THE ONE YEAR MARK IN BLOGGING – LOVING SOUTH AMERICA

The one-year mark in our blogging is a point of introspection, which in turn is first objectively measured by website traffic and search results. Typing “South America” yielded 309 million results in Google. On pages such as Wiki, encyclopedias, atlas, travel books, FIFA, agencies, maps, Fox sports, Disney, newspapers, weather, hotels, etc. etc. etc., we did not land a single post in the first 48 pages. It does raise the question is there still space open in the internet? And while the search engine robots have their own agendas one has to wonder how miss-directed and self-serving they are for Google’s bottom line? Our website address is www.southamericatotheworld.com; the words South America are right there, and yet so many other pages that come up instead of us have hardly anything to do with either word. This is the frustrating thing about the internet, Google, and SEOs.

After one year we have 114 posts. Many of these posts deliver better search results when the search more specific, such as South America hot springs- there we have had success. We have a total of 14 posts on hot springs taken from our guide book on the Andes. Or South America geology, landing the second page of search results due to 18 years of keeping a bibliography on the continent’s geology science papers.

We launched five posts on Pisco, which ultimately encouraged putting together an e-book on Pisco cocktail recipes. Of course, none of these show in the first 10 pages of search results on Pisco; there are just so many voices on the internet, and embedded older pages with nothing new updated on them clogging up the system. It is a very competitive market to break into, with all the Pisco manufactures and newspaper one-off articles supported by the massive traffic of their hosting sites. We speak from experience, majority of those webpages listed instead of us with their novelty summary of the liqueur have drank far fewer Pisco Sours than we have! This includes the following; we have tried Pisco Sour in the town of Pisco in 1999 where the name of this Peruvian brandy originated, and also had a Pisco Sour at the Grand Hotel Bolivar in central Lima where the history of this cocktail started. On our wedding day we all had Pisco Sours as well, and of course Yanira being Peruvian means she is very familiar with her national drink.

In SouthAmericatotheWorld.com we have sought out continent wide topical summaries on things that interest us, including dinosaur tracks, caves, active volcanoes, deep mines, Peruvian food, and off the beaten track travel. Our website was also made to support our nine books written on various topics from South America. Our background knowledge on South America is far vaster than many numerous three-month vacation blog sites that have just first set foot on the continent and struggle with how to pronounce the word “llama.” Yanira grew up on top of the Peruvian Andes and her husband Jim has been to more places in Peru and Chile than the nationals that live there, and both visited many other countries on the continent. Travel to South America means many things. It is still an adventure going to some towns that appear so simple and yet holds so much history like Potosi in Bolivia, or Huancavelica in Peru. The people and their different culture make every visit more interesting along with the food they prepare. We love to travel and South America still has a lot more to be discovered and we plan on doing so.

All of the above may intone frustration about the internet and Google traffic, but behind the startup issues is a deep passion for South America that is decades old, and something that we are committed to as a lifelong exploration. South America’s diversity in climates, cultures, and landscapes has not been captured by the majority of the websites beating us out in traffic, and only very few of them can match us for the level of photography done on the continent, or have the breadth of on the ground experience as we bring, thus explaining why we continue to present South America to the world.

 Therefore we maintain that South America seems to refuse to show its inexhaustible creative force.