Jason Roe / Blog, Jason Roe - Web design, Development, SEO Advice

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Following up from Michele’s post “Irish SEO - Where to Submit Your Site� I decided to have a look for a few more Irish directory sites. Here are the results of 10 minutes work. Some of the sites are free, some are paid and some I have absolutely no idea how you get a link into them! Enjoy!

http://www.irishsites.com/
http://www.kilcooledirectory.ie/
http://www.purplepages.ie/site/content/default.asp
http://www.itdirectory.ie/
http://www.irishabroad.com/Directory/
http://www.tipperarydirectory.ie/htmlsite/directory.asp
http://www.fashion.ie/directory/
http://www.gaire.com/dir/
http://www.queer.ie/directory/
http://www.gaycork.com/directory/
http://www.irishbuildingindustry.ie/
http://kildare.ie/business/
http://www.mayodirectory.com/
http://www.letterkennyonline.com/
http://musicdirectory.dfloor.net/directory/
http://www.galwayec.ie/schoolsdirectory.html
http://www.sustainable.ie/directory/index.php
http://www.hotspots.ie/
http://www.progressivetrance.net/directory/
http://www.isearch.ie/
http://new.galway.net/directory/
http://www.longford.ie/business/directory.asp
http://www.furniture.ie/directory/
http://www.adlib.ie/directory.asp
http://www.ballyfermot.ie/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=43
http://www.youth.ie/arts/directory/
http://www.dun-laoghaire.com/directory.html
http://www.longford.ie/community/directory.asp http://www.carrickonshannon.ie/carrick_local_business_directory/index.php
http://www.braydirectory.ie/
http://www.weddingsireland.com/directory/

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I’m glad to see that Irish users have started to latch onto the idea of text link ads. To be honest they are fairly cool. I have made about $54 so far from them. It’s like money for nothing. Payments have been made every month on time via Paypal.

So what’s a link on my site worth? Text link ads produced a cool ill calculator. The tool works out how much you could get depending on what kind of site you have. To be honest if my site was gambling related my links would be worth $69, that’s over twice the price of my current links. So go over to text link ads sign up and start making money!

Also a big hello to iWorld one of our text link advertisers, it seems that you can Buy iPod and iPod Accessories at their site. Some of them look fairly cool too. Please note the nofollow link.. Have to keep them keen after all.

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Build your empire to last

At the moment search engines seem to be ranking sites fairly well that have pages with relevant inbound links. This is not the only factor involved to rank well, however it seem to have a lot of weight behind it. The search engines have also got smatter about identifying people who are playing the system to their advantage.

Link exchanges are no longer as effective as the where in the past and many people have got banned or caught up in a bad neighbourhood by using them. In an ideal world, if everyone followed the rules link exchanges would work perfectly, but this is the real world! Quality is more important than anything else. I found a chart that approximately shows how many links are needed to achieve a certain PR from pages with a particular PR.

“…the meaning of a link has been transformed from a reference to a vote.�
Bill Slawski, from his interview with Aaron.

Link building takes time. I would compare link building to building the foundations of a home. The foundations have to be strong and must withstand the test of time. Everyone has there own theories about the best ways to build links, you need to take time and work out your own linking strategies. I found a great article over on search engine watch regarding linking strategies. “101 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies�

How long does it take? I found an interesting post over at Link Building Blog that mentioned a “time line� of sorts:

Established Domains (domains that are over 1+ year old or are already ranking for many terms)
*build links -> 10-12 weeks later see results.

New Domains (domains under 1 year old and are showing no strong ranking results) *build links -> 12 weeks to 16 months later see results.

Feed the monster

Start adding news content to your site and make sure to set up an RSS feed immediately. This can be done via a blog, content management systems or custom script. The advantage of a feed over a standard news section is that feed will be picked up and aggregated by many sites. A standard news section will only be read and indexed by major search engines. News is produced to be read, not just to fill up a page on your website.

Bloggers have realised for a long time that Feeds are they way to go. Your news will be out and all over the web in less than 24 – 48 hours. RSS is being picked up and read and indexed by most of the search engines. Most aggregators will also give you link backs thus boosting your rankings.

Make sure that you ping every aggregator site that you can. Many blog tools already have pinging tools build in as standard, make sure to add in all the aggregators that you can find to your list.

Don’t get lost!

