I’ve never spent much time looking at the travel niche here in Ireland, but amidst all the doom and gloom I see fantastic opportunities for Irish travel agents who are willing to embrace technology to build strong online relationships with their prospects and customers.

I love feedback. Good, bad or indifferent – it’s all good. The only bad feedback is no feedback at all. So here’s a nice case where the lack of a simple online feedback mechanism means that one travel website is likely to remain broken for some time.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I saw these video comments it opened my eyes to how the future will likely look – high fidelity communications where nuance between parties increases exponentially. Not to mention a very valuable insight into how Google might use phone numbers to determine website owners…

For sometime now I’ve noticed some sort of message flashed on my screen when hitting the back button to a Google SERP. It doesn’t happen all the time, but certainly enough to have me wondering exactly what it says. The message normally disappears instantly (you only see it flash), but today one of those messages [...]

Two weeks ago I recorded my second Podcast on Search Engine Optimisation for Enterprise Ireland. This time myself and John Ring discussed SEO for SMEs in Ireland, and how businesses can use SEO to increase traffic and sales.

Building sites that work seamlessly across browsers and platforms is a difficult task, but now, thanks to Adobe Browserlab, the task of QA’ing your pages just got a whole lot easier.

Interesting case study by Michael Wall showing that the rel=”canonical” tag is not panacea some would suggest. Take care or you might see the same outcomes as Michael…

Well done to John Handelaar for his Kildare Street project, winner of the Best New Web Application/Service category at the 2009 Realex Irish Web Awards.

This weekend the best and brightest Irish Internet folk will gather at the 2009 Realex Irish Web Awards. Red Cardinal are sponsoring the Best New Web Application/Service category, and want to wish good luck to all the great apps/sites short listed this year for an award.

Small, but still significant change to Google Local search results – Google now return 7 Local results rather than the 10 they had previously.

A new SERP result layout that really delivers massive real estate to sites getting these types of listings in Google’s search results.

Nice short video from Matt on how to publish same language content for multiple countries AND avoid dupe content filters.

Interesting to see that Yahoo! finally built a dedicated Irish hompeage on Yahoo.ie. Interesting that is until you go 1 click further and not everything is at it should be…

A very, very off-topic post, but this is so important to my home country that it’s worth even having just one more person read this. Your kids’ futures may be determined by what happens with all this NAMA crap.

Sometimes you have to move very subtly if yo’re going to make waves in a competitive niche. Better to rise gradually than to jump to the top, especially if you’re buying your way there…

Very interesting video from Google explaining duplicate content and multiple site issues. Some great information for entry-level and advanced webmasters.

An interesting change I just noticed where Google is showing sitelinks for sites ranked lower than #1. The sitelinks point at 4 related forum threads, and include the post date.

A look at high-commitment online funnels – in this case for car insurance – and how low perceived benefits and unknown outcomes will result in high drop-out rates. Smothering your prospects and killing your leads.

Have you nominated your favourite websites for the 2009 Irish Web Awards? If not you better get over and do it today – nominations close later on.

Very off topic post today about a new BMW advert that got my attention. No SEO here, but it’s always nice to look at the offline world once in a blue moon.

If these figures are representative of actual levels of malware infestation on Irish hosting networks then many, many Irish webmasters need to take extreme counter measures. In fact, perhaps the hosting companies themselves may need to review how they protect their infrastructure and the sites they host.

The Irish Web Awards really are the “web awards”. Where all other awards function to generate returns for their oganisers, IWA functions to applaud the those Irish websites that truly deserve kudos. No strings, no ulterior motives, just the best of the best. Get nominating today!

While messing around with bing I found some odd handling of country/language settings. Doing some more digging over weekend, and it does indeed appear to be a bug that affects Chrome users. When you select a country, and then visit an alternative bing country site bing gets confused when displaying results. In the following example [...]

It appears that Google is slowly relaxing the rules around geotargeting of ccTLDs. Personally I don’t think this will help, but for webmasters stuck on vanity ccTLD it’s probably a God-send.

With the rise of online privacy concerns it pays to be careful how you treat users who may restrict certain third party cookies. Here’s a case where a major airline blocks access because Doublclick’s cookie is restricted. And this must be costing them sales…

Perhaps the bing developers don’t use Chrome, but here’s an interesting bug that leaves Irish Chrome users stuck with UK results.

Sadly the Internet can be a real cesspool, and if you were caught out by the scamming Euro Business Guide, and subsequently received legal threats demanding payment, then this post outlines what to do.

Some nice screenshots of another Google test that could affect how searchers enter your site via Google SERPs. Will this become another form of sitelink?

Check out Google’s future search results in this just-released public BETA.

In an improvement to their generic “Your computer may be infected with spyware” message to blocked search requests, Google now lets you know when someone behind your IP is running automated requests.

Organic geotargeting affects every site owner. How search engines, and Google in particular, handle geotargeting is one of the most important factors to be considered in SEO. And in this post I’m outlining some tests I observed that suggest big changes to geotargeting may be on their way. This will affect your website, so please keep reading.

Beware of thinly veiled blackmail attempts from companies who claim to have your best interests at heart. The old adage always rings true – if it sounds too good to be true…

I was searching ‘pages from Ireland’ looking for a supplier of load-balancing routers. Google for some odd reason thought the most relevant result was from a French business story on Yahoo!s FR Biz site. Not good.

Redirects are one of the most important tools for any SEO. As well as being powerful they can also result in weird, wonderful and damaging outcomes. Here’s a really odd case of different browsers redirected to different page URLs with the same redirect—not something you want happening—and how to fix the problem.

Around most industries you will find businesses scavenging at the less-savoury edges, often making quite a good return while they’re at it. Very often those businesses operate in ways regular people might consider to be unethical, and sometimes deceptive and/or illegal. In many cases governments are forced to regulate to keep order. The Premium Rate phone segment, in my opinion, is a great example of why regulation is needed.

Here’s a case of a very small change in Google that will likely be noticed by lots and lots of Irish sites.

No SEO in this post, and for a change a look at some of the airport advertising and announcement screens I happened upon on a recent journey.

I’ve been watching lots of change over at Google the past few weeks, and some of these changes lead me to think that geotargeting, both the tool within GWT and the way we search on Google, is about to change.

Quick apology to any email subscribers – you may have received a large number of email alerts, and this was due to migrating the site to a new server.

Bet you cant guess! Tonight I’m training at DMI in Dublin again.