SEO Consultant Ireland - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization

January 17, 2012
by SEO Consultant (admin)
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How to write a blog?

1. Write about industry News – whats happening this week, this month

2. Read and develop content on industry Trends – where is the industry going, what are the emerging hot segments

3. Find out about your customers Pain Points – Write posts that provide solutions for your customers problems

4. Write about customers successes – Write up a case study about a clients successful project, they will often let you publish their name

5. Publish content on what not to do! – highlighting where something hasn’t worked (the names shall remain anonymous of course)

6. Create a video blog post by interviewing a successful client – this can a powerful providing authentic evidence of authority and credibility for both you and the client

7. Write articles for the different types of customers that are relevant for each of your vertical markets

8. Brainstorm blog post topics with colleagues and management and create a list for future reference and planning

9. Subscribe to the top industry blogs in your market, both company blogs and personal blogs for ideas

10. Look through your latest news releases for ideas

11. Sign up other staff to write on topics in your industry or market that they are passionate about

12. Develop a series of how to blog posts

13. Turn the “how to” blog posts into short videos

14. When you have a great idea, go straight to your “add new” button and write the headline and save it as a draft or write it down before you forget it.

15. Include a great iconic image at the start of the blog that catches the eye

16. Case Studies are always popular to write about and not just your own

17. Place Powerpoint presentations on your blog by posting and then embedding links from Slideshare

18. Run polls and surveys on your blog

19. Create great headlines that catch people attention and makes them want to read the rest of the article

20. Add credbility banners such as how many subscribers, number of hits, blog grade and any awards

21. Provide “share this” buttons to Facebook and Twitter as a minimum

22. Implement “subscribe” buttons via RSS and Email

23. Write in bite size chunks and use bullet points so readers can quickly and easy consumption

24. Break up large blocks of text with iconic and interesting images

25. Take screen shots to place in your post using Software like Snagit to highlight points .. a picture is worth a 1000 words

26. Be yourself even if it is a company blog.. be authentic.

27. Optimize your blog for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

28. Promote and distribute your posts on to other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

29. Make the blog easy to find on your company’s web page with a large bannner or button

30. Finally, have fun, mix up the types of posts and add some humour occasionally Gini Dietrich from Spinsucks.com contributed to the list with the following eleven additional tips

31. Ask your readers what they want you to write about

32. Let your readers pimp their own blogs in your comments section (we’re going to do this on Thursday of this week)

33. Ask questions

34. Create contests (which goes along with your poll/survey idea)

35. Install the SEO All In One pack on your WordPress blog

36. Use StumbleUpon and AllTop to increase your readership

37. Create content for Associated Content by republishing your blog posts there (it helps with readership and news outlets will republish your content on their sites)

38.Comment on other blogs and news articles to show your thinking/expertise, but also link people back to your blog

39. Make sure, when you use Twitter to promote your blog post, that you’re tweeting about it more than once a day

40. Subscribe to SmartBrief newsletters, RSS feeds, and Google alerts in order to find ideas for new content (that’s how I found this blog!)

41. Post and link your content on the Delicious social bookmarking site. (This will again help spread your content by placing it on a highly trafficked site)

42. Try your hat at a guest blogger or two, this could add credibility to your site , especially if the person is influential in his or her space. Courtney Wiley of iNgage Networks also made this suggestion

43.In the meta tags for your photos, make sure the labels/words are what you want them to be – search engines can’t “read” photos, only the labels/meta tags. Dave Heinrich from WebTechUniverse.com also contributed with this tip which is vital and I do this with every image in my posts

44. When people write a comment actually take the time to email them directly and thank them for the comment and if they ask a question, then answer it. You will find that this will create a WOW factor and spread the word about the blog. If you took 10-15 minutes a day to respond to 5 comments via email you would make great impact on over 1,500 people during a year who would each spread the word to potentially 1000′s more. This could be the making of a tribe!

45. Comment appropriately on the top blogs ranked by Google on the major key word or phrase you are trying to optimize for SEO. This will create a a link back to your site and linking is key to increasing your own rankings with search engines

46. Write a blog post listing some important bloggers in your industry (such as the top 5) and point out how they make their blogs successful and you might find they return the love!

47. Interlink to other posts in your blog when writing a post especially those that are relevant and have been successful (this again is great for SEO)

48. Outsource content development for sections of your blog that are appropriate such as ‘resource’ sections.

49. Update an original post that provides more value to your readers (this post is an example)

50. Take readers comments and include and promote them in your blog (like we have just done)

51. Take a selection of your best blog posts and make an ebook out of it. Then distribute the ebook on the Amazon Kindle Store and Apple iBookStore. This will find you new readers for your blog. And you can monetize it in a whole new way by charging a dollar or two for your ebook. (Thanks to Vikram Narayam )

52. Collaborate with other Twitter users within your niche to promote each others content

53. Make sure that everyone within your company has their own Twitter account and promotes the blog and company social media accounts on that account

54. When speaking or presenting, record it on video and upload it to company YouTube channel. It will be a constant resource for clients as well as adding to your websites SEO

55. Make excerpts of key points on the video and turn them into short blog posts

56. On your YouTube make sure you have optimized the video for search engines through tags, key phrase in the description as well as the link to your blog in the description section

57. The SlideShare account where you have uploaded your PowerPoint presentation should also be optimized for search with your blog or website URL in your public profile

58. The Slideshare account should also have your top keywords and phrases in the ”Public Profile” about section so that search is optimized.

59. Keep most blogs short with no more than 400-500 words as most people don’t have much time and will be only spending a minute or two on your blog (average time on this site according to Google Analytics is 1 minute and 39 seconds)

60. If embedding a video in the post again brevity rules with the rule of thumb now at a 1-2 minute video

61. Take each post and post it on the New Digg (20 million visitors a month), it is quick and easy to do and will take you only a minute or two (it involves copying the URL and pasting it to Digg, add the headline and choose the section then hit

62. Take the results of your polls or survey and turn them into a blog post. A lot of people want know the results as over time the blog post is buried in the archives

63. Use a twitter app such as SocialOomph.com (Professional edition) to schedule tweets your posts on a regular basis

64. Collaborate and communicate with other successful bloggers in your niche especially those that enhance and add to your skill set (they will encourage and support you)

65. Implement an email acquisition strategy that includes a pop over form that hovers over the screen for first time visitors (offer free eBook or video tutorial as an incentive and a gift for people giving you their name and email address) . One platform that provides this is Aweber.

66. Another email subscriber tactic includes a suggestion to refer a friend to join the email list

67. Place a video on your Facebook fan page inviting visitors to subscribe

68. Link to your blog on your Facebook fan page

69. On your email subscriber form don’t ask people for their life history keep it short and only ask for name and email address

January 10, 2012
by SEO Consultant (admin)
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Link building is just like getting in shape

The backlinks that point to your website are still the most important factor that determine the position of your website on Google. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get good backlinks. Link building can be compared to getting in shape after the holidays:

1. It takes hard work and there are no shortcuts

It does not matter if you want to lose weight after the holidays or if you want to get high quality links: you have to invest time and effort.

You cannot lose 30 pounds in a month and you also cannot get your website on Google’s first result page for a very competitive keyword in that time.

If you want to get lasting results, you have to work continually on your links and your web page content.

2. You have to be consistent

SEO isn’t a one-shot solution. It doesn’t help your rankings much if you get many links at once and then stop building links. Search engines also consider how many websites link to your site over time.

It’s the same if you want to get in shape: doing a 12 hour workout on a single day and then doing nothing won’t help you to lose weight. It will be bad for your health.

It’s the same with link building: if you get many links at once and then no links at all, search engines might think that you try to cheat them with a linking system.

If you want to get in shape, you have to be consistent. You might not see immediate results but there is a constant change and some day, you’ll find that you’re much thinner.

Link building works exactly like that. Do not try to game search engines by joining link systems or buying links. Get one link at a time, optimize your pages and the rankings of your website will improve steadily.

3. There are a lot of scammers

The SEO industry is full of scammers that promise easy and quick solutions. You should be very careful. If something sounds too good to be true then it’s probably not true. There are no easy and quick solutions and there are no secret tricks that nobody else knows about.

The same applies to weight loss and fitness. There are lots of diet pills and miracle machines that promise easy and quick results. These methods don’t work.

4. It’s possible to trick the system but you won’t get lasting results

There are a lot of diets and diet products that help you to quickly lose weight. Unfortunately, you only lose water weight with these diets and you’ll get your old weight back soon.

Link building is similar. Every now and then, some webmasters find a loophole in Google’s algorithm. These loopholes allow people to get on Google’s first result page without doing the hard work.

This usually works for some weeks but then Google finds out and websites that exploited the loophole are penalized and removed from the index. It’s very risky to use these methods to get high rankings because Google doesn’t like spammers.

5. The result is worth it

People who lose weight usually feel more healthy and happier. Being number one on Google’s result page for the right keyword can mean many more sales for your business.

You have the choice: Don’t fall for rip-off products that promise easy and quick results without much work. These products don’t deliver long term results and they often put your website at risk.

January 4, 2012
by SEO Consultant (admin)
1 Comment

SEO is 12.9% harder than last year

The IE Domain Registry (IEDR), the managed registry for Ireland’s official internet address .ie released the figures today showing