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Excerpt: It's been more than a week now since all the Geansai Gorm competition started. At first a search in google.ie returned only a few related results, mostly bebo, digg and other social networking websites, but now Google return more than 9000 results. As expected the SERPs are shifting every day and as I write this #1 spot is taken by taskdrop.com followed by mybluejumper.com and respectively bluejumperireland.com BlueJumper.net took almost a week to appear in the results, starting on page 3, then moved up to page 4 the next day, and today the 05 Nov. 2008 14:30 page 2 Not bad for a new domain.... The competition seems very tight at the moment and only time could tell... It's a good learning process and it's well worth a go... I, for one, am enjoying it...
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Excerpt: Geansai Gorm - This is going to be some fun... Damien Mulley with some feedback from Cormac & Richard announced a new competition to find the "Greatest SEO of them all" available only for Irish individuals and Irish business, but read on because there are a few rules that can not be broken: Criteria: 1. Entries open to all Irish individuals and Irish businesses. 2. Search is to be performed on www.google.ie without Pages From Ireland selected, with personalisation off and from an Irish IP address. 3. The domain to rank must be a new domain. Must not contain the keywords in the domain name at all and no ccTLD domains are to be used. 4. Only want the homepage to rank, not other non-useful pages. 5. 301 redirects are not permitted. 6. Keywords as gaeilge (Geansai Gorm) instead of English but copy can be in English So lets find out who's the best spammer on this... As I said is just for fun so please don't go over board... More about this competition can be found here >> ... and to ad on this post, Blacknight (hosting provider) are now sponsoring the competition.
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Excerpt: Important steps to search engine optimization 1.   Website / Business profile (niche) 2.   Acquiring a domain name 3.   Finding the best hosting provider for your website 4.   Website design (DIY or by a Professional Developer) 5.   Keywords research 6.   Getting the Page Title Right 7.   Meta Data (description, keywords, etc...) 8.   Page Content 9.   Creating and Submitting Sitemaps 10. On-Page Optimization (heading tags, body text, image alt tags, links title tags, etc) 11. Internal Linking 12. Outbound Links 13. Off-Page Optimization (Links Building)   1. Website / Business profile (niche) »» You might have the website / business profile already picked, but we would like to assume that you don't so we can have somewhere to start with. First is to ask yourself what are you selling, is it a product or a service? What can you do to get this business kicking, online? Is the business suitable for online audience? Have you targeted any goals by having an online presence and what are them? Is it going to be a local business, country specific or international? ........................................................................................................ more » 2.   Acquiring a domain name »» If you don't already have a domain name, than is time to get one. Make a list of few domain names that you would like to acquire, keeping the name as close as possible to your business / website profile. Best domain names a
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Excerpt: 1. Website / Business profile (niche) You might have the website / business profile already picked, but we would like to assume that you don't so we can have somewhere to start with. First, ask yourself what are you selling, is it a product or a service? What can you do to get this business kicking, online? Is the business suitable for online audience? Have you targeted any goals by having an online presence and what are they? Is it going to be a local business, country specific or international? I mean, the questions are infinite and you might need to have an answer for all of them before taking any marketing steps and start throwing your money into advertisement that might not get you anything in return. Having an answer for these questions, also helps in getting the right domain name, choosing your keywords / phrases that you are most likely to optimise your website for, searching and  finding the right hosting company that suit your website best. Having your niche in mind, you can start discovering your competitors and learn from them. You'll be surprised to find online business with the same profile that you've never heard of. « Back to Search Engine Optimization - White Paper
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Excerpt: 2.   Acquiring a domain name If you don't already have a domain name, then is time to get one. Make a list of a few domain names that you would like to acquire, keeping the name as close as possible to your business / website profile. The best domain names are 2-3 short words that together form a single word (that describes at it's best what the website is about), followed by the TLD (.com, .net, .ie, etc) [e.g. eire-webdesign.ie (eire = Ireland; web design)] As per example above, you can make use of dashes (-) to separate your words, but Why? it's explained below. Now that you have your domain names list ready, go to a trusted domain reseller website and start checking for availability. You might have a great domain name and chances are that it's already taken, but don't despair, the right one is just right the corner from you. Try the same variant by separating the words with dashes (-) as you have seen in the example above, make use of numbers (4 = for, 2 = to, etc.), think of new phrases, but don't make them too long, don't use words that are hard to spell, avoid words with double letters (double LL, double MM, etc., unless you can purchase the domain with a single letter as well), try adding "online", "free", etc words to your domain list (e.g. freeadvice, onlinebitsnbobs, etc.), you get the point don't you?... NOTE: Don't start shopping for domain names that are part of a trademark, as there is a high risk of loosing them (e.g. NIKE) If you run out
