June 15th, 2006 by Jason Roe
I have a trip to cork planned in the next month or so. I am looking for a Hotel or Accommodation in cork.
Here is the deal:
If you find and select a hotel that I will like, that meets all the conditions below, you will win the top prize of €10.
Winners will be picked on Friday 23rd June.
- You MUST link to this post from your blog.
- Leave a comment with your recommended Hotels/Accommodation.
The Conditions
- It must be reasonably priced.
- In a nice area.
- That is accessible from cork airport or train station.
- Duplicate hotels will not be accepted, first in rules apply.
The Prize
10 big ones! €10 with free postage and packaging.
Runner up will also be in with a chance to win €5 euro. The runner-up be picked at random!! that should mix it up a bit.
For anyone that cant be arsed looking
have a look at the link below:
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June 13th, 2006 by Jason Roe
Lee Dodd, owner of Sprint Users and other large forums has agreed to be on the show this week. Lee has mastered the art of making money online and is currently working on a book about it scheduled to be released later this year.
Pop over to Shoemoney’s blog for more info.
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June 11th, 2006 by Jason Roe
Brick and mortar e-commerce has stumbled over from the USA and landed in Ireland. “iSoldit� seems to be a fairly unique idea, its essentially an eBay power seller who sell item on your behalf. iSoldIt offers a walk in centre or shop where you can bring in items that you would like to sell on ebay. They provide a professional photographer to take pictures of your items. All of the shipping, handling, support and payment is managed by iSold it.
For the privilege of this service they change you a 30% fee based on the overall selling price, they also seems to skim money off the shipping and handling fees. To quote the website:
In addition to receiving a commission from the seller (your customer), you will also collect a handling charge that is paid by the buyer. You also get to keep the difference between postage and shipping “rack rates” charged to the buyer and your actual reduced iSold It reduced postage and shipping corporate rate.
According to an article on ENN “Galway eBay store opens its doors�. I went over to the corporate website for iSold It to find that they have no Galway stores listed on the “store locator�. This could just be a sloppy mistake made late on a Friday evening after banging out as many press releases as possible, or maybe its an indication of lack of planning and coordination by the company as a whole.
The one aspect that ISold It didnt describe in they franchise pitch is how they manage dispute resolutions, shipping delays and lost goods. What if the item is damaged before shipping, who picks up the costs then? What about fraudulent or stolen goods? The list of questions goes on. Maybe I’m just nitpicking but it seems like a very unstable investment over all.
I like the idea, to think that someone would pay €25,000 for a franchise with no brand in the Irish market is just insane.
It is believed the typical cost of operating a franchise in Ireland ranges between EUR90,000 and EUR150,000, depending on factors such as rent, labour, size of the store etc.
In my opinion anyone could go out tomorrow and duplicate this business model in a matter of hours. This seems to be a service that you would expect from your local Internet café, its not rocket science.
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June 8th, 2006 by Jason Roe
A new firefox plugin called Google Browser Sync was announced by google. The plugin allows users to synchronise browser settings including bookmarks, history, cookies and saved passwords. Google has also provided a detailed FAQ for Browser Sync.
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June 6th, 2006 by Jason Roe
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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June 2nd, 2006 by Jason Roe
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.
- 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.
- 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�
- 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.
- 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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May 25th, 2006 by Jason Roe
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!
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May 4th, 2006 by Jason Roe
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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May 1st, 2006 by Jason Roe
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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April 24th, 2006 by Jason Roe
You wake up to the sun beaming in your bedroom window, the room the temperature of a blazing inferno, to find the mother of all wasps beating itself to death upon a pane of glass sounding like a jumbo jet attempting to quite unsuccessfully take flight. How this creature found its way into my bedroom, passed the unopened door is beyond me.
Its really one of them strange things that would replace an alarm clock quite quickly!
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