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.

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

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…

Semi-Automated Directory Submission Service.

What is it?
Many website owners spend a lot of time to get their website into the Search Engines, and the first step to do so is to submit it to directories.
This way Search Engines can find it and index it, but this type of work is time consuming and many give up after a while.
Is not easy to find these directories and even after that you have to type everything (website title, description, URL, email, name, etc) over and over again.

With our program, you don’t have to do that anymore.
All you have to do is enter all this data just once.
Even Better, we allow you to enter up to 5 website TITLES and 5 DESCRIPTIONS, which at the time of submission they are automatically picked at random so it doesn’t look like directory spamming.
We took the hard work away from you, found these directories and with just a few clicks you can have your website submitted to 100 directories in less than an hour.

Try it for yourself. Register today, using the form above and take the system for a spin.
We even allow you 100 Free submissions per URL to prove the system works.

Does submitting to directories help?

Of course it does. “Build it and they will come” – a very old and very true saying, but it doesn’t work on the Internet.
To be found on the Internet you have to be indexed in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc…
Directory submission brings back-links to your website and back links are and will be for ever good.

How much does it cost?

The first 100 submissions per URL are FREE.
If you like the system and decide to submit more, the charges are as follows:

€20.00 per month or
€199.00 per year.

For these prices there are no limits to how many websites you can register and no limits to how many directories you can submit to.
At this time we have over 4000 directories available for you to submit to… ]]> http://www.eire-webdesign.ie/blog/2008/05/12/search-engine-submission-directory-self-submission-service/feed/ 2 http://www.eire-webdesign.ie/blog/2008/02/21/sitemap-generator-class/ http://www.eire-webdesign.ie/blog/2008/02/21/sitemap-generator-class/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:44:34 +0000 Louie @ Eire Web Design http://www.eire-webdesign.ie/blog/2008/02/21/sitemap-generator-class/ 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.

First lets create a new file and name it .htaccess (only if you don’t already have one), and ad the following lines at the very top:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

Now we are going to check the URL making sure the www. is always there otherwise we will redirect to the right format URL:

# redirect if not www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www)\.domain-name\.ie  

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain-name.ie/$1 [R=301,L]

Now lets redirect the index.php or .html to the main URL as this creates duplicated content as well:

#redirect index.php or htm to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ .*/index\.(htm|html|php)\ HTTP  

RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.(htm|html|php)$ /$1 [R=301,L]

Depending on your server settings, sometimes the PHPSESSID get attached to the end of your URL, which will also created duplicated content, so there is a solution written in php that will check for the PHPSESSID query-string and if found, we will remove it and do a 301 Permanent Redirect to the same page but without it:

//remove session id from url  

if (!empty($_GET['PHPSESSID'])) {  

  $clean_uri = preg_replace('/?PHPSESSID=[^&]+/','',$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);  

  $clean_uri = preg_replace('/&PHPSESSID=[^&]+/','',$clean_uri );  

    header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');  

  header('Location: http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $clean_uri );  

    exit();  

}  

//

Please Note: The above solution is not part of the .htaccess file, but has to be added to a common include file available across the site.

There are many tools available at the present for example: http://inventory.overture.com/  now owned by Yahoo or Google Keyword Tool, but myself, I  don’t find them very useful for a website that targets the Irish market.

A better approach for the moment, until new tools are made available is to sit down and write on a piece of paper a few sentences that would describe your business.
At the end of the day, nobody knows your business better than you do.

Now sit back and read them over and over again, until it sinks in, then try to get the meaning of one sentence at a time in just 3-4 words and write them down.

Why 3-4 words? Because if you are in a tight competitions, 1 (never recommended) or 2 words ranking are a lot harder to achieve, and more than 50% chances are that you will never get the results you are looking for.

E.g. – trying to optimise your website for just “insurance“, would be a mistake and you will have a very slim chance of making it into the first 10 results out of 414,000,000 found (default number of results Google returns per page), but if you are going for “car insurance” with only 79,500,000 results or even better, “car insurance ireland” with just 2,810,000 , you have a better chance.

Unless 2 words are more than 75% relevant to your query, search engines will try very hard to give you the right results.
Have a look at the example above, searching for “insurance ireland” could mean anything related to insuring something but what, a car, a house, valuables, etc….??? 

Now if you are looking to insure a car, and as usual you go to a search engine like Google.ie, what are you going to type in the search box?
More than likely, you will type car insurance and if results returned are not to your satisfaction you will add Ireland.
Don’t you?

Basically the point is that: the longer the phrase the greater the chances are for your website to rank well.

Getting back to our “ships”, make a list of as many short phrases you could come up with, then go back over them and try to make the list shorter like 10 to 15.

