I’m just not with Alex Ferguson’s way of thinking at all. He refuses to let an arrogant and spoilt child leave Old Trafford. This, even after all the problems he has created and the lack of team spirit the boy has.
Yet onn the other hand, he’s happy to let one of the greatest strikers Man Untied have ever had in Ruud Van Nistelrooy, leave Old Trafford. Ruud was again United’s top scorer for the season with 26 goals. Ok it’s a long way from his 44 goal season he had on his second year at united, but then again we play a different style of football now that we have very little delivery from the wings. To score 26 goals with the way United have been playing is a major feat.
Ferguson - you’re getting old, I think it’s time to quit….. As each season goes by, you seem to get worse, give it up before you ruin United like Souness did to Liverpool.
Posted by : Tom Doyle in (Rantings) 18th Jul, 2006
Today will possibly see the hottest day on record, with temperatures in the midlands set rise above the 33.4 degrees celcius that was once witnessed on these isles!
In our office here already, at 10am, the temperature in here is 23.5 degrees celcius - our air cooler isn’t doing too well to prevent the heat from entering the room.
It’s no wonder most of the countries with hot climates economies don’t do too well - I feel like going home now because it’s too hot 
The World SEO Championship got underway on Friday. The idea is that SEO beginners and experts will fight it out to see who can be top of the google rankings for the phrase “Ambatchdotcom Seocontest“.
The crowd behind this competition say “This is a great challenge for all SEO beginners and experts”. The winner will be decided by ambatch on the 10th of October 2006.
The prizes? Well not very awe inspiring…. but better than nothing I suppose.
1st place $200
2nd place $100
3rd place $50
I can’t see many BUSY seo experts taking part in this competition - I’d be interested to see if any irish SEO experts are involved though!
Posted by : Tom Doyle in (Music) 17th Jul, 2006
Just got a listen to Stone Sours‘ much anticipated new album, Come What(ever) May. I have to admit I quite like the album, although it’s not nearly as heavy as their first album.
Corey Taylor always said his vision for Stone Sour was to do music he couldn’t do with Slipknot. I think he has definitely achieved this with this album.
The album is much more radio friendly, with at least 3 songs capable of being played on mainstream radio. For those (like myself) that didn’t want to hear that, don’t worry, there are still many very heavy tunes to break your neck rocking to them!!!
I think they will do pretty well with this album!!
How do I create a successful website? Well this can only be answered after you have ascertained what your goals are and what you will class as having a successful website.
Most businesses simply want to use their website as a sales leads generation tool and for those, we have put together a list of tips for creating a successful website.
- Planning
In the words of footballing legend Roy Keane - “Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail”.
You need to ask yourself a list of key questions before you begin developing your website:
a) What is the sole purpose of the website?
b) Who and where are my target audience?
c) What services/products will I be able to sell online?
d) How will the website be marketed?
e) How will I keep them coming back for more?
If you can answer all of these questions, you are ready to move ahead to the next stage….
- Web Design
Good web design is not about fancy graphics, it’s about creating an accessible person centred website that will allow users to easily navigate your website and find the information they seek and where possible easily make contact with you.
Your website should keep all your corporate branding that you may have used on your company stationary etc.
Most people hate change, so you should try and keep your website similar to the most visited websites. For example, a shopping site should be as easy to use as say Amazon.com
There are of course technical issues that you should ensure are covered by your web designer. Things like ensuring that your website can be seen as you have designed it on all different browsers and screen resolutions.
- Web Development
Ok well there’s a lot to cover here and this really depends on what you have decided you are doing with your website. There are a few basic items that I would ask your developer to do.
a) Create each page with their own title and meta tags, this just prevents the possibility of any duplicate content penalties from Google.
b) Search Engine Friendly URLs - This is a must. Search engines give less weight to sites with a URL like “www.whatever.com/index.php?id=22334&jack=story” than a site that can produce a URL like this “www.whatever.com/22334/story/“.
c) Create/Install a Content Management System - It is essential for any site to be a success that you are in control of your website. You need some sort of content management system so that you can make changes when and where you please. A content management system also prevents you from needing to pay a web designer each time you need something changed on your website!
- Online Marketing
Believe it or not, some web development companies still continue to “forget” to tell their clients that no-one will visit their website unless they market it. Build it and they will come…… ehhh, no they won’t.
If you are going to take any website seriously, you need to develop a good online marketing campaign and that does not mean it has to be expensive.
There are many options available to you:
a) Search Engine Optimisation - The act of getting your website listed in the generic search results of search engines. Contact us for more info 
b) Pay-per-click campaigns - Google Adwords is now possibly the most used form of pay-per-click campaigns. A simple solution to get your site listed on the top of the search engine results instantly!
c) Banner Advertisements - I personally am not a fan of banner ads. They can be very expensive and in terms of generating visits to your website they are near useless. For example, 250,000 impressions on RTE.ie will set you back about €1,800 (ex VAT) - going by recent trends you are likely to achieve between 0.8 and 1.8% clickthrough rate. So for €1,800 you are likely to get between 300 and 4,500 hits to your website. This is something that can be achevied by spending a lot less money!
You may be saying that that is a very broad overview of how to create a successful website, but without knowing your requirements in detail it would be nonsensical to give specific details. We’re always here to answer your questions and give advice - You can ring us at +353-1-2190223
Over the weekend Google updated it’s PageRanking and backlinks data. It has majorly affected the search engine rankings, with many sites losing valuable positions. Our own site (www.2bscene.net) has dropped in the search results.
