http://technorati.com/account/signup?f=blogclaim

Once you enter in your particulars (name, email etc…) you get a verification email, and are prompted to “claim” your blog.  The claim procedure is a simple “copy and paste” of some javascript into your landing page. All very straight forward. I’m not sure if this will help increase the page ranking of my blog for the keywords “Eamonn Kennedy”, but we’ll wait and see….

Three search engines, three different techniques, all three techniques pretty much the same.

Google:

To get the best out of google’s search ranking system, you have to jump through a couple of hoops. Luckily these hoops are quite helpful anyway, so there isn’t too much of a downside, other than the time it takes to signup.

Hoop one: Google Webmaster tools

Sign up and authenticate yourself as owner of your website, by uploading a file to your public directory. Once you become a recognised master of the web, you can submit a “site map”.

Hoop two: Google Sitemaps

It’s siffice to say, that basically, you’re giving google a document which descibes how many pages are on your site, which ones are important, and how long they will continue to be important. More info here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318&hl=en

You can do other things inside google’s webmaster tools, but not many of them are very interesting. Pretty much once you’ve figured out how to submit a site map, Robert’s your mothers brother.

As an aside, for anyone looking to build a site using Wordpress, there is a handy little plugin, that builds your sitemap for you: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Also, it bears mentioning that google offer a free “Google Analytics” service, which you can sign up to in order to monitor how many times you check your own site.

Microsoft / MSN Search /Live.com:

You can simply submit your site to live.com/ MSN Search here: http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx. However, you can also make Microsoft accept your master of web status using their webmaster tools. Again, you have to create an account, similar to Google. Once your account is created, again, you submit a site map. The sitemap you created before, should work again. Again, you also need to authenticate your ownership of the site, by uploading a file. Again, again, again.

One small difference is how Microsoft describe their sitemaps. They link to http://www.sitemaps.org/

Yahoo:

Start offf here: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

See as above, signup, submit url, authenticate by uploading file.

So, that’s it. Now I have a search presence, I just sit back and wait for the internet to send me huge sums of money through email.

After submitting my site, I was told it could take from days to months for my submission to propogate across the web. According to it’s own hype:

The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web’s largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.

We’ll see.

Before trying any SEO techniques I have a decent head start. Firstly, my name is spelled with two ‘N’s which is less common than that other bastardised version of my name, ”Eamon”. Secondly, the URL of the site is http://www.eamonnkennedy, i.e. the keywords that I’m looking to optimise are already in the URL.

http://www.vivalogo.com/vl-resources/beautiful-javascript-flash-galleries.htm

Favourite is:

         http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/autoviewer/

Made this: http://eamonnkennedy.ie/gallery/

Actually scrap that, this is better :
  http://airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/

Finally, this is a pretty cool one, however, you have to manually create an xml file, it if they’re your own photos. A bit slow loading also. But it looks great when it’s fully loaded.

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/tiltviewer/

Made this:

http://www.eamonnkennedy.ie/tiltviewer/