Now that you have the list, open your browser, go to a search engine and start your search for the phrases you have on the paper one by one. Look at the results returned and navigate to the first 3-5 websites that are on the first page, but not the ones listed as “Sponsored Links“.

Does the business profile of those websites relates to your business?
If yes, keep the phrase but if not ask yourself, are this the right keywords for me?
If I am looking for something related to my business, what will I be searching for?

Repeat the last step for every phrase you have, but don’t forget that search engines ignore words like: is, in, from, for, and, etc..

Eventually, you should be left with probably less than 7 phrases, and going over them again should tell you if they are the right phrases for your website or not.

Now navigate through your website and compare the list that you have with the text available on the home page.
Are any of your most important keywords in your Page Title?
What about the body text of your page?
Are there any headings that contain your keywords?

If your answer is No to any of the questions above, then you need to make changes.

Now remember, trying to conquer the search engines and get the “Google Love“ for a long list in one go will be a mistake, so keep it short and to the point.
You can always create new pages later and link them from your website home page.

Sadly enough, there are also scammers out there who are only interested in separating the unsuspecting from their money. 
They prey on those who do not know enough about the search engines to know what to do or where to go for info. 
Currently, there are not as many of them out there as there are for other traffic scams, but it is still worth mentioning to help you stay alert for them.

One of the first flags to watch for is did they contact you first? Whether by e-mail or a telemarketer, it is best to be very cautious when dealing with anyone, or any firm, soliciting their services. Another red flag to watch for is “guaranteed rankings“. 
If they tell you they can guarantee the ranking of your site or guarantee “the top ten in search results“, beware. 
The guarantee alone should be sufficient to warn you as none can make that kind of guarantee. 
This is especially true if they tell that they can do it without making any changes to your site.

One thing you should do is check them out to verify their legitimacy and services. 
You can do this through forums and WHOIS. If they operate under multiple aliases, or have fake info in their WHOIS, it is best to walk away. 
You can look in other forums and articles related to the subject. If in the forums, ask questions and wait for the answers. 
A timely warning here can save you thousands down the road.

One tactic used by SEO scammers is the use of front pages and a demand that they control the URLs. 
Front pages are used to redirect traffic to your site using different search words and phrases. 
Controlling the doorway URLs simply means that they use their own domain in the doorway page URL. 
The promise is that these pages will get you a wider search result as they use more keywords relevant to your site.

This is a lie as individual pages are rarely relevant in keyword searches. 
Furthermore, these pages will often contain hidden links to other clients or the SEO firm itself. 
This tactic will diffuse the traffic that would otherwise come to your site and drain away your link popularity.

It is always important to understand exactly what the SEO firm is planning to do. 
Get specific information on how they plan to set up their service and where your money is going. 
If they won’t tell you, or use a sales pitch that sounds to good to be true, walk away. 
Beware the hard sell or high pressure sales tactics.

Ultimately, it is your responsibility what the firm does, or does not do. 
When choosing any advertising or SEO optimisation firm, always protect yourself and check them out. 
Be thorough in your research. A wise choice will help you along in your search engine traffic while an unwise one can cost you dearly.

1. Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2. Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3. Site optimisation purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4. Organisation and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organised site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organised for everyone.

Having Duplicate Content will not improve your website rankings in any of the major search engines, therefore should be avoided.

There are two major cases of Duplicate Content:

1. Duplicate content as a result of Site Overall Structure

  ♦ Print-friendly pages
  ♦ Exactly same website content different domains (domain.com -> domain.ie or domain.net)
  ♦ Affiliate pages
  ♦ Navigation links and breadcrumb navigation 
  ♦ Pages with similar content that can be accessed via different URLs
  ♦ Pages with items that are very similar in description and name, but they are different in (e-commerce catalogue) colour, size, etc.
  ♦ Pages with the same Title or Meta Tags values.
  ♦ Using URL-based session IDs
  ♦ Canonicalization problems. (eg. domain.ie versus www.domain.ie or /index.htm versus / )

Example using .htaccess to redirect domain.com to www.domain.com

RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com  

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

There are times when a  website has to contain duplicate content, as in the case of Printer friendly pages, which can be easily excluded from being indexed by SE using meta tag:

meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"

You can also make use of the robots.txt file to exclude directories and files from being visited by search engines.
The robots.txt file should be placed in the root folder of your site and below you will find few basic things that will help you dealing with duplicated content:

#forbid all robots from your site
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Disallow any URLs that start with a certain word:

#disallow ggogle from indexing URLs that starts with /blog ( note the leading / )
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /blog
#a particular page
Disallow: /page-name.html

You can also use wild-cards to disallow any URLs containing the sub-string of your choice ( in this case “print=”):

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /*print=

2. Duplicate content as a result of content theft

CopyScape is a service that helps you find content thieves by scanning for similar content contained by a given page on other pages.

