Dear ROS.ie and Open24.ie. Please forward yourdomains.ie to www.yourdomains.ie. You’ve been annoying me for many moonnnthhhhssss!I am in the habit of typeing site.com, instead of www.site.com.Although technically different site, one should forward on to the other. This ensures that users such as yours truely are sent where they should be.It also ensures that the search engines pass on all the link juice you deserve. If people are linking to yoursite.com and it’s not fowarding on to www.yoursite.com then you’re not getting the value of those links unless you are forwarding that on.To do this simply open your .htaccess file in your root folder and add the following:rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com [nc]rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]This will foward www.yoursite.com on to http://yoursite.com

What’s the page rank of your login page?

Joost’s blog is a great read and he has a nifty little solution to this in the form of a nifty little fix for wordpress leaking page rank.

Most techy people don’t need to be told the benefits of feedburner, but there are a few hidden bonuses lurking around this free service.

For a long time the fastest method of indexing was the create a blog on an authoritive domain (such as blogger or wordpress) and post regularly, then link to the pages you want to index.

Since Google purchased Feedburner a few years ago, it has been the quickest way to get you pages indexed.

I have seen my blog posts indexed within a few minutes of posting.

If indexing is important to you and the content you want to get indexed isn’t a blog you will need to create an RSS feed from your static content. I have successfully used XML hub XML RSS generator.

For those SEOs who write their own scripts you may want to combine this with a spidering script and roll over site (check out http://www.bluehatseo.com/power-indexing-tips/ going to play it safe on not link the as it recently lost some PR), so that your indexing is on permanent auto pilot.

Deep Link building using RSS

For quite some time “Feedburner Pro” funcitonality, which you previously had to pay for, has been available for free to Feedburner users.

In your feed burner account, on the Analyse tab, click on FeedBurner Stats (PRO), which is under the services heading.

Click the link to activate this feature if it’s not already active.

Tick the box that says “Item link clicks” and select the “search engine ranking” option.

This turns the links in your RSS feed into 301 redirects.

Note that if you are heavily reliant on Technorati as a means of promotion, then this approach may not be suitable for you as it doesn’t count 301 redirects as valid links to your domains.

You can now promote your feedburner feed and any links to it will now pass “link juice” to your site. Promoting your feedburner feed, will build authority to the feed, which will in turn give you super fast indexing benefits. Props to Colin Lahay (website marketing strategies guru) for helping me figure this bit out.

Social Networking sites you can use to promote you RSS feed.

There are a number of social networking (and other web 2.0) type sites, that allow you to publish your RSS feed on your public profile.

You should create an account with these sites and get active in the community.

If you are able to add friends then you should do so as every friend you add will have a link to your “public profile” page on the social networking site.

The same goes for if the site has “groups” you can join different groups and build links to your public profile.

Aside from building links to your profile you are continually adding exposure to your site and yourself. Depending on your niche, you can get a lot of direct traffic from
these sites.

Here’s some sites you should join and start geting active in:

1. Grazr
2. Bumpzee
3. MyBlogLog
4. Rojo
5. zimbio.com
6. twitter
7. Tumblr
8. BlogCatalog
9. Squidoo
10. Technorati (will only work with your sites’s original rss feed, not your feedburner feed)
11. Facebook
12. Mashable
13. Friend Feed

Thanks to the Earners blog’s Deep Link Guide

RSS directories

You can also submit your RSS feed to RSS directories. RSS directories work like normal directories, but instead of linking to your site, they link to your rss feed.

This the quickest way to build links to your rss feed. This is as mind numbing as submitting to normal directories, but it is the kind of thing
that can be automated or outsources (contact me for more info on this).

Here’s a few different RSS directory lists.

1. RSS directories
2. more RSS directories
3. and even more RSS directories

The big news of the week is that Google has released it’s new browser.

….and it did so in spectacular fasion, using a comic by famous comic animator, Scott McCloud.My initial thoughts were that it was an even better way to gather data on what webistes people are visiting, but Matt Cutts has pre-emplted the paranoia with a detailed list of communications between Chrome and Google.com.They talk about browsers being born into a different world than the one we are currently in and suggesting that perhaps they are unsuitable for the tasks of the average web browser today.One example of this is highlighting the fact that Chrome is multi-threaded, that is to say has many processes with their own memory allocation etc. So that if there’s a problem, such as a javascript looping it would only be necessary to kill one process or tab.This is open source so all the good bits are going to be spread around and even Matt Cutts (who love firefox) thinks that a bit of competition is a good thing. This will especially allow for more comlex applications to run in the browser pushing us just a little faster towards a centralised computing.Google apps such as google reader and google docs are running super quick in Chrome. And with a more robust design of the browser, it’s another reason not to use google aps gone extinct. Another feature of Google Chrome is a javascript virtual machine, called V8.What’s behind V8s speed?

