Posted by James in Dear god the amount of times that my clients ask me this is crazy. Unfortunately there are a load of different factors involved in getting your domain to number 1. You’re going to hear a host of different responses from various people (one thought of a customer was that searching for his domain with google and clicking on the link would drive his rank up).
The majority of people with any SEO background will tell you though that your domain isn’t ranking because of a number of the following probably
- Its a relatively new domain
- The market is saturated for the given term
- You’ve no inbound links
- You’ve no real content on your site
- You’re content is not unique
- The search engines just don’t know about you
- You’ve not made use of the rapid inclusion service ( an in joke I’m afraid that will be lost on the majority of people)
- You’re using images in place of text
- You’re not making proper use of tags / markup (header / strong tags and so on should be used)
- and so on …
So what does this all mean. Well basically there is a good bit of work involved in getting your domain up there. For example the current competiton for the term “Geansai Gorm” is quite an easy one for anyone to get involved in. The term isn’t well known. There are no domains already ranking well for the term until the competition was announced. So basically who ends up winning is anyones guess for the moment. More than likely the two factors that are going to influence it are 1 - inbound links (and their age and authority) and 2 - regular updates of content. As its a relatively short period of time as well (just over 1 month) I don’t think there’ll really be time for it all to settle down and who knows when people will stop entering the competiton.
Back on topic though.
1: You want inbound links … and you want inbound links that have the text you want to be found for. You also want these links to be coming from authoritive sites. (This can be equated to PR .. page rank .. to a certain degree though the majority of SEO people I believe will tell you that PR is dead. It may be dead but its still something I like to have and in my opinion a good indicator of the authority of your site).
2: You want to regularily update your site with unique content. Whether this means getting a copy writer to create a news item / article / page once or twice a week is up to you really. There is a knack to it. Do I have it I don’t think so and its not really something that currently interests me. ( Check out the likes of www.copyscape.com to determine if the content you’re getting is in actual fact unique content or if its just been ripped from someone elses site. The search engines will penialise you if you’re ripping off other sites.)
At the moment those in my eyes are the two main things you’ll want to concentrate on.
Of course on top of this there are influencing factors
(page Titles - Meta Keywords - Meta Descriptions - Internal linking to pages -sitemaps - adding yourself to search engines… and so on)
Anyways this is my rather simplified version of why your site isn’t linking at number one. I’ll probably end up pointing a few customers at this article in future but feel free to comment or take it apart if you feel differently 
I know I’m missing various bits but this isn’t meant as the final word on getting your site up there more as a brief summary
Publish a full feed not partial!!
And good advice
Thanks Ciaran …. trying to get more into blogging and out of foruming (if that can even be considered a word
) Just putting my thoughts out there on SEO 
Best of luck with bluejumper-ireland 
edit: Oh I should add I’ve updated that so there should be the full feed now
Cool as same to you, haven’t had the time to do anything yet so doubtfull I’ll be winning but it’ll be entertaining none the less
yeah from what I’m seeing … people adding youtube videos … all the social media links … posting articles to new blogs linking back … trying to add diggs and so on .. I really don’t think I’ve time to be doing that. I do have one idea that I could put into play. It would be rather sneaky and I’d probably need to launch it in the next week or two. I would think it could definitely rank me in the top 5 though. I’ll wait for the whole geansai market to settle down a bit over the next week or two and see how new arrivals are treated by G
I think I’m learning a good bit from this though. You tend not to try the silly on clients sites too much.
I’ve got to ask though. Ultimately why on earth are people using blue jumper domains ? Does google know irish ?
(long term it’d be a good move but as for the most part peoples domains are throw away (I leave I would have assumed they were)