Hi Leslie
Please correct me if I'm wrong??
If this is the case, well that's not true. You don't need to host in Ireland at all. The .ie is sufficient enough to make Google believe your business is in Ireland and there are other ways of "fooling" Google into believing your site is based in Ireland.
I dont think you need to fool Google - the webmasters tools lets you set a country - and even then you can sometimes show for more, depending on your search and link history.
I don't think you have to host in Ireland in order to show. That would be anti-free trade and Google is an openly free-trade, globalised company. In fact they even have a video about this. I haven't seen this as an issue before.
Sure,if you have a .ie and host it in Ireland it will definitely have an advantage over a ".com" hosted outside Ireland that isn't seen as an Irish domain.
There are issues with your free content too - it just reads like the numerous top 10 tips for SEO - most of which are just read from other peoples sites and largely worthless or innaccurate. Most SEO is base on past experience - but it doesn't mean that a couple of successes makes you know everything. You've rushed this and you haven't put anything into context.
For example, your comments on flash will only continue to cause confusion should anyone read it. You are saying flash is now only ok if used in the header? So you can use flash in other places either? What if you wanted to use flash where you'd normally have one image to rotate different images? how will that negatively impact your site?
Secondly you can do much of what Flash does in other ways - there is Microsoft Silverlight, there is javascript and javascript content can be read. I'm not advocating it - I'm just pointing something out.
Your next point almost sounds like you shouldn't place text in images - this isn't true - you can do both.
The description and keywords tags are no longer used for ranking - please refer to the Google Blog for this.
Your advice on keyword stuffing and having a "couple of hundred" keywords is far from good practice and you haven't presented a balanced approach with this information. The number of words doesn't have to be "a couple of hundred" and it is not "best" to stuff keywords or use as many from the "research list" as possible - even though it may seem "ugly".
You clearly haven't bothered keeping up to date - links from Directories are largely useless - they tend to have little relevance to the sites being linked from, they're being pushed down the list with every Google update. Worse are PR sites and ARticle sites because of the huge spam they create - and they'll probably have little effect in 2009 and later.
Yahoo ansers have a nofollow tag and squidoo lens are very open to spam. Again something thats not a good place to build links in
Reciprocol links? Really?
What if there is no social aspect to people creating links on social media or with social bookmarks? Isn't that contributing to spam? isn't that why Google are reducing link value from these sites?