1. hidden class transitions - dynamically creating a class for objects with common properties to share
2. dynamic code generation - it generates machine code from the source code
3. precise management of pointers

The address bar features a fancy autocomplete and you can search from the address bar itself. Not only that if you have searched on Amazon before you can do so from the address bar.Privacy mode that doesn’t record your history.An additional layer of protection has been created for Malware, so that it cannot write to the harddrive and it’s scope is limited to the tab that it is launched in. Chrome achieves this by using a new permissions model whereby the “sandbox” can only see data that the User has allowed to show to it.Lastly the browser is open source so that features that are usefull can be ported to other browsers such as Firefox. This will allow for a common experience across different browsers. Google are calling this gears.Over at search engine land you can see Danny’s experiences test driving search and the omnibox.The Paciello group have been talking about Google Chrome and accessibility. I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to do some testing.So far I love it! Once things for sure: it is undoubtedly very exciting!

You can now pay your toll for the M50 in Dublin online.

Unfortunately they don’t appear to have done any search engine optimisation at all and it took me ages to find the site I had to use to make a payment.

It seems a little unfair to be fined if you can’t find the the site that you are supposed to use to pay m50 toll online.

Hopefully my link will help the next person who uses that phrase, a little?

I attended the second Irish Websmaster Forum meetup in the Harbour Master on Saturday night. Despite torrential downpours and Luas construction trying as hard as possible to prevent me from accessing the IFSC, I finally managed to meet some other webmasters and such from this fair city.

I was great to meet a number of people I had heard of and followed on the web over the last while and a even more people that I hadn’t come into contact with before….

The even was sponsored by Blacknight hosting who have just launched their VPS (Virtual Private Servers) Hosting.

Delicious (one of the orignal bookmarking services) has relaunched itself as Delicious.com.

They name a few reasons for their relaunch.

Although it’s great to have faster searches and all that. I would guess that it’s probably more to do with the fact that they were getting spammed to hell.

The web is full of scripts to auto post bookmarks and I’ve seen a script automatically bypass the delicious capture. These too things in combination would be enough to create a huge mess as I’m sure it did.

I have neither the time nor inclination to investigate this further, so I’m just guessing.

I think another hugely motivating factor (besides staying ahead of the social bookmarking pack) is probably that the future of the web is communities.

It seems that the latest revision of the site is moving strongly towards this, allowing us to learn more from what our friends have socially bookmarked.

When you’re saving a bookmark, you can now select to send it to friends that you have added in your network.

Peer reviewed materical is a great way of using the collective consiousness to increase the amount of quality material you can absorb.

As the borg and social bookmarking has shown us, the collective assimilation of information allows us to increase our coverage and push the cream to the top while pushing the rubbish downwards.

The new format of Delicious also makes me think that it will be possible to build big authority to your own bookmarking page through the “asssimilation” of new friends and the Link juice of there page. I’ll be looking into this, so more on that later.

There’s a new search kid on the block and he’s a really cool pair of trousers.

There are definitely enough new interesting features to perk my interest, such as the categories that can be explored from within the search results.

I did a bit on playing around using a fairly obscure topic that I am knowledgable in (West African djembe drumming) and it did a great job of  creating relevent categories and sub headings.

I presume this must be done algorithically as they claim to have 3 times as many pages indexed than Google (10 times that of microsoft) which seems to bode well for the technology behind all this.

Those concerned by the information held by Google will be happy to hear that Cuil are only interested in search results and hold no personal data what so ever.

They have an impressive staff, which is another strong indicator that they are taking this launch very seriously. It will be very interesting to track them over the next few months to see what impact they have on the Internet and online marketing strategy.

Some people claim that Google are running awa from their core business (search) as fast as possible and while that may be difficult to prove they are certainly going to have to re-examine their core business if they are to continue to be the market leader in search, propably the most important architecture on the Internet.

This is part 5 of the Hotel Marketing Guide series. Please subscribe for updates.

The physical Internet is made up of links between different computers. The real (virtual) Internet is made up of links between different web pages and sites.

Link building is the act of building links to your website.

Google (which now has 90% market share) gives your website a certain amount of authority based on links to your website.

Google gives a score to your website out of 10 based on your authority, this is referred to as pagerank or PR.

Think about links as votes. If you deem a website worthy you link to you it, so every link is like a vote. All votes are not created equal though as we shall see.