Black hats have many ways to help you get removed from search engine indexes. Be careful to watch out for malicious server side includes, comments sections or reviews with direct links without nofollows and link spammers (with irrelevant keywords). There are many more ways to get removed, banned and penalised they just break the rules!
Most of the time there isn’t much you can do regarding external attacks. Try contact the major search engines, describe what is happening and plead that they won’t remove you from the index.

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I was having a look at my Apache log files today when I stumbled upon this snippet from Msnbot. It seems like the Msn bot was looking for something Google related. The site in question runs both Adsense, Analytics and has a Google sitemaps.

GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/google/planting.gif HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/google/rakegirl.gif HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/xml.png HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/google/lilybasket.gif HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/gear/13.jpg HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/google/egg.gif HTTP/1.0

All requests where made from 65.55.246.48 around 06/Jun/ 10:03:06 +0100

I have had a look around on the web but I can’t find anything related. Has anyone seen this kind of pattern before?

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• Posted in Web Design & Development
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Keep It Local

The one major problem that I have seen with a lot of Irish companies and websites is that they are hosting their website outside of Ireland. Why would this be a problem? Most of the modern search engines over the last few years have implemented geo targeted results. Geo targeted means that the search engine find pages that a most relevant to you by showing you local results first.

The long and the short of this is, If you’re an Irish based company looking for Irish traffic it is better to host in Ireland. In the same respect if you are a UK based company looking to target UK customers then host in the UK or on UK IP space within Ireland (Ask your hosting providers!). Hosting in Ireland won’t guarantee that you will shoot up the SERP’s on the major search engines, however it can help you along the way.

Avoid Duplicate Content

It is well known that the best way to help your rankings is to always have a fresh supply of content. This is why blogs and the like have sky rocketed in the last few years, the search engines love them. However with the adoption of RSS by webmaster has come a plague of duplicate content issues. Duplicate content is an exact copy or a close copy of content from other websites. Search engines frown upon too much duplicate content on a page.

A prime example of duplicate content is news feeds on pages, if your “news section� is made up entirely of this kind of duplicated or aggregated content it won’t help you one bit on your rankings. Most of the major search engines can easily identify duplicated content and if your page is found to have too much it, the page just won’t rank at all or get dropped into the supplemental results. Many webmasters now re-write content feeds by replacing words, terms and by using LSI (latent semantic indexing) theories.

There are some rare cases where this may not be the case. We have all heard stories of 100% duplicated content ranking well, however in many cases these sites have used other methods to help their cause.

Help Spiders do their job

Spiders are automated bots design by search engines to crawl your website. Over time a spider will index your pages many times. The bots are designed to help identify and classify sites so that the search engine can return these results in the SERP’S. There are many theories about how to help these bots along the way.

1. I always suggest that a site should always have text based navigation somewhere on the page. This text based navigation can be placed anywhere on the page, the header, the footer or in the body. A text based navigation is beneficial because the search engines can obtain extra information from the link text. Image based navigation can also use this theory by using image descriptions, however many seem to believe that this kind of navigation is not as effective as a traditional text based link. In many cases a text based navigation can also be used in conjunction with a image based Nav.
2. Don’t use the same title on every page, your title shout be customised to the content on a specific page and should relate to your keyword density. In many cases your page titles should look something like this“Page Name, Company Name – Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3, Keyword4, Keyword5�
3. Place your content as high as possible within your pages. Try to place your content above your navigation, the spiders will read this information first and will not get cluttered up with other possibly irrelevant information. In many cases this can be achieved by using a right hand side navigation or by positioning the navigation with CSS.
4. NoFollow all un-trusted links or external links that you are not in control of. You can’t control what a webmaster on an external site may or may not do with their site. If they happen to “Break the rulesâ€? in a search engines eyes you may be left in a situation where you are now unknowingly linking to a “Bad Neighbourhood â€?. So why risk it? Give the link love to sites that you think deserve it. A NoFollow link is a standard link with the attribute rel=”nofollow” added to it . This attribute signifies to search engines that you would not like to take the responsibility of being associated with a site.

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It seems “Someone” is now sending in the lawyers on a “pending” trademark for the term “Web 2.0â€? see:

O’Reilly trademarks “Web 2.0″ and sets lawyers on IT@Cork!

IT@Cork is a not-for-profit networking organisation for IT professionals. IT@Cork organises regular information and networking events which are free for its members.

One of these events - the upcoming Web 2.0 half-day conference is the target of a cease and desist letter (below) from the legal team of O’Reilly publishers. Basically O’Reilly are claiming to have applied for a trademark for the term “Web 2.0″ and therefore IT@Cork can’t use the term for its conference. Apparantly use of the term “Web 2.0″ is a “flagrant violation� of their trademark rights!

