Developing eWrite

The Tuesday Push is an initiative started by Damien Mulley to encourage the blogging community to point a spotlight on new or useful services in Ireland.

The Tuesday Push happens every second Tuesday. This particular Tuesday isn’t one of them but I wanted to promote on of my own projects and how it relates to another of Damien’s ideas, the SEO competition.

In short, the SEO competition aims to find out who is the best at search engine optimisation in Ireland. I think the competition is an excellent idea and several sites and blogs are already appearing to compete.

Im interested in the tools and techniques of SEO but I’m not participating myself, I don’t know enough. Im going to be watching the participants and their sites so that I might learn a thing or two to benefit our clients. Hopefully, when this competition ends in December, one or more people will blog about the techniques they used so we might all learn from it.

My own project that I wanted to talk about is ‘Yell if it changes‘. This site was originally started so that I could be notified automatically if some of our customers sites had changed. For a long time I planned to add the ability to monitor the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for changes in the results for specific keywords and URLs, This is now in place.

For the SEO competition, enter the magic words ‘Geansai Gorm‘ and the URL you would like to monitor. You will be notified of the current position(s) in the results page of Google and you will also be notified via email whenever the URL changes position(s). The history of changes in positions are recorded too so it should make for some very interesting data in time.

It isn’t limited to the SEO competition though, anyone can use it to monitor the positions of their own sites for their chosen keywords. Go on, its free and you can use it for as many sites or search terms as you like.

Yell if it changes is a small project I work on in my spare time. There are many many things I plan to add to it in the future to make it more useful to myself and the 200+ users so far. If you have any ideas or comments on Yell, I’d love to hear them.

This weeks Tuesday Push is Louder Voice.

Louder voice is developed by Cork-based business Argolon Solutions, spearheaded by Conor O’ Neill.

Loudervoice allows anyone to post reviews about anything via several sources including blogs, Twitter, Jaiku, SMS and more. I have written a couple of reviews in the past and I plan to continue.

In their own words :

LouderVoice is all about reviews but with a BIG difference. Instead of expecting you to spend time and effort writing reviews for us, we’re interested in your reviews wherever you write them

In the highly detailed words of 11850 :

You may try this website on Loudervoice; http://www.loudervoice.com/about/ Thank you.

(Click here if you’re wondering why I brought up 11850)

There is a great Help section on their site to teach you how to begin reviewing : http://www.loudervoice.com/help/

The Loudervoice homepage reminds me of Yahoo and Lycos a few years back. Im all for healthy white space on a website design but LV manages to get a lot of stuff into a page very very well. Review of the day, review of the week and latest review widgets on the homepage are great.

There are a lot of tick marks on the homepage, it would be great to see more profile images from those reviewers, maybe only those people with profile images should be able to make the homepage.

In my opinion it is detailed, quality services like Loudervoice, driven by its user base which will drive more and more customer purchases. Many people I know look for reviews or ratings when searching for a hotel or B&B to stay in, this will spread to more and more products and services.

Word of mouth is the most influential business referral technique. In the absence of people recommending items to you, reviews and ratings such as those provided by Loudervoice are the next best thing. In a similar manner, I find myself using Google Blog Search more and more when searching for items on the web rather than using the usual website search to get a more up to date and personal opinion on what ever I might be searching for.

Loudervoice is clearly aware of this trend as they have recently launched Loudervoice for Business – Connecting commerce and customers. Conor writes about the launch of Loudervoice for business in their blog.

I would be excited to see if I would be able to use Loudervoice in relation to our own eWrite software to allow users to review our products to make sure we’re kept on our toes.

Deservedly, Loudervoice has been short listed for the Moviestar.ie Irish web awards. Good Luck Loudervoice!

Loudervoice…. 5 Stars!

The Tuesday push is part of a coordinated effort to spread the work of the Irish tech community.

On the 9^th of September eWrite was the focus of the Tuesday Push. Several great blogs wrote about eWrite which resulted in 122 referrals so far according to Google Analytics.

Heres a chart showing the URLs and how many referrals they directed to ewritecork.com from September 9^th to September 30^th.

Thank you again to each person who wrote about eWrite in their blog.