The Chain Gang Cycle Tours

The Grind Of Getting Googled

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Clare and I have recently started the latest round of website promotion. Periodically I get a bee in my bonnet about optimising our website and increasing traffic. We pay Lizzie for this sort of work as well, but as she says, she can do so much, but the tools she uses are generated by the elbow grease that Clare and I put in.

For example, our blog postings and newsletters are all part of the process. We have to write them, Lizzie uses them to optimise traffic to the main site. You can’t have Lizzie doing lots more work without lots more work on our side. In theory I subscribe to this logic wholeheartedly, I love putting more information on our website and adding stories to our blog, etc. But just like a diet, I’m good for a week or so, then it drops off a bit, then it disappears altogether. Then I get shouted at by Lizzie, and then I start again.

This time will be different! Anyone out there believe me? So, our latest project is to develop a comprehensive ‘Links’ programme. Firstly, I want to have a links page where we can provide links to anything that I think Chain Gang people might find useful or interesting: travel, nice bike shops, vineyards, chateaux, our hotel partners, as well as cool cycling video clips, good books about the regions we explore, anything (in fact, any suggestions welcomed).

The second part is the hard part, which brings home the bacon - persuading other websites to link to us. The more sites that link to your site, all other things being equal, the better your ranking in Google. And that is rapidly becoming the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd most important part of any marketing plan.

Some bits should be easy. We have loads of suppliers in France and Italy, hotels, vineyards, transport suppliers etc., certainly a few hundreds of companies who we know and who we pay money to. I was surprised how many of them now have websites. You’d expect all the hotels to have websites, but as recently as last year loads of them just didn’t. It’s changed in the short time since last spring. Now, most of the hotels and even the vineyards seem to have websites. I hope it’s as easy as “We’ve paid you lots of money every year for the last 11 years, please will you put a link on your website?

It won’t be that easy, but with an air of overwhelming optimism the process starts today!

Race Season’s Here

Although most attention is given to the Tour de France, the bike racing season runs from February to October, and March / April can be especially exciting times.

This is the time of the great 1-day classics in Northern France and Belgium, as well as a slight nod to Italy and Holland. Races like Liege-Bastogne-Liege, Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, Het Volk, Fleche-Wallone the Amstel Gold Race and the biggest one of them all, Paris-Roubaix.

Before Lance Armstrong started to concentrate on the Tour de France to the exclusion of all else, these 1-day ‘classics’ were a key part of the season, and for cycling fans these are important races.

One of the biggest of these races, one of the so-called ‘Monuments’, the Milan-San Remo, which took place three weeks ago. Traditionally this race was decided by the series of short, sharp hills near the finish, notably the Poggio.

In recent years sprinters have become so good that they’ve managed to stay on the pace over these hills and the finish of the Milan-San Remo has become the domain of the sprint specialists, with mass sprints contested by the likes of Stuart O’Grady, Alessandro Petacchi, Paolo Bettini, Tom Boonen, Robbie McEwen and Mario Cipollini. The hills towards the end of the course simply weren’t tough enough to weed out the sprinters.

This year’s race would have been of special interest to anyone who watched the prologue of the Tour de France last summer in London. We all saw Andreas Kloden riding super smoothly, and our local hero Bradley Wiggins riding so well to come in 4^th. And then the last rider set off, Fabian Cancellara. Before he’d gone 100 metres it was clear that Cancellara was faster, his whole rhythm and speed was different, and sure enough he won by more than 10 seconds in a 9-minute race.

And he did the same in the Milan-San Remo. When he hit the front 2 Km from the end, nobody could keep up. That’s amazing - you’re not supposed to be able to outsprint the field from the front. Those of us that saw him last July saw how good he was, and I was delighted to see him win. Read more about the Milan-San Remo and read about this year’s results at www.cyclingnews.com.

It was the Paris-Roubaix on April 13^th. A fabulous, historic race, the most famous 1-day bike race in the world. 260 Km from Paris to Roubaix, the main feature of the Paris Roubaix is a series of cobbled sections, known as ‘pavé’.

Milan San-Remo 2008