I recently attended the Enterprise Ireland Web 2.0 event hosted in the Helix, DCU. Thankfully the 200 yards I had to travel from the office meant I didn’t get caught in much traffic.

Very interesting speakers in particular; Jeff Clavier, the very entertaining Marc Canter and Judy Gibbons.

The event was strongly represented by venture capital people with some great advice for anyone trying to raise money for the next big web 2.0 show stopper. I’ve sumized some of my notes below:

• Have a sustained Differentiation i.e. the difference between your product and the next guy isn’t a feature they can have as part of there’s in a week or month.
• Build end user value. Ask yourself what is the value of your software to the end user or ROI for enterprise 2.0 applications.
• You need to build an image of trust.
• Show a steady 30- 35% monthly growth in sign ups, a huge frenzy of sign ups all at once is not always considered a good thing.
• A business plan is important but a VC will only be interested in your presentation and executive summary so make it stand out.
• Be sure when presenting your product to introduce yourself. Don’t just go off explaining how great your product is. They will want to know as much about you as they will about the product.
• They will also want to see what you’re personal ambitions are not just having a business road-map but a personal one as well. If you plan to sell early and get a quick few bucks and retire they more than likely won’t be interested.
• The management team is very important, a venture capital company are more likely to go with a smart person with a dumb idea than the other way around.
• Think Big
• It is often good to have a product where it is difficult for the customer to change horses because they feel tied to your product or service.
• Have a solid business model.

As a general rule these VC companies and people were looking for more B2C style web 2.0 ventures like facebook, delicious, flickr etc instead of the B2B apps i’d be interested in like basecamp, blinksale and salesforce but still most of it was very relevant and informative.

UPDATE:

Jeff has uploaded his slides from the event, highly recomended.

Social communities are popping up all over the web here is one that really takes it to a new level. The idea seems to be that they have leased out an island in Fiji for 3 years. They are creating a community where members can stay on the island for a few weeks some time in the 3 year period. Only 100 of the eventually 5000 will be on the island at one time. If you go early on in the 3 years you will be part of the team that builds the tribe infrastructure and may be living a bit rough. The idea being hopefully near the end you’d have beds and loads of other amenities. Personally i think I’d go for the beginning of the trip myself, the idea of building something like this definitely appeals to me.

They have over 4 thousand at the time of writing so it’ll be booked out pretty quickly. It looks like they are have a very up to date website encouraging the community to communicate all the time presumable to get a great enthusiasm about the whole project along with its own television station.

Timing doesn’t work out for me but in a few years something like this would be my idea of a great experience. Should be interesting to see if some copy cat adventures pop up.

Would this appeal to you over a standard sun holiday?

A great thread has been started on sitepoint giving you a guide optimizing your website for search engines.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=361403

Before you write one line of code:

• Do keyword research to determine what keywords you want to target

While constructing your website you should do the following:

• Use markup to indicate the content of your site

• Optimize your ‘title’ tags on each page to contain 1 - 3 keywords
• Create unique Meta Tags for each page
• Use header tags appropriately (H1 - H2 - H3)
• Use ’strong’ and ‘em’ tags if appropriate

Optimize your URLs

• Use Search Engine Friendly URLs (for dynamic sites)
• Use keywords in your domain (http://www.keyword1.com/)
• Use keywords in your URL
  (http://www.example.com/keyword2/keyword3.html)

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• Use dashes instead of underscores to separate words in your URLs (keyword2-keyword3.html)

Optimize your content

• Use keywords liberally yet appropriately throughout each page
• Have unique content
• Have quality content

Use search engine friendly design

• Create a human sitemap
• Do not use inaccessible site navigation (JavaScript menus)
• Minimized outbound links
• Kept your pages under 100K in size

Design the navigational structure of the site to channel PR to main pages (especially the homepage)

Create a page that encourages webmasters to link to your site

• Provide them the relevant HTML to create their link to you
• Provide them with any images you may want them to use (although text links are better)

Make sure your website is complete before launching it

Immediately after launching your site you should do the following:

Submit your site to all major search engines

• Google (Use a Google SiteMap)
• Yahoo (Use the page list option)
• MSN (Finds your site via incomming links)
• Ask (Finds your site via incomming links)

Submit your site to all free directories

• DMOZ (also powers Google Directory)
• JoeAnt

Submit your site to relevant directories

• Find more at ISEDB

Begin a link building campaign (attempting to get keywords in the link anchor text)

• Put a link to your website in your forum signatures
• Reply to relevant blog posts (Don’t spam please)
• Submit articles to relevant websites

If you will pay to promote your website:

Submit your site to pay directories

• Yahoo
• GoGuides

Purchase text links from high PR (Pagerank) sites related to your site

Finally, as part of an ongoing strategy:

Continually update your website will quality, unique content

Continually seek free links preferably from sites in your genre

Do NOT do the following:

Make an all Flash website (without an HTML alternative)

Use JavaScript for navigation

Spam other websites for incomming links

Launch your site before it is done

Use duplicate content

• Point several domains to one site without using a 301 redirect

Use markup inappropiately

• Style ‘h’eader tags to look like regular text
• Hide content using ‘display: hidden’ (for the sake of hiding text)

Use other “black hat” techniques (unless you accept the risk - Banning)

• Doorway/Landing pages
• Cloaking
• Hidden text
• Keyword stuffing

Additional Tips:

Usable and accessible sites tend to be search engine friendly by their very nature

Be patient! High rankings don’t happen overnight

Don’t obsess with any one search engine. They are all worth your attention.

Also mentioned is this very useful tool: http://www.nichebot.com/