July 31, 2006
Archive | July, 2006
July 29, 2006
Irish SEO – Where to Submit Your Site
If people don’t know about your website they can’t visit it. Simple fact.
Of course there are mountains of content written on how best to optimise your website for search engines etc., but it cannot hurt to spend a couple of hours manually submitting your site to search engines and directories.
Some people will whine about non-Pr passing links ie. sites using redirectors etc., but I would recommend any serious webmaster to ignore them. Every visitor to your site could lead to a sale. Would you turn them away? I don’t think you would.
If you are running an Irish based / focussed website then you need to place some emphasis on the Irish market.
So let’s see:
Google – You probably won’t need to submit to it, but you could look at adding a sitemap and validating your ownership. If you do you’ll get access to crawl statistics and search query results, including clickthroughs.
Yahoo – Similar to Google, Yahoo’s spider seems to pick up on sites with little or no intervention. They also offer a sitemap style solution as well
Altavista – Now part of Yahoo.
Scrudu – Currently in development. Not sure when it will launch, but it might be worth looking at. Update
As of January 2008 it looks like it has been taken offline and is currently showing a default apache holding page
WhoisIreland – Has been around for quite some time and crawls periodically.
BrowseIreland – One of the oldest directories of Irish websites. They recently launched a number of region specific sites and are also behind the Scrudu project. Commercial listings require an address and telephone number
Search.ie – Started life as Irelandculture.com before becoming IrishSearch.net and now Search.ie. Static PR passing links on all detailed pages
Browse.ie – Searchable directory of Irish sites originally seeded with DMOZ data but now accepting submissions as well as purging dead links (unlike DMOZ)
Armchair.ie – Directory of Irish shopping sites ie. ecommerce sites only.
All listing require tangible contact details to be displayed on their sites ie. no email only contact forms. SEO friendly
NiceOne – Another directory of sites that has been around for quite some time. They now seem to be pushing web development services.
Find It Ireland – Another directory
GuestHouses.ie – Directory of Irish bed and breakfasts / guesthouses. SEO friendly
HotelSearch.ie – Directory of Irish hotels. SEO friendly
GimmeDat – Directory of Irish sites with logos
WebSearch.ie – Another small directory
There are also a growing number of “made for adsense” sites or DMOZ clones. The problem with them is that they do not accept submissions and merely duplicate the listings (and the broken links) in the main DMOZ directory.
If you are going to submit a site to any of the directories mentioned above please bear in mind that they are human edited. That means that someone has to manually review each and every submission.
While the listing criteria may vary from directory to another certain things are probably true of all of them:
- avoid promotional language
- do not submit holding pages
- choose the correct category for your website
- provide a suscint and intelligible description NOT a list of keyphrases
If anyone knows of any other Irish directories I’ve missed out on please feel free to comment
EDIT: I’ve updated this entry to include some of the links included in comments etc.,
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July 28, 2006
Blogging from Nokia 9300i
I recently got a Nokia 9300i, so I ended up posting to this blog from it yesterday.
It was not a pleasant experience!
To overcome the basic display issues with the public area of my blog I installed Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition, which strips your blog down to the bare minimum and makes it perfectly usable from a PDA / mobile device.
But what about actually posting to the blog?
While I could try posting via email, that would be a bit limited, as I wouldn’t be able to choose the categories I wanted to post to.
So are there are any Symbian compatible blogging clients or is there a plugin to simplify the WordPress UI?
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July 28, 2006
FeedBurner – Tracking Subscribers over time
Just for laughs I thought I’d see how the number of subscribers to this blog had evolved over time.
I first setup an account with FeedBurner back in June 2005, so the stats cover a period of just over 12 months:
Of course there’s no easy way of knowing exactly who is subscribed, but if you are into your stats it’s still sort of interesting in a geeky kind of way 
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July 28, 2006
MyHome.ie To Become Pay Per View???
Over the last 6 months both myhome.ie and Daft.ie have been courting buyers, with an announcement early this morning that The Irish Times, who own Ireland.com, would buy MyHome.ie subject to the competition authority’s approval.
So what will The Irish Times do with it?
Will they keep the site as is, or will they try to recoup their significant investment by making it pay per view??
It may seem like an odd idea making a property portal “pay per view”, but they also made the bulk of Ireland.com only available to paid subscribers, so it wouldn’t really surprise me if they were to do something similar … Or would they?
Forking out 50 million euro on an Irish website seems a little crazy, unless you have a sound business model to back it up. Will they now try to buy out Daft.ie also?
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July 27, 2006
UK To Introduce WEEE
According to Out Law the UK will have legislation in place by this time next year – 3 years late!
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July 27, 2006
Nokia 9300i Cases
July 27, 2006
Cork Drinks This Evening
July 26, 2006
Off to Cork
July 26, 2006
Bank of Ireland targetted with another phishing attack
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