Quite possibly you think that I started this blog to just benefit my Geansai Gorm entry. It wasn’t the case however but it did spur me to get the blog going. I do have plans to market this site more and I honestly don’t think an extremely new blog like this will have that much of an impact on a websites position.

To date I’ve not done that much marketing on my Geansai Gorm entry. Its mainly been powered by about 2 or 3 mentions which all had fairly high impact on the site. The first would be my own personal website I Accept Cookies. The second would be my work website www.forbairt.ie and the third was quite possibly a blog post by Michele over on his website http://www.mneylon.com/blog/.

My personal website wouldn’t really have that much authority I would assume. The second has quite a bit more, being an older domain. The third would probably also be quite authoritative as he tends to generate quite unique and interesting content over the last few years (since 2000 I believe though I’m not positive when he started blogging possibly 2003) (I’ve only followed his blog for the last two years)

What else I did. I included a few signatures on various forums linking to my Geansai Gorm website.

What else … well what I should probably have done was to include links back to my website on all the various blogs I subscribe to. However I didn’t really feel like spamming peoples websites too much for a competition, plus I just feel its kinda wrong.

I also didn’t make PR related posts on various websites which I noticed a few people did. Or link to my own websites on the likes of Wikipedia. This is a no no unless of course you have a non commercial interest in linking onto those sites. ( A recent site I’ve developed is for the Galway City Museum of course I’m going to add this to Wikipedia … why ? because its a public website and the actual public are interesting in knowing about it and its relationship with galway. Will I add my own iacceptcookies website or forbairt media websites ? no because they are of a personal nature and not commercial.

Other things people did or so it would seem .. adding themselves to multiple directories all over the place. Again not something I really wanted to do. Why dilute the index with my crap. Also Task Drop is going to be an actual website (hopefully on december 2nd… though that deadline is a bit unrealeastic for me right now)

I could have generated articles of interest on other websites but not exactly for a search term “Geansai Gorm” nor would I have wanted to.

Anyways I’ll no doubt make another post tomorrow evening or Tuesday on here on the overall results with some link loving being distributed as well.

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

1. Its a relatively new domain
2. The market is saturated for the given term
3. You’ve no inbound links
4. You’ve no real content on your site
5. You’re content is not unique
6. The search engines just don’t know about you
7. 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)
8. You’re using images in place of text
9. You’re not making proper use of tags / markup (header / strong tags and so on should be used)
10. 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

On Tuesday Damien Mulley announced a competition to determine “Are you the best SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) person in Ireland?“  Of course among all the usual faces there has been quite a buzz. Its a great idea for a competition.

Take two words. Try to rank at the number 1 position for them after roughly 1 month.

Am I taking part ? HELL YEAH … I don’t have that much time to devote to it though. We’ll see how it goes I’ll be happy if I can make it to the first page I think.

There have been a number of threads / posts and comment from people in the past saying SEO is dead/pointless/useless. Starting a blog on it probably isn’t the best idea then

I’m going to use the competition to try out a few different things. Its nice as its not a customer site. If I fail miserably it doesn’t affect my business (high rankings of websites aren’t something I offer … they just tend to get there for their keywords over the course of a few months)

Anyways what am I trying out.

Well I registered a domain name Task Drop … absolutely nothing to do with the two words “Geansai” and “Gorm” (Irish words for Blue Jumper) No mention of Ireland in the title. No mention of Jumpers / Irish and so on. So immediately I’d assume I’m at a slight disadvantage. What do I bring to the table. Hopefully enough.

Many people seem to think wordpress is the way to go and well you can’t really argue with how quickly you can get your sites indexed via wordpress and the Update Services that come as default. (You could almost say it takes the fun out of it)

For the moment I’ve a static website. Geansai Gorm. I mentioned the competition on my blog yesterday and it seemed to do some good as later on that night my site freshly registered that morning shot up to 7th. Though that has probably changed already now.

I would have used this site (Forbairt Marketing) only I registered the domain a while back and one of the rules state that the domain has to be a newly registered domain.

Anyways best of luck to all involved. It should be a fun month of monitoring, tweaking and hopefully not too much spamming of blogs and links.

Could I have done something different hell yes but this week actually got me thinking a lot about SEO and online Marketing. The reasons will follow in future posts. This blog is about my efforts with SEO. I’ll probably only talk about personal projects here. I’m not an SEO expert but I’ve got all the basics I can get sites ranking well its all just a question of how much time I put into it all.

In case you didn’t know this is for want of better words a sister site to Forbairt Media - Webdesign

James