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The search giant Microsoft has opened its doors for its msn advertising program adCenter. I signed up today to check out what all the talk was about and was pleasantly surprised. Some of the highlights for advertisers include Location specific adverts, specific day of the week and specific time of the day advertising.

The interface is really easy to use, however it only accessible via Internet Explorer. There is also a requirement for a €5 euro credit card verification fee to verify your credit card.

I found some of the tools quite interesting, the site allows you to Import or export ads via csv. This allows you to quickly update your campaigns. The Keyword research tools allow you to see Traffic Trends, Age and Gender, Wealth Index, Lifestyle, Geography. The only problems I can see about this feature is that it’s not location specific so you get a lot of US generic information.

As far as I can see the adverts themselves are only available on msn.com and not yet available on the localised search engines such as msn.ie. If you want to check adCenter out yourself surf over to http://adcenter.msn.com/

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It now seems that media bot is indexing content for the main Google index. Previously Google stated that this bot was designed to only pick up what ads where relevant to you website. The implications of this is that anyone that has been “optimising� content for adsense by removing non critical information will be affecting their main Google index.

The guys over at SeoRockstars gave a prime example where over 50,000 pages got dumped into the supplemental results. They also stated that this has been confirmed by a source within Google. On the plus side this also means Adsense publishers might have an advantage over normal website as new content might be picked up and indexed sooner.

Listen to the SeoRockstars podcast:

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Online advertising was something that in my mind hasn’t changed that much over the years, sure the technology has moved with the times but what has really changed? Well it seems that most companies in the area of online marketing have kept the fundamentals, publishers + advertiser = cash. It seems that every “new� technology in this area is a spin off of something that has come before it. I have to admit some of these new mediums have worked extremely well, a prefect example was the ever talked about million-dollar home page.

So with all these new fandangle mediums banging about how do you know what one is for you? After working on a re-development of an Irish site called Irish ISP Test I realised how powerful google adsense was for a publisher. Without going into specifics of the project, I realised quite quickly that google adsense advertisements could have paid for the entire re-development costs within less than one month. This could be down to the colossal amount of traffic received every month, or the fact that it was also a useful tool who knows?

The adsense experiences made me think in great depth about this whole advertising situation. From a publisher point of view the “adsense way� seems to be the ideal way to make money, however I feel that the advertiser are getting the raw end of the stick in some respects. Sure the advertisers are getting buckets of traffic that’s targeted, segmented, poked and prodded and then finally delivered but they are also missing out on other opportunities.

Lets go back to basics for a second to an old tradition called link swapping, this was a phenomenon that went on for years and still does to this date, blogs being a prime example of this. Not only does it advertise your site it also boosts your rankings and increases your PR, in some cases its not as targeted but never the less it works. So where am I going with this? I stumbled upon a service called TextLinkAds, I’m sure it’s not completely unique however it uses this kind of link swapping ideology.

TextLinkAds seems to be an interesting alternative to adsense, in some respects it resembles the “Advertise on this site� feature offered by adsense. What makes it different is the fact that TextLinkAds provides you with a full directory of publisher sites. This directory gives you relevant information that can help you choose where you would like to advertise. The advantage of this system is that you pay a flat fee per month (no pay per click) for each site you advertise on, for this fee you get a direct link on the website meaning that not only are you advertising you are also boosting your organic search engine rankings.

So to conclude there are many options for advertiser and publishers alike its best to shop around and get the best all round deal. Try new things explore new services and pick the ones that suit you. Id welcome peoples comments on online marketing and advertising services.

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In my experience the natural flow of a website seems to be some times overlooked by designers, this is a common mistake that can have drastic implications. If a user can’t find relevant information on your website you are doing something wrong. This often highlighted by emails or calls that go something like this .. “I was looking on your website but I couldn’t find X or Y”….”the user is not looking hard enough” I hear you all cry!!! However why should a user have to look hard for information that should be easily available?

With all this in mind I went about constructing a basic layout. I tried two possible layouts which are fairly simple, one design with a left sided navigation and another with a right sided. Although this normally seems like a very small detail it really affects the way content is read and perceived. The final layout looks something like the image shown on the right.

The simple design means everything is only one click away from the main page. Creating a simple navigational flow helps users to navigate and find your relevant information quickly. Interlinking related pages such as linking the services page with specific products you will improve the quality of the information because its is much more acessable. This kind of infomation can often be missed by users while browsing.

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