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Excerpt: 3.   Finding the best hosting provider for your website Now that you've found & purchased the domain name/s, it's time to shop around for a hosting package. As mentioned previously, based on your target location, it's best to find a hosting provider in that area. Please note that some local hosting providers do have servers outside the country your are targeting, so do not hesitate to ask, making sure that is exactly what you are looking for, or at least as close as possible. Hosting prices differ from company to company, but most of the time is not the price that matters, it's the service you get with it. You might be tempted to select a company that gives you so much for so little, but when you run into trouble or are looking for advice it's actually then you realise you should have thought about it more. Some of the requirements that we advise you to look out for are: A. GEO Location of their servers B. Connection Speed C. Do they have modern servers? D. Are they flexible? E. Operating system (we highly recommend LINUX) F. Are they reliable? All this plus a lot more, matters when you need that extra bit that you are looking for. « Back to Search Engine Optimization - White Paper
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Excerpt: 4.   Website Design (DIY or by a Professional Developer) Getting a website designed is not that tricky, and most website owners take a shot at it, but the hard part is getting it right. Website development has changed so much in the last 2-3 years that even a pro could be old news if he/she doesn't keep up with the technology. I remember when I designed my first website back in 2000. For me at that time it was a great achievement, taking in consideration that I never went to any web design courses. Black was in fashion, so my website had a black background. Everything was done manually, in pure html (of course a lot of bad coding for me at that time), and every product had to have it's own page done manually from scratch. Then I discovered "frames" (which now are mostly used to achieve other great features (AJAX) but highly not recommended for anything else), cutting the job in half. Thank God I don't have that website any-longer because I wouldn't be able to sleep any-more. Anyway, getting back to web design - It's a job better left to the professionals that know what they are doing. It's not complicated to throw few images on the page, write some text, etc., but when you are looking to get better search engine rankings, all that throwing and writing doesn't pay for it. The power of proper html tags helps a lot. A spider visiting a website does not understand and see all that fancy style and catchy images, but pure text found inside the html tags. Examples: tit
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Excerpt: 5.   Keywords Research You've already found some good keywords when searching for a domain name, but what use do they have when optimizing your website for search engines? Keywords, are the words or phrases a user types into the search engines search box to find relevant websites to his/her query. Two or more keywords are better know as key-phrases. Keywords, hold an important role in search engine optimization, helping you write good content related to your business/website profile. There is no point in writing about "dogs", while your website it's all about "cats" is there? For search engines to display your website into the SERPs, the search query must match these keywords inside your page content or having inbound links to your website with the keywords in the anchor text. A good example for the second part is http://www.adobe.com/, which ranks #1 for "click here" phrase. If you already have a website, a good place to start searching for key-phrases is the website statistics log files. You'll be surprised to see what users are typing into the search box, looking for your product/s and you'll probably find words that you never thought of before. If that's not the case, another good place to research your keywords is "Google AdWords: Keyword Tool". Enter your keywords or phrase in the text-box provided, check the "Use synonyms" box, type-in the captcha verification code and press the "Get keyword ideas" button. A few seconds later, Google Keyword Tool
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Excerpt: 6.   Getting the Page Title Right  "Page Title" - the most important tag when optimising for search engines, is the html tag it's found in between the <head>.... <title>Title Here</title> ...</head> tag. This tag is not visible on the page itself, but in the source code of the page. It can be also seen at the top of your browser window (blue bar for Internet Explorer) and at the bottom of the screen. Why Page Title is so important? a. The Page Title is used by the search engine as the anchor text to link to your website in the SERPs. b. The Page Title describes at it's best the page content itself. c. In the SERPs, the Page Title makes your website stand-out from the crowd (it's like shouting "click me... or read me...") invoking the "Call to Action" d. The Page Title it's also used to submit your website to directories Points to take into consideration when creating the Page Title: 1. The Page Title should be unique for every page 2. The Page Title shouldn't be any longer than 75 characters (including spaces) as it gets truncated by the search engines (Google - 64 chrs, Yahoo - 120 chrs) 3. The Page Title keywords should also be found in the page body text (best enclosed as a h[1-2] html tags and normal text below [context]) 4. The keywords used in the Page Title should also be found in the URL (converting spaces with a dash [-]) 5. Avoid common words ( the, or, and, for, etc...) as much as possible and if you don't hav
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Excerpt: 7. Meta Data (description, keywords, etc…) »» Meta tags are part of the html source code of a page and can be found between the <head> ..... <meta name="description" content="content here" /> <meta name="keywords" content="keywords,here" /> ..... </head> tags itself. They are not as important as it used to be due to abuse in the past by many website owners, but they can still make a difference. Meta Description: Search Engines (especially Google), tends to ignore them at this time, but they are still making use of them for snippet compilation, also called "call to action". When displaying result, search engines tend to make use of this tag to describe the website profile, and is shown below the "Page Title" (also the link to your website) as a snippet. If the meta description is not found on your page search engines will decides to show a snippet from the page content itself (a snippet of what is considered to be more relevant to the search query). The downside of this is that the snippet might not have that "call to action" that you are going for. Another use of this tag, is, when submitting your website to directories, as some of them will pick-up and use the meta description you have on that page as their directory listing description. As the page title, meta description should be also unique across the website for each page. It's like a short description of the product or service itself that all-in-all gives the user
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