James O’Sullivan’s Blog

SEO, (Search Engine Optimisation) is absolutely crucial to the success of your online business. There’s a whole host of companies offering their SEO services and charge an arm and a leg to give you advice on how your website should be optimised. My best advice in today’s ecomonic climate is to save yourself some money and do it yourself. SEO agencies position SEO as a complicated science which only they understand. That’s simply not the case. SEO companies come in, do a check of your keywords, optimise your content, give advise on website structure and code, and simply rattle off best practices that YOU need to follow. After all this advice the SEO company don’t really “Do” anything! They give you the advice but it’s you who needs to do the work to implement their recommendations! It’s you that has to build up the in-bound links, it’s you who needs to update your code with meta descriptions etc, it’s you who needs to code up the short URL’s and so on. In my opinion I think it’s daylight robbery.

If you want to optimise your website just read Google’s document on how to SEO your website.

and if that’s too much check out the really useful SEO cheat sheet.

Follow this and you’ve just saved your self a pile of cash to spend on Google ads or at your Christmas party

If you’re lazy go ahead and waste your money on an SEO agency.

Today and came across some neat sites that I wanted to bookmark using my preferred social bookmark plugin – delicious.
However I was on a different PC without the handy plugin so I went to delicious.com to download and install the plugin.
There I was greeted with a brand spanking new interface by delicious.com which I have to say I’m very impressed by.
Here’s the screenshot of the homepage.

The site still maintains the same simple look and feel but the functional changes are simply brilliant, I especially love the new Tag section.
title=”New Delicious tags by josullivanlive, on Flickr”>

You can find a complete list of changes here.

Well done delicious, very tasty work indeed

July 28th 2008, a new search engine named Cuil ~cool launches and aims to take on Google!

Irish born Tom Costello, CEO and Founder originally from Drogheda is leading Cuil’s highly motivated and experienced team.

Cuil has the talent and knowledge required with ex employees of Google and IBM on the team they are surely bound for success.

Cuil claim to have a largest search index on the planet which is caused Google to sit up and pay attention.

Google have responded to their claim on their official blog post http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

Basically Google are saying that they have the largest index but they don’t shout about it.

I guess the question is how relevant is Cuil’s index and how do their results compare to that of google?

So the following thoughts and questions come to mind.

• How relevant are their searches?
• How will they counteract Spam SEO techniques?
• Will Cuil be just a fad?
• What differentiates Cuil from other search engines?
• How can they make money?
• Brand recognition / equity?
• Will users bookmark cuil.com as their home page?
• What about user generated content?
• What’s their capacity?

            Seems as though Cuil got too hot after launching and suffered the digg effect as reported by techcrunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/28/andcuil-is-down/

Google have acquired so many web properties and applications over the years to help build a more relavent index.

Google analytics, docs, webmasters, books, journals….

Youtube

Blogger

Jaiku

Feedburner

Orkut

The list is endless but all have a common goal

• Acquire talent, knowledge, IP, users and to deliver a better a relevant experience for the user which help google deliver relevant ads to make money.

More on this one later..