requested. This was my next target.

I started with the javascript files — there used to be four — and combined them into just two files (one needs to remain separate as it is not always loaded).

That was easy.

I also looked at some of the third party javascripts that were being loaded. A World Nomads one related to their select box was a bit sluggish so I grabbed the script and uploaded it to S3. One note on this is I’ll have to check back occassionally with Nomads to make sure I have the most up-to-date file to keep this working properly. I’ll probably do the same with AWeber which can sometimes really bog down the load, while Reinvigorate I plan to stop using, so will just remove it.

The other third party scripts, Quantcast, Facebook, Google Analytics are better left on their respective servers.

In reducing the number of requests I’m not only building a faster site, I’m also saving myself money. Amazon charges for the S3/Cloudfront service in part by request and my last bill charged me for almost four million requests. (Don’t panic, the bill was under $10). But essentially what Amazon is saying it is in everyone’s interests — mine, Amazon’s and Travelfish.org readers — to keep the total number of requests down.

Talking about requests, the next step (which I’m starting on this week and will write about next week) is all about reducing them even further — with Sprites.

So many pretty pictures
Many of the icons (stars, checkboxes,flags etc) on Travelfish.org could be combined into a single file and displayed using CSS. The process is called sprites and there’s an old but good general wrap on sprites at alistapart.

Basically if you have 30 images that are common on many pages, you combine them into one and reference different parts of the single image to display the icons it contains. In this example this effectively reduces the number of files you are requesting from 30 to 1 and probably results in a lower overall filesize as well.

Optimal images
There are a number of online services you can use to optimise your web images. This generally revolves around stripping out data that isn’t needed (eg EXIF blah blah) and making the image file as compact as possible. Travelfish.org has around 15,000 image files on it, so I’ll be saving this one for the wet season.

Often the file saving is nominal (in hundreds of bytes rather than thousands), but every little bit counts — especially when you have an image being served thousands of times a day, 365 days a year.

Code reworking
Travelfish is all handmade, by me, and it generally works. I’m not bragging, but rather saying I could make a glider as well, that would probably fly — but it sure as hell wouldn’t be the Concorde.

I’ll be the first to say there is significant grounds for improvement in this area, especially with regard to caching — but as this will be different for every site, there’s little point in going into it here. The other points above though are applicable to any website.

Resources
Amazon S3
Amazon Cloudfront
Labnol’s tutorials
S3 Firefox plugin
WordPress plugin for S3 image uploads
alistapart on sprites
Pingdom results on the sample page

Next week, sprites and WordPress readership helpers.

Update
Thanks to Carl Hancock for pointing me to this entry regarding Cloudfront and S3.

It points out that Cloudfront doesn’t rerequest the file from S3 unless the filename has changed. I’d been updating the Expire Headers on the image on S3, but the file had already been called across to Cloudfront – so the revised image wasn’t being called.

What I need to do is upload a renamed version of the file to S3, change the expire header, then upload a new version of the HTML file that requires the image, using the new image name — this (in theory, I’ve not tested it yet) should result in the new image being pulled over.

Tedious, but better to learn this now rather than after I’ve uploaded the other 10,000 images!

Second update
So having tested the above, it does indeed work — so I wish I’d posted this entry before I uploaded all the images I did — as now I have to rename all of them… doh!

Regular Travelfish.org readers will be aware that we have a particular travel insurance provider that we recommend. That provider is World Nomads. We promote them because while they’re not the cheapest provider, we think that they’re the best match for independent travellers to the region.

And yes, we promote them on an affiliate basis (meaning we may earn a commission if you click across to their site from a link on Travelfish.org). They’re the only travel insurance provider that we work with in this fashion.

I’ve met the people who started World Nomads and they have always struck me as stand-up kind of people — the type of people that I trust. When it come to insurance, trust is important.

Now just like anyone else, they’re running a business, not a charity (though they do support many) and I assume they don’t pay out every claim, but likewise I assume they do pay out a lot. I’ve seen them personally intervene in cases that have somehow gone off the rails. That’s important. Nobody is perfect. If you make a mistake, you admit it and try to fix it as best as you can.

We do put our money where our mouth is. Both Samantha and myself use them without fail whenever we travel outside of Indonesia (we have separate coverage for within Indonesia from a different expat provider). As luck would have it, we’ve never had to make a claim.

We use World Nomads because we trust that the people behind it will do their upmost to assist us if we need it. It’s one thing to promote something because it sounds ok, it’s quite another to promote something because you use it for yourself and your children.

Where am I going with all this? Bear with me while I ramble on web-nerd-stuff.