I don’t think the update has completed as all of our inner site pages have yet to be awarded their proper pagerank.
With great dismay I read today that Ronaldo is not leaving United. Why Ferguson insists on keeping this player at United is beyond me.
Ok, yes I agree, he is one of the most talented young players in the world at the minute. However, for me that is just not enough to warrant a position in one of the greatest clubs in the world. Football is a team game, one player does not make a successful football team. What makes a successful club, is great teamwork.
Since he joined United, I have never been a fan of his. I always felt his whole attitude towards the game was completely different than any other player United have ever had. He is self absorbed, arrogant and immature.
It is completely obvious the unrest at United last season was down to this guy. United now look likely to depart with one of the greatest strikers they have ever had in Ruud Van Nistelrooy and this seems to stem from a training ground bust up between himself and Ronaldo.
Any true Man United fan will remember the European Cup game when Ryan Giggs was substitued and you could lip read what he said as him came off. “What about fucking him?” asked Giggs, pointing in the direction of Ronaldo. If there is no repspect between the players for each other, it just won’t work.
Fergie - please wake up, I know you are getting old, but surely can see this lad is ruining your once great team…..
Juventus, Lazio and Fiorentina have been relagated to Serie B. This follows the outome of the match fixing scandal that has rocked Italian football. On top of relegation, Juventus will start next season with a 30 point deficit and they have been stripped off their last two Seria A titles the team had won.
Lazio will be docked 12 points next season, while Milan have got away with a 15 point deficit for the start of the season. The full details of the whole debacle have yet to come to light but it is thought to include referee’s and officials too.
Posted by : Tom Doyle in (Internet & Computers) 14th Jul, 2006
It was brought to my attention today that Boards.ie had been issued with legal action by SwitchMedia for what it classed as offensive posts. Take a look at what Boards.ie are saying here >>>
Since the posts were removed before I had a chance to read them, the general jiist is that people were complaining about the price of SwitchMedias service offerings. A representative of SwitchMedia was at one stage replying to the posts, but removed them as soon as they sent the legal action to boards.ie
Let’s face it - what’s offensive about stating the facts.
1. SwitchMedia are expensive, but not the most expensive
2. They must trawl through company registrations records - try registering a company yourself and see what material you receive from from SwitchMedia. One thing is for sure… you will receive something from them! Is there anything wrong with this? Not if it’s as simple as we can help you get a domain name and hosting, but generally it’s more in a scaremongering fashion where they send an invoice or something to that effect.
As my day-2-day job involves managing an online marketing company (www.2bscene.net), I thought it’s about time I started a blog discussing some issues relating to online marketing. So here it is, my first blog post on online marketing and I will start with the topic I feel is most important to any online marketing campaign.
I’ve been in the web development game for just over 8 years now and have seen many changes over that time. However, there is one area of the web development industry that I feel is too often overlooked. That are is Search Engine Optimisation…..
Even the first book I read (the name escapes me now) on web development had a whole chapter dedicated to marketing your website on search engines. This was at a time when optimising websites was as simple as putting your phrases in the title tag of your HTML pages and spamming keyword tags with words like Madonna, Sex, Pamela Anderson just to generate traffic for these searches. The funnier thing was, it worked!!
But nowadays it’s not that simple. It’s a much harder taks to acheive top rankings on search engines for phrases relating to your business. Studies have shown that 75% of search engine users will be looking in search queries not for your business name - but for what your business does or the services you provide. So basically, that means that you need to be coming up in searches relating to your business, if you are not you are unlikely to get a return on your invesment from the website.
Yet, web development companies seem to avoid this issue when talking to potential or existing customers. They still seem to instill the “Build it and they will come” mentality. Anyway, that’s enough of me ranting off let’s get down to the nitty gritty. What are the top 5 most important items when optimising your website…. here it is:
- Choosing Strong Keyphrases
This is the most important area of any online marketing campaign. If you cannot decide who your target market is, where they are and what they will be searching for in their search queries you might aswell stop right now. It is imperative that you not only choose words relating to your products and services, but it is also important to target phrases that you have a realistic chance of appearing in the top 10. So for example, trying to get number 1 for “sex” would be a mammoth task, but if you can add “sex ireland” or “sex toys ireland” etc, you will have a much better chance of developing traffic.
- Optimising your website
This is the easiest part - this is where you do all the stuff you have read about online such as Title Tags, Meta Tags etc. However, don’t forget things like the names of your files. E.g. To be foudn for the phrase “car dealers ireland”, make sure the name of the page is “car-dealers-ireland.html” (or whatever extension). Most search engines treat “-” as a space whereas if you used an “_”, tey would read the page as cardealersireland, which obviously means nothing. There are many other thing you can do, too numerous to mention here….
- Submitting to Search Engines & Directories
I always think it’s best to naturally let the search engines pick up your website as opposed to mass submitting your website to hundreds of search engines. And one of the best ways to do this is to submit your website to the many free web directories out there such as www.dmoz.org, www.search.ie, www.browse.ie, www.searchme.ie etc etc.
- Build Strong Links from Other websites
Try not to rely on Directories for your main source of back links as this can take time. You should ask your clients would they exchange links with you. Try to be part of a partners section or something like that rather than a links page.
- Keep Monitoring Your Progress
You should always know how you are doing, with thousands of sites coming online every day, you need to make sure you don’t fall down the pecking order. Also, always try to continue to get links from other website where you can.
Ok, well that’s it for this installment. Keep coming back and I will post any new findings as they appear!
