Title of my blog post

Body of my blog post

Regards,
Mark O'Leary,
ICT Specialist,
Tipperary Institute,
0504 28055

moleary@tippinst.ie
www.tippinst.ie

This e-mail may contain confidential and privileged material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, use, distribution or disclosure by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorised to receive for the recipient), please contact the sender by reply e-mail and delete all copies of this message. Please consider the environment before printing this email line.

Test

A test of blog syndication for the Web Dev II Class

My Blog Title

This is the text in the body of the blog post.

Space Invaders - Tipperary Institute

Science Week Ireland - Celebrating the 30th aniversary of classic arcade game Space Invaders, 8 schools visit Tipperary Institute over 3 days to create their very own version of of the game.




See http://www.insideview.ie/irisheyes/2007/11/science-week-ir.html

Uploading images from Flickr to Blogger

Uploading images from Flickr to Blogger
Originally uploaded by IWHQ

This is how it's done

Web Design Ireland - Search Engine Tips

So you've identified your audience and the most likely searches they may make to find your products. Now you need to fight to get your website on the front page of search engine results for these search terms.

For the next few weeks I will talk about content - specifically text content. Your website cannot exist in the search engines without content. The major search engines will index your site and read the content to form a picture of your site's purpose. If they think that the content of your site is a close match for a search engine keyword search then you have a good chance of appearing towards the top of the results.

News Flash - Search engines will not read images or flash files. Sure enough you can (and should) add alt tags and descriptions to your multimedia on your website but these will not compensate for lack of text content on your site.

When a search engine sees an image on a site, even if the image contains text, it will not read the text. If the image has alt tags the search engine will read those but will not give as much priority to alt tags as it does to good old plain text.

This weeks golden rule is:

Always include plain text content on your webpage

If your website provides information in image of flash format, repeat that information in plain text. What's the point in having wonderful animations on your web site when no one visits?

As a rule :

• Use H1, H2 tags etc for headings rather than images
• You have identified keywords that you want to rate highly for in the search engines - place these in the H1, H2... tags as much as possible - and place them at the start of the heading. For example if you wish to rate highly for "sweet shop" and your shops name is "The Candy Store" then use <h1>Sweet Shop - The Candy Store</h1> rather than putting your shops name at the front of the header.
• Use the keywords throughout your page. Somewhere between 4% and 20% of the text on your page should be made up of keywords.
• Use bold text for keywords. Do this a few times throughout your page. Search engines place priority on bold text also.
• Link to other pages in your site using the keywords - for example: Sweet Shop. This will help in two ways - Firstly the search engines will note that a keyword is linked and will note this when determining your site content. Secondly, one of the best ways to increase your Page Rank (PR) is to have links to your site with your preferred keywords as the link text.
• Use plenty of text content and plenty of text pages. Don't be afraid to write articles or place a blog on your site. The more relevant text the better. You may even syndicate content from other blogs if it is relevant to your site.

So we now have a clear idea of the keywords we want to rate highly for and we have created site content to reflect this. The next step will take us in a more technical direction when we will look at optimising out html code and web page structure for SEO.

Have a look at Liam Noonans blog where he did an analysis of effectiveness of the keywords on his website. Liam is a lecturer in an Irish College - Tipperary Institute

Web Design - Search Engine Optimisation

Tip of the Week
Search engine optimisation is the online equivalent of moving your shop from a back street in the middle of nowhere, to a prime location on a busy street in a vibrant city. If no-one can find you, chances are that sales will be down. Think of all of the passing trade that city centre stores get due to their location. Lets apply this theory to our sites and increase our business.

The first tip is a simple one. Determine the words and phrases that you want your website to perform well with in the search engines. For example, if you run a sweetshop you will want your web site to perform well for the phrases "sweets" and maybe "sweets Tipperary" (add your location here). You will probably not be interested in being in the top ten for search phrases such as "irish web design".

Put yourself in your customers shoes. Imagine that you are sitting in front of a computer and you want to find a sweetshop in the local area - What would you type in the search box?

Once you have a list of 3 or 4 search terms you can begin to optimise your site for these terms.