Speak Up Sydney

A bit of news from our business review partner www.rayv.com.au

Anyone living in Sydney may be interested in knowing about Speak Up Sydney, a community initiative aimed at strengthening the tie between Sydney residents and its businesses. Speak Up Sydney gives people an opportunity to Speak Up and:

1. Share their experiences
2. Provide valuable feedback to businesses
3. Uncover the hidden gems of Sydney

Best of all, Speak Up Sydney’s community sponsors (which inlclude Time Out Sydney and RAYV) have sweetened the pot by providing over $10,000 in cash and prizes to be won, including the grand prize of $5,000 in cash! All you need to do is share your opinion, and if the judges think it’s one of the best, you win. Not bad for 5 minutes of work.

The competition ends April 30.  More info can be found at www.speakupsydney.com.

Taco Fleur Bio

Bio | Taco Fleur 

Taco Fleur has been working with the Internet since its early days.

After growing up in The Netherlands and spending a year in the Dutch Royal Air Force, Taco moved to Spain at the age of 19 where he worked for an ISP based in Marbella. There, he could do what he loved most; designing websites and working with computers.

At the age of 21 he made the bold move to open up his own Internet Development and Hosting company called “Malaga IT”. At one stage the company employed 12 people, ranging from receptionist to designers and IT staff.

Setting up the company was one of the most exhilarating and at the same time most difficult thing he’d ever done. All business experience and knowledge had to be gained the hard way, and each day was another day of learning. Over the next 6 years he setup a complete hosting environment, with email, web and database servers, and managed several staff in hardware sales & maintenance, graphic design, programming and hosting.

Selling the company after 6 years was even harder than starting it up, but he decided that the 6 years of knowledge would allow him to build an even better company and reach his goal of owning and running a successful website one day.

At age 28 he moved to Australia Brisbane where he worked for several great companies over the years like; Department of Premier and Cabinet, Tourism Queensland, Suncorp and Inco Mining.

Taco Fleur is currently managing the successful Australian Business Directory clickfind™ (www.clickfind.com.au) and running a Brisbane based web design business called Pacific Fox (www.pacificfox.com.au).

Carolyn King Bio

Bio | Carolyn King 

Carolyn has 25 years’ experience in graphic design, interface design, information architecture, branding and communication for online and print media.

Carolyn came to Australia from England at the tender age of 4, growing up in the beautiful Blue Mountains near Sydney. After completing a degree in Visual Communication (Sydney College of the Arts) she worked in graphic design for the educational publishing market.  

In the mid 1980’s Carolyn was designing screens and information structure for an online Australian travel system based on videotex technology, well before the general public had even heard of the Internet.

She moved to the UK in 1986 and spent a number of years working for a Cambridge communication consultancy. At that time, Cambridge was the centre of a technology revolution, nicknamed “The Cambridge Phenomenon”. Initially, Carolyn was designing user guides, posters and screen interfaces to help people use new technologies. Then the consultancy merged with a large IT company, and her role focused on planning and implementing communication strategies for corporate change management programmes.

When the World Wide Web became a reality in the early 1990’s, Carolyn jumped ship from her successful management consultancy role to work for a start-up web design business. That business grew quickly and she was able to use this experience when she moved to another agency to establish a web design service there. The agency’s clients included big corporates such as BT, IBM, Coca-Cola Schweppes, KPMG, Ford and others.

After a few very productive years at the agency, Carolyn decided to establish her own freelance business so she could concentrate on the work she loves – visual design and communication. She moved back to Australia in 2004 and continues to run a freelance design business, servicing local and international clients (www.cazazz.com). Carolyn is a part-owner of new Australian search engine clickfind™ and lives in the scenic Samford Valley near Brisbane with her family.

Search Engine Strategy

We’ve recently answered some questions for the “Startups Carnival” (http://startups.sharmavishal.com/) which we thought would be quite interesting to post here.

Free article submission

Clickfind will soon be rolling out something new that has not been done before in the local search industry. We’re going to allow anyone to write articles related to listings on clickfind. Sort of like a wiki, but different…

Australian Associated Press

We’ve recently started to use AAP to distribute our Press Releases, and we’re pleased to see that the PR has been taken up by some websites.

http://www.thestandard.com/…

http://www.computerworld.com.au/…

clickfind shoots up the results chart in Google

For several relevant key phrases we can now see clickfind on page one of Google (Australia). This is great news, not only for the clickfind team, but for businesses who have listings in the business directory.

After a (relative) short time, clickfind has achieved the following:

• australian business directory – 04/02/08: not found | 14/03/08: #6

• australian search engine – 04/02/08: #25 | 14/03/08: #5

• business directories – 04/02/08: not found | 14/03/08: #9

• business directory – 04/02/08: not found | 14/03/08: #19

There are still better results to be achieved, and I’m quite sure the results will flow on to the various listings in clickfind.

For the complete seo report, please download the pdf available on this business directories page.

From a website design perspective, having a listing in clickfind is both a money and time saver. The team at clickfind work hard at achieving great SEO results, which brings in more traffic, thus exposing businesses who are listed in the directory to a whole new group of potential clients.

Some small businesses may even do away with having their own website altogether. You can simply purchase a cheap domain name registration ($25.00 for a .com.au) and have it forwarded to your clickfind listing. This will save you lots of money over time by using the unique 500 page products and services listing feature, rather than expensive website maintenance.

Websites belonging to larger businesses will benefit from the brilliant deep link feature available from each one of the clickfind directory’s (up to 500) products and services pages in their own listing.

Brisbane Biz draws Yellow Blood and Google Gold Rush

Brisbane based Clickfind.com.au has launched a direct attack on the already established business directories Yellow Pages Online & Microsoft’s Mylocal business models offering advertising free directory listings that help secure top Google rankings for Australian business owners.

Google Ranking

We were in panic mode for the last two weeks, as we basically dropped completely from Googles search results. This was after doing some tweaking of the site for SEO.

Alexa ranking up again

Since February 7 our Alexa ranking has gone up from 501,584 to 468,625. We’re very happy to gradually see it growing.

Our own search reports show a decline in number of searches and business views, however, there is a valid explanation for this; we’ve completely stopped our paid marketing campaign efforts with Google, after which our number of indexed pages also dropped by 25% (who knows why they dropped). The reason for dropping our campaigns with Google is because we have a few surprises in the pipeline, and we want to have maximum impact with those campaigns when we launch them.

We’ve also stopped traffic from several bot infected machines, which seemed to bump our statistics up a bit, although that’s very nice, we prefer to see real statistics and have excluded about 100 IPs from our traffic.