If you are a victim to content theft, and want to take action, first let the individual using the content illicitly know by sending him a “Cease and Desist” letter, using the contact information you can gather from his website or in the WHOIS record of the domain name.

Failing that, the SE have procedures to alert them of stolen content:
  Google: http://www.google.com/dmca.html 
  Yahoo!: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/copyright/copyright.html 
  MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_CONC_AboutDMCA.htm

In some cases, pages like “Terms & Condition, Help, FAQ, etc…” doesn’t go well with the main navigation links, so a good practise is to include them into the footer of you web site.

e.g. home | terms | help | faq...

Another example is when the links structure are created using flash or form select menu. 
Search engines are known for not being able to read images, flash content, etc. and they can not submit forms, so creating a sitemap and adding a link to it from the home page, or adding those links at the bottom of the page, helps search engines in finding to pages included within the web site.

Talking about forms submission.
    It’s a good practise to offer your visitors a search form, especially when you have an e-commerce website with 1000′s of products.
As I said above search engines can not submit forms, and so the search page is not that relevant to them, but there is a way in making it important and gain from it.
One solution I found to be very useful, is to log all searches done by users into a database or text file, and with a bit of coding you can create a large sitemap (over a period of time) that could turn your search page into a relevant source for search engines.

For instance Google Sitemaps. 
With Google Sitemaps using a XML format, you can inform Google of all pages you have on your website. 
XML Sitemap files can include settings for each URL as 
  :. their priority
  :. page last modified date 

Pagination, used for navigating through few pages related to a search or product category. Very useful, but can have side effects regarding search engines if not implemented right.
For example:

consider the following navigation: 

home page -> page1 -> page2 -> page3 ->page4 ->page5 ->...... 

or 

prev | next

The fifth page is harder to reach not only by users, clicking the least 5 times, but also by search engines, which can very easily treat the fifth page as less important then  the first one, also called “Death by Pagination“.
Ways around it:
  :. create a plain HTML sitemap with links to all the pages
  :. create an XML sitemap and submit it to the search engines for crawling
  :. create a better pagination like:

prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next

It also likely has an effect on CTR (Click Through Ratio) because keywords in the URL may make a user more likely to click a link due to an increase in perceived relevance.

The URL, like the Page Title, is also often selected as the anchor text for a link.
This may have the same beneficial effect as mentioned in SEO Page Title

If your website is hosted on Linux, you can make use of the .htaccess file to create Rewrite Rule and redirect long query strings pages to nice looking, friendly URL’s.

Example:

Current URL could be

www.domain-name.ie/pagename.php?a=1&b=2&c=3

From a search engine point of view, this type of URL format tells nothing about the page itself, but this example should:

New URL:

www.domain-name.com/details-Product-Name-Here-a1-b2-c3.html

To achieve this type of url’s, create a new file and name it .htaccess and ad the following line at the very top of the page:

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /#new rule

RewriteRule ^details-(.*)-a([0-9]+)-b([0-9]+)-c([0-9]+)\.html?$ /pagename.php?a=$1&b=$2&c=$3 [L,NC]

#where L = last rule, NC = case insensitive, (.*) = anything, ([0-9]+) = numbers only

Now change the link format on your page as shown in the example above and you are done.

The point is if you have an exchange links page, always go back to it and verify that the sites your a linking to and from are still relevant to your content, and they are still live.

Well, over the years as meta tag keyword stuffing became prominent, search engines adjusted their algorithms to give less weight to the tags. A LOT less weight. Now, meta tag weight is so negligible that many webmasters no longer even use them.
You will notice that I use them here. The main reason is because Google will normally list a sites meta description ( Of course we all know this is query dependent ) as the description in SERPS. I would prefer to have control over this rather than let Google choose what to display.

he’s perfectly right.
For the most part, the importance of a meta description or keywords lies in the fact that search engines may choose to use it in the SERP’s, instead of displaying relevant bits from the page content.
A meta description might have a minor effect on search engines rankings, but is definitely not a critical factor.

This is the part that you can see at the top-left corner of your browser called The Title Bar. Also can be seen at the bottom of your screen as a tab.
Very significant for search engines, as is the part that will stand out on the result page (headline of a search engine) being the link to your website and will also have the search keywords.

Is highly recommended that all pages have a unique Page Title, must be accurate , keyword rich, relevant to the page content, avoid stop words as: the, and, for, a, etc…, avoid keyword stuffing as it could get you penalised.