I’m a noob. There, I’ve said it. In fact, in the grander scheme of the Irish Internet ‘scene’ I’m a complete blow-in. There, I’ve said that as well.

The history of the ‘blow-in’

Back in August of 2006 I started this blog. That’s just 6 short months ago, and I quite honestly couldn’t be more flattered than I am right now having received 3 nominations for the Irish Blog Awards. (Full lists and links to all nominees is available here or here.

So I want to help this community that has welcomed me so warmly. But bear with me for one moment.

We’ve been held back

The Irish are world-renowned for their culture, their art, their bant and their craic. The shame is that in the on-line world we’ve been held back by the woeful regulatory inadequacies that have allowed out infrastructure to rot. So I’m wondering whether I can do anything, regardless of how small an act, that will help this community. Well, all I know is SEO, so… If I can get just one or two extra visitors to Irish sites I’m going to.

My plan

UPDATE: Hold the boat a minute. Some people are starting to ping this but it’s not always 100% clear if they are simply reporting it or actually availing of the offer. Please try to be clear – mention that you would like the review or link with the anchor ‘search engine optimisation’.
Thanks.

So here’s what I propose to do:

There are over 500 nominations for the blog awards. I’m offering to help each and every one of those sites, FOR FREE.

First off, if you are one of the nominees well done. And here’s the bonus – if you would like me to provide an SEO review of your site then read on.

TO EACH AND EVERY NOMINEE

I will undertake an SEO review of your site at no cost to you. I’m going to check your site for the most common spidering and indexing issues. I’ll also give you my very biased ‘first impression’ for good measure.

I’m going to analyse your homepage, the most important page of your website. No catches. No fee. Just expert advice for free.

Now, mindful of the fact that there are over 500 of you who can take me up on this offer, I need to create some process to achieve my goal of helping you all.

So I’m going to ask anyone who wishes to take up my offer to please follow 3 simple steps:

1. I need a little information. Nothing private. Just a little background on your website. If you can write me a few sentences to let me know the following:
   • [added]category you are nominated;
   • your blog’s topic or niche;
   • your target audience;
   • how long you’ve been blogging;
   • how old is your domain;
   • the names/URLs of a few other sites, competitors or friends, in your niche.
2. I don’t really want an extra 500 emails clogging up my Inbox, so I want you to put the above in a new post on your own blog. Give the post the title ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and, now here’s the important bit, link back to this post from your post. When you link back my blog will pick up the Trackback and record your post. That’s how I’ll know you have accepted my offer. If you use WordPress all you have to do is place the link in your post body and Bob’s you uncle. Something like <a href="http://www.redcardinal.ie/marketing/11-02-2007/search-engine-optimisation/">search engine optimisation</a> will do nicely.
3. I would like you to mention one other thing if possible – tell me what you want to achieve SEO wise, and if there is any particular issue you think needs addressing on your site.

Right, there’s no rocket science up there.

Expectations, expectations

A little bit of expectation setting is needed before I leave you to go and write your posts. There are about 500 of you. I’m not going to turn any of your sites into the next [insert the biggest most famous blog you know here]. But I might just find one or two things that prevent your site getting into Google, and hopefully find some nice new visitors for your blog.

I intend devoting around 15 minutes to each site. That might not sound like a lot of time for a review, but I live, eat and sleep SEO, and an experts eye together with the tools I use can identify many issues instantly.

If I get a large response to this offer (go on surprise me) it will likely take me quite some time to complete every review. I’d love to be able to just drop everything, but that’s simply not feasible (any clients reading this – you’re actually dreaming and will wake up shortly).

If I could set up another site to publish the reviews I would. I don’t want 500 pages of reviews here on my blog, so I’m going to publish them to my feed. Yep you read that right. If you take me up on my offer your review will appear in my RSS feed and not on my site. So you need to sign up.

Hurry, this offer won’t last for long

I’m going to leave this offer open until 5pm February 16. The reviews will be published from March 1 onwards.

Oh, and if you manage to win a category I’m hoping to offer you even more help. It will be another limited offer, so sign up to my feed to make sure you don’t miss out.

Thanks for nominating me.

Richard

You can ignore the rest – it’s just pings for the nominees.

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