Jason Roe Blog, Jasons Blog | Blog Ireland

Over the last week I have been doing an SEO experiment. I have been Piggy backing on the funda Dublin coastal development exposure. This all started last Saturday when I made a post about the video that was produced by funda. Around the same time I had swapped over to my new template. When you look at the template code itself you may notice that it’s not just a new style sheet it’s a whole new template.

The experiment itself was simple, take the keywords that I was receiving from the first post and apply it to a second post to get maximum exposure. The first post that was made on Saturday was ranking well on the SERPS by Monday. When I say ranking well, the post wasn’t #1 in any way shape or form but it did show up in the top #10.

The second post was made on Monday and included some (but not all) of the keywords that I had seen. If I had to do it all over again the title would have been more like “Funda Ireland launch, Wasaki Dublin Coastal Development“?. I noticed redcardinal targeting the term “Funda Ireland“? so it probably wouldn’t have been as much fun to target that second term.

On Tuesday the first post had dropped from the SERPS and was replaced by lots of traffic from irishblogs.ie. I can only guess that this was a mixture of me adding other posts “New Template!“?, “RateMyGoat Gets Smutty!“? and the second experimental post getting added. This was the first Yo-Yo that I had seen. The second post was ranking well on Wednesday / Thursday (I was ranking #1 for the targeted term). Domain age & linkbacks helped me achieve this speedy result. The influx of searches also got me some direct link-backs from forums and the like.

Today (Friday) I had noticed something strange. The second post had completely dropped from the SERPS. The weird thing is the post had been #2 for the targeted term this morning (8 am) and then suddenly vanished. This was the second Yo-Yo that I had seen. The only thing that had changed in the post was the comments made by my readers (this may have changed the keyword density slightly). I’m sure there where many other factors in play however these where the most noteworthy. The page seems to be fighting to get back in, dropping and appearing at what seems to be random intervals. I’m sure that after this post gets indexed the second post will completely drop from the SERPS.

Before you ask the targeted term was “dublin coastal development“?.

I would be interested to find out if anyone else has seen this kind of yo-yo with their blog within the last week?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Business, Marketing, Web Design & Development
• 8 Comments »

It seems that the Funda PR stunt and viral campaign has started to stir up some controversy at a local Irish Motorboat Club. It looks like many did not catch the end of the film directing users to Funda launch page. I have seen a large volume of searches today after my last post about the Wasaki Global Dublin coastal development.

Some information via Spoilt:

Chemistry conceived the idea. They commissioned The Farm for the video piece, and Spline Design was contracted for the website.

I would be interested to find out what you think of the whole “viral” campaign. Please leave your comments below.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Business, Marketing, Web Design & Development
• 10 Comments »

Following up from Michele’s post “Irish SEO – Where to Submit Your Siteâ€? 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://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/

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Business, Marketing, Technology, Web Design & Development
• 12 Comments »

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Business, Marketing, Technology, Web Design & Development
• 3 Comments »

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Business, Marketing, Web Design & Development
• No Comments »

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?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Web Design & Development
• 5 Comments »

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Business, Marketing, Web Design & Development
• No Comments »

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 violationâ€? of their trademark rights!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Business, Web Design & Development
• 2 Comments »

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/

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Business, Marketing, Web Design & Development
• 3 Comments »

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:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• Posted in Business, Marketing, Web Design & Development
• No Comments »