Tantallon House on Hadrian’s Wall

I have been in charge of Tantallon House’s internet marketing, learning various techniques through intensive research, into this constantly changing field. It may be that you found our site through Google - perhaps the be all and end of all of searching. It seems that the majority of people use Google when searching instead of Yahoo, AOL, Ask, MSN… According to this article (and the evidence varies), Google has around 80% of the UK market. Achieving a high ranking in the search engines, contrary to popular belief is not based on the number of hits a site receives - as this could be easily manipulated by companies, but essentially on two factors - content and links.

‘Content is King‘ is often heard on SEO (search engine optimisation) blogs. Google scans sites and matches up people’s search terms with the keywords that most often appear in your site. For example this site is optimised to the keywords ‘bed and breakfast’ and ‘hadrian’s wall’. To illustrate the point we could have focused this website on ‘accommodation’ and ‘cumbria’ if we were to target a slightly different market. So what does this mean? Well for starters Tantallon House ranks highly for the search term ‘hadrian’s wall bed and breakfast‘ in Google. The higher up the rankings, the more hits the site will get and the hope is the more bookings we will receive.

Google uses another major criteria for ranking - links, and this is arguably the more time consuming side of search engine marketing (SEM). Google’s rankings are loosely democratic, in that sense that each website can ‘vote’ for another one by posting a link to it. This is seen as a sign that there is something of value on the website. However, these votes are weighted - a site that has more votes (and is generally regarded as the ‘authority’) has a greater influence with its links. For example a link from the national trail official website, is considered more valuable than say someone’s relatively unknown personal website.

Sounds relatively simple doesn’t it? Well to be honest it is, but the more you get involved with SEO the more you seen can be acheived and more importantly the bigger the impact that can be created on a business in terms of the number customers. If you would like to know more about this, or how SEO could help your website - then a new site is about to be launched, goodwebpractices where there will be useful and easy to understand articles that delve deeper into internet marketing.

A spectacular event, the Northumberland Lights Festival, was held in the old quarry of Walltown Crags a few days ago.  This is a beautiful area for walking and is on the line of Hadians Wall.  The Victorians extensively excavated the area and there is now a dramatic formation of crags which formed the backdrop for the show.

The show commenced with a walk from the entrance up.  We passed strange eerily lit  sculptures until we arrived in the central part of the quarry.  There we stood with many others listening to the intro music while we waited for the main show to commence. - The lighting, of all sorts of colours and shapes were projected onto the craggy rocks, Majestic fireworks ricoched around the quarry as they exploded in amazing lights over us, the fire works were to the front of us and behind us, seeming to respond to each display, ,at one stage, what appeared to be blazing braziers were swung around the heads of brave volunteers hugging the cliffs, electronic music accompanied the display and all the fireworks, music and lights were synchronised to good effect.

We would recommend going to next years show organised by Northumberland National Park, especially as its very close to our bed and breakfast - about 3 miles away.  You can walk or cycle but there are buses from local destinations serving the site and all timed to ensure the scheduled train and bus services can be caught by the show goers.

About 10 minutes walk from our B&B is the Irthing Gorge. This is a great place for a walk in amongst the woods with the River Irthing running through the area.

One of the places to visit on the walk is Popping Stones. Local legend has it that Sir Walter Scott proposed to his future wife on the prominent rocks that lie beside the river and and it has been known ever since as Popping Stones. There are 2 stones which sit side by side which are rounded, well worn and bear signs of work by modem masons. Reshaping did take place around 1870 according to the historical records (thanks to Will Higgs here). It is a wonderful place to sit and watch the river and wildlife. Visiting today, the route was muddy, but it does dry out significantly in the summer. The river water was flowing out from a tributary half way up the gorge cliff. (reminiscent of Scotland here) and I have also seen a heron flying though.

The area is administered by the woodland trust and the whole Gorge is protected.