The value of a link is based on a few criteria:

• The quality (or authority) of the site linking to you.
• The age of the link - how long it’s been linking to you.
• How many other links are on the page of that is linking to you.
• Is the link from a site that is in a similar niche as you? A link from a dentist is not as valuable as link from your national hotelier association.

The more links you have the better. It’s important that you build links at a natural pace and don’t suddenly get 500 new links within a few days of starting your website.

Link velocity is the rate that you gain links and it can often bump you higher on the search engines than other sites with more links. This is because google thinks that you are really popular for some reason and it’s more likely that people are looking for you.

You definitely need to take care not to trip any google aging filters which will penalise you if you grow too fast though.

What the text inside the link (the link text) says is extremely important when in ranking.

For example:

A link that says -  Bed and breakfast in dublin will help that site to rank for the phrase “bed and breakfast in dublin”.

Where as a link that says - Buy property in Ireland, will help that site to rank for that particular textual phrase.

Further to this. If you want to rank well for the word “djembe”. It is often more useful to build links using phrases that are commonly searched for, rather than only building links with that particular word in it.

For example I might build links like djembe drum and djembe drums. Notice how both phrases have my target keyword in it. This way you will rank for more phrases, while also building credibility that you should rank for the word “djembe”.

Link growth must remain constant because a drop off might indicate to google that your sites popularity is tapering off.

So where do you get links from?

There are many places you can get them:

Directories

These can be Free and paid. Start with your immediate locality and exact niche (hotels) and work you way outwards - hotels, then hospitality, then travel, holiday, backpacker tourist etc.

Search for directories in Dublin, Ireland, Europe etc.

Some google searches that will prove useful:

Directory search

Travel “Subit Site”

hotel “submit URL”

There are many variations around those themes. Experiment!

There are many quality directories that are worth paying for such as the Yahoo directory. Business.com may be worth it, but research the page you’re submitting to and make sure that there isn’t too many links on it and that it is indexed by google.

In general the value of directory links has been on the decline, but an outsourced submission to 1000 directories which can be done very cheaply is a great way of bumping the sheer quantity of links you have from unique IP addresses.

Social Media

See my upcoming post on social media marketing for full details, but here I would just like to discuss social media from a link building standpoint. You can get your site submitted to 120 social bookmarking sites very cheaply which will give you another cheap source of unique IP address links on high PR sites.

Alternatively you could do this yourself. You could then interlink each social bookmarking and networking profile page, to build up it’s relevancy and authority.

Picking up Easy links

Check out Aboutus.org and create one for yourself. Create squidoo pages about your locality. How about 10 free things to do in Paris? You can write articles or pay someone to do it for you and submit to quality article sites like Ezine Articles.

Generate Content that other people would link to

A blog is increasingly important way of promoting businesses online. See my article on the benefits of a business blog.

It allows you to create new content continuously and can increase your exposure of google. As a hotel you could blog about what’s going on in the hotel like renovations etc. You can also discuss up and coming events like St. Patricks day in Dublin or up and coming sport matches. All of this content will them be promotable on search engines as well as attracting their own links.

Viral marketing is a great way to get links and blog post about the 10 funniest hotel moments of the year could well bring you lots of links if managed properly.

A good photo album could generate lots of links especially if you get creative. For example flickr allows you to create groups which allow links back to your site. Create a group for your city and put up your great pictures of the city. Search flickr for your city name and invite everyone who has a relation or photo from there to join your group.

Every person who joins your group will give a link to your group. By doing this you can strengthen your group (and link) while also doing direct promotion. There’s many ways you can use flickr to your advantage like this, but I’m not going to into all of them (check out the RSS feeds too).

This guide is only a few idea for link building and is not even a fractionly conclusive. I provide a llink building service so can’t give all my tricks away

A blog acts as the public face of the company and is an ideal of communicating with the public.

A Blog can be an online marketing tool that can be used to raise the visibility of your company. It will also make a contribution to the industry and as the purveyor of this information you will be seen as an authority.

A blog will also give the general public an idea about the inner workings of your business which will attract new customers and talented people people to work for you.

Blogs are increasingly important on the Internet today because of their ability to advertise and promote your business. They also continually create new content and the more content you have, the greater you visibility on the search engines.

Blogs also create RSS feeds which are a great way of getting deep links to your website. See my forthcoming RSS promotion post for further details.

Blogging can provide a creative outlet for you employees and provide many opportunities for link bait.

It is far easier to promote a blog a website that contains a blog on with search engines. I predict that in the near future all businesses will have blogs. Make blogging a part of your marketing strategy today.

 Update 16 - 10 -20008

I found and interesting article from Randa Clay today - 5 reasons your business needs a blog