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 (web hosting provider) are now sponsoring the competition.

We’ve recently writen a Search Engine Optimization White Paper.

The articles are aimed at website owners with less experience in the search engine optimization field, helping them understand the work involved in achieving a higher search engine ranking, but it can also be useful to anyone looking for a quick reference, so feel free to take a read.

The White Paper can be found on our sister website www.eireseo.ie -  Search Engine Optimization Tutorials & Techniques

Google has just release the new Search Engine Optimization tips and advice for choosing the right SEO company.

The article can be found here:
What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?

Right after the new content, Google is asking other SEO’s for tips: Webmaster Central Blog

What I love about this is the fact that everyone is saying similar things that can be easily found on the Internet, while others warns website owners not to give FTP details or allow the SEO to modify pages but do it yourself.

While that’s alright in some cases, many website owners does not know  what FTP is, and probably hasn’t got a clue which page does what…., so how exactly can this be done?
I believe in trust, and if you are out there looking for a SEO Company, but you cann’t trust anyone, than go to www.amazon.com, get yourself few SEO books, study and go for DIY.

It shouldn’t be that hard to realise, while talking to a SEO, that he/she might have a clue and things that are being said should make sense. If in doubt, you can always pop-in the Irish Webmaster Forum and ask.
There is a section there totally dedicated to SEO, and while advices is being given to you, take what you thing is right and ask more question if is too hard to understand…

This php class will help you generate a sitemap for your website automatically.

// sitemap generator class
class Sitemap{  // constructor receives the list of URLs to include in the sitemap  

  function Sitemap($items = array()){  

    $this->_items = $items;  

  } // add a new sitemap item  

  function addItem($url, $lastmod = '', $changefreq = '', $priority = '', $additional_fields = array()){  

  $this->_items[] = array_merge(array('loc' => $url, 'lastmod' => $lastmod,'changefreq' => $changefreq,'priority' => $priority), $additional_fields);  

  }  

// get Google sitemap  

  function getGoogle(){  

    ob_start();  

    header('Content-type: text/xml');  

    echo '';  

    echo '';  

  foreach ($this->_items as $i){  

      echo '';  

  foreach ($i as $index => $_i){  

        if (!$_i) continue;  

  echo "<$index>" . $this->_escapeXML($_i) . "";  

      }  

      echo '';  

    }  

    echo '';  

    return ob_get_clean();  

  }  

// get Yahoo sitemap  

 function getYahoo(){  

 	ob_start();  

 	header('Content-type: text/plain');  

  foreach ($this->_items as $i){  

 		  echo $i['loc'] . "\n";  

 		}  

 	return ob_get_clean();  

 }  

// escape string characters for inclusion in XML structure  

 function _escapeXML($str){  

 	$translation = get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES, ENT_QUOTES);  

  foreach ($translation as $key => $value){  

  $translation[$key] = '&#' . ord($key) . ';';  

 		}  

  $translation[chr(38)] = '&';  

  return preg_replace("/&(?![A-Za-z]{0,4}\w{2,3};|#[0-9]{2,3};)/","&" , strtr($str, $translation));  

 }  

}

Usage:

$s = new Sitemap(); 
 $s->addItem("http://www.websiteurl.com", date("Y-m-d"), 'weekly', '1.0');  

 $s->addItem("http://www.websiteurl.com/link2", date("Y-m-d"), 'weekly', '1.0');  

 $s->addItem("http://www.websiteurl.com/link3", date("Y-m-d"), 'weekly', '1.0');

This class can create two type of sitemaps for you – XML for Google and TEXT for Yahoo

if(isset($_GET['target'])){  

  if(($target = $_GET['target']) == 'google'){  

  echo $s->getGoogle();//xml sitemap  

  }elseif($target == 'yahoo'){  

  echo $s->getYahoo();//txt sitemap  

  }  

}

This class wasn’t designed by me but by Jaimie Sirovich & Cristian Darie and the reason I put it up here is to help others that are trying to get this done without the headache of creating a new code.