One of the factors Google uses to ranks sites is to count up the number of natural links that point to a site. Afterall a link is generally a “vote” on the quality of the linked to site. This created an entire industry of link buying and link selling. Sites would buy hundreds or thousands of links in an effort to game Google. Crucially, these links do not adhere to Google’s guidelines (code can be added to tell Google to ignore a link). They want Google and, by default, the reader, to think it is a natural link. They’re hoping that Google won’t realise the links are paid for and so will push the destination site up in the search engine rankings.

Originally these links would be off on the sidebar or in the page footer. But Google cottoned on to that, so then the link buyers asked to have the links closer to the main text (“This story is sponsored by” kinda thing). But Google is cottoning onto that too. So then the link buyers started asking for the links to be in the actual content (write whatever you want, just add a link to X somewhere in the copy).

For publishers, especially small scale publishers, the earning potential can be substantial. I personally know people who charge US$300 to $500 for a single link. When you have 100 pages on your site, the money adds up quick.

But there’s a cost to this practise. Trust. Publishers who sell links are lying to Google and so to their readers. They’re saying this link is a natural link when it isn’t. They’re essentially the vital cog in a black-hat SEO tactic designed to game Google. They’re helping a website to appear higher in Google than it should.

Obviously each site owner is entitled to make their money however they want, but Travelfish.org does not engage in this practise and we try whenever possible not to link to sites that do.

So what on earth does this have to do with travel insurance?

Travel insurance companies are one of the biggest link buyers out there.

How can you trust a business that actively uses misleading SEO tactics to try and boost their ranking in Google?

World Nomads does not buy links.

We are regularly approached by travel insurance companies offering paid link deals. We ignore the emails.

So, what they do instead is they set up fake profiles and post messages on our messageboard with leading questions like “Has anyone heard of X insurance?”

So the insurance provider having found we won’t sell them a link are now posting fake messages on our messageboard to try and drum up business and create more “natural links”.

I find this rather annoying, hence this post.

So next time you see a link reading “This story was sponsored by X Insurance” remind yourself that if they’re lying to you before you even click on the link, how do you think they’ll treat your claim?

You can learn more about our recommended travel insurer World Nomads here. Yes, that is an affiliate link.

We pay all our writers by international bank transfer and have done for years. Nearly all the time it works fine. We’ve very infrequently had problems wiring to accounts in the US, but generally speaking we’re able to pay a bunch of people, month in month out, without problem.

Place money in waterproof bag, attach to pigeon, tell to fly to London.

All the payments are done through the Westpac ebanking platform meaning there are no painful trips to the bank required, and over the years it has proved to be a convenient and reasonably affordable means of paying people.

Until now.

While the following was kicked off by a mistake by us, the ongoing problems clearly indicate some issues that Westpac could better handle.

Back on 18 August (yes, over a month ago) we sent a wire to the UK account of one of our writers for an amount just shy of A$2,000. Their invoice listed all the details we normally use for transfers to the UK (account name, account number, SWIFT code and intermediary bank details). We had made a previous payment to this account without problem.

On the invoice, the account number was listed as (xxxx) xxxxxxxxx. When we tried to enter this into the ebanking, the system choked on the brackets, so, in our error, we tried it without the bracketed section. The details were accepted and a receipt number was issued. Bingo.

The problem of course was that the bracketed section was vital (it is the branch indicator) and so without that number, HSBC (the intermediary bank) would be unable to determine which branch to send the money to. We discovered this weeks later, when we realised that with the first transfer, we just removed the brackets rather than the bracket and number.

Anyway. At this stage we didn’t know anything was wrong, but just to be clear we are aware this entire shebang was kicked off by our error.

A week later, on August 24, we received a message from the writer, politely enquiring after the funds.

We then called Westpac who advised the branch identifier was missing, so we then filed, by email, a payment adjustment request. According to Westpac, this request would be forwarded to HSBC who would connect the dots and forward on the money.

On 30 August we received another message from the writer, noting that the money had not been received.

So on 30 August we contacted Westpac again, only to be told that they had “overlooked” forwarding the details to HSBC. So, they would do so immediately and confirm this action by email. We never received an email from them.

On 31 August, we called Westpac again to ask after the email and to check the instructions had been forwarded to HSBC. Instead we were told that the funds had been returned from the UK and had been retransmitted by Westpac (without notification to us) with the full correct details. This apparently took place without the money hitting our account at all. We were also advised that this action would be confirmed to us by email. We never received an email from them.

On 6 September we received yet another message from the writer, noting that the money had not been received.

On 6 September we checked with Westpac and were told the funds were re-transmitted on 31 August for effect 1 September. Westpac agreed to contact their “investigation branch” and have a trace sent to recipient bank. During this call, the consultant noted that “IBAN should be used in UK transfers, but that transfers would work without one, just easier for the recipient bank”. We then advised that we had an IBAN, but they neither requested that nor any extra information. As with the other calls, the consultant then advised the above would be confirmed by email. No email was received.

On 9 September we received yet another message from the writer, noting that the money had not been received.

On 9 September we checked with Westpac and were advised all Westpac can do is wait for response from UK bank.

On 13 September we received yet another message from the writer, noting that the money had not been received.

On 13 September we contacted Westpac again, and were advised that the UK bank had responded, saying “we are investigating and will revert”.

On 16 September we received yet another message from the writer, noting that the money had not been received.

On 16 September we contacted Westpac, they advised they would forward another trace and at our request copy an email to us — this email actually was received. We also instructed Westpac that if funds are returned from the UK bank, the funds to be returned to our account and we are to be advised. Absolutely do not re-transmit to UK.

On 17 September we received yet another message from the writer, noting that the money had not been received.

Separately to this, on 16 September, we sent a new wire for the same amount and the writer received it within 12 hours — so they have been paid, but Westpac and HSBC, given it has been a month, we’d really like that $2000 that you’re collectively sitting on, back please.

Update
On 20 September, we called Westpac again and were told they wait five days before chasing HSBC.

On 21 September, still no money back from Westpac.

Last week we headed across to Kuta Beach on southern Lombok for a holiday. While it wasn’t exactly a work trip, as we plan to cover Lombok anyway I thought I’d try a bit of an experiment and do some research solely on my iPhone4. The result? I’ll never buy a sheet of grid paper for mapping again!

One note before I get started: I realise not everyone is quite the Apple fan-boy I’ve developed into, but in many cases there are Android equivalents to what I’m going to cover here.

Mapping: Everytrail Pro
I love drawing maps — really — but as anyone who has tried to draw a map from scratch knows, it can be a trying process. Roads don’t line up, alleys disappear, and don’t get me started on towns with hills and valleys. Once you’ve got it down on paper, you then need to mark the points of interest — now was that guesthouse on the left or the right? The taxi rank on the northwest or southwest corner? Oh God, it’s 40 degrees outside — do I really have to walk down and check? You know the drill.

One app makes this all go away. Everytrail Pro records a GPS track as you go — it’s incredibly accurate — and you can punch in points of interest (waypoints) as you go. This then records the longitude and latitude for each place. Once you’ve finished walking out the map (or doing it by motorbike or car for bigger towns) you can then upload the data to your free Everytrail account, from where you can then download it in a variety of formats — I take it by GPX for transfer into OpenStreetMaps, which is the platform we’re slowly migrating to with Travelfish.

Even if you’re not after the road layout, Everytrail can still be used to punch in data points as you go, so you can then supply them to your publisher with longitude and latitude points — something that I’m happy to wager is going to increasingly become a requirement.
EveryTrail Pro in iTunes (US$3.99)

Waypoints
If all the mapping is overkill, but you still need longitude and latitude, Waypoints is an excellent app for telling you exactly where you are. It works better if you stand outside, so get a reading before you walk into the club. I’ve generally been able to get a reading within five-metre accuracy. It does give elevation readings as well, but I’ve found them to be a bit more mysterious.
Waypoints in iTunes (US$2.99)

WiFi Finder
WiFi Finder is a crowd-sourced application that lets you find WiFi (free and paid) sources that are nearby. I’ve found it to be pretty useful, though 3G coverage here in Bali isn’t too bad so I find myself needing WiFi less than if I was in one of those developing cities like Sydney, Australia where free WiFi is about as easy to find as a reasonably priced latte. The great thing about it is you can download the database so that it works offline, meaning you don’t have to HAVE WiFi to FIND WiFi! Duh! This is useful not just for your personal use, but if your brief includes listing places that offer WiFi.
WiFi Finder in iTunes (Free)

Gowalla and FourSquare
As Facebook Places isn’t active yet in Indonesia I couldn’t give that a run, but I tried both of these apps and definitely prefer Gowalla — Foursquare feels way too much like a pissing contest for my liking. Tripadvisor also has a similar app. Whichever one you choose, these can be very useful in discovery. Turn it on, allow it to use your location and see what pops up nearby. On Gowalla you can click on a particular place that’s nearby and it will tell you how many people have checked in there. This could be a sign of a popular place worth checking out.

A note on both of these apps: the information, especially the location, can be off. For instance, Foursquare lists Frangipani in Bali (a bar a 30-minute drive away) to be at the end of my street — so don’t use either of these as a definitive source. There’s no substitute for going there yourself.

Secondly, while these were both useful, personally, I’d prefer talking to people and you’re certainly tying yourself to an “electronic niche” in relying on these too much.
Gowalla in iTunes (Free)
Foursquare in iTunes (Free)

Twitter
If you’re not on Twitter already, get on it. Set up a hashtag following destinations you’re going to be writing up and save them as a search. Be specific, but not too specific. So, #bali is a better fit than #indonesia. Then keep an eye on the stream and see what people are tweeting about: it could be a new bar opening, a hotel with crappy service or a beach you’ve never heard of. Twitter can be a great discovery tool — but it can also be a major time sink, so be disciplined!
Twitter in iTunes (Free)

More discovery
There are a slew of other location-based travel apps of interest, but one that really stands out from a discovery point of view for finding hotels is HotelsCombined’s iFindHotels. You just turn it on, let it detect your location and then it shows you all the hotels it has in its system nearby. Then you can click on the ones you’re interested in to see if they fit the profile for the properties you’re looking to review. A few other apps have similar functionality.
iFindHotels in iTunes (Free)

Instapaper Pro
This lets you clip interesting online stories (could be magazine or news stories, travel write-ups, blog entries and so on) and save them to your iPhone for reading later. You can also sync it with your desktop. It is a very good app and I’d recommend it to anyone who reads a lot online.
Instapaper Pro in iTunes (US$4.99)

PDF Reader
If you’ve grabbed some resources in PDF format (or any other kind of research material — train and ferry timetables spring to mind) then this is a great app for reading them easily.
PDF Reader in iTunes (US$0.99)

Photos
The camera is a built in part of the iPhone, but if you’re taking snaps of accommodation (if you’re not already being asked to do so, expect to be asked soon), consider turning on “Location Services” as that will stamp all your pics with longitude and latitude. The camera is also useful for all the other typical stuff: business cards, timetables, shots to jog your memory and so on. Obviously organise your photos into albums – they’ll be easier to keep track of and sync with your computer when back home.

Notes & Voice memos
Two more built-in (and so free) apps. My process was to review a property, snap photos, and then once outside jot all the details into “Notes”. I’d just start a new page for each listing. If you find the keyboard tricky to work with, then record a voice memo instead — either way you’ll have all your first impressions recorded immediately, when they’re freshest, which should result in better end-version write-ups.

Email & Skype
Email is built in and obviously helpful for receiving those emails from pesky editors. Skype is handy for calling them to tell them to leave you alone (use the above-mentioned WiFi Finder to find a free connection to call on).
Skype in iTunes (Free)

One app that is missing?
Evernote is the one overarching app that would be perfect to collect all this information into, but, as far as I can see, there is no way to export the information back out again, which makes it close to useless for our purposes.

Update:
Thanks to @hackneye and @bm_ for pointing out that Evernote actually does allow you to export the data (in a HTML format with the images in subdirectories etc, or in an XML format) so it could be a nice envelope to stuff with all the data you collect afterall!
Evernote in iTunes (Free)

In summary
With one iPhone you can record your notes (typed or voice-recorded), find WiFi, record longitude and latitude, look after pretty much all of your mapping needs, take photos to jog your memory for when you’re writing up 40 near-identical thatch bungalow operations, use location-based apps to stalk other travellers and see what they’re into, receive emails from annoying editors and yell back at them via Skype. Then there’s the browser (mobile Safari) which is handy for online research and checking the football scores.

Sure the iPhone isn’t a cheap phone, but, combined with even just some of the above apps, you’ll be amazed just how much time it can save you while you’re on the road. Publishers are forever demanding more work for the same coin and they’re increasingly going to be asking for data like longitude, latitude and accommodation photos. For once it needn’t be a headache.

Just don’t forget to back up!

Got any suggestions for other apps to ease a travel guide writer’s pain? Please share!

Oh and one more thing, if you’re in an app-buying mood, don’t forget to check out our travel guide apps for Southeast Asia!

If you’re running a travel blog and view it as a potential income source, stop calling it a travel blog and start calling it a travel website.

From the content director’s (sorry I just can’t use curator) point of view, the process doesn’t change one iota, but from the advertisers point of view the perception can change considerably.

Stop calling yourself a blogger. Start calling yourself a writer (or photographer, artist etc).

Stop running a blog. Start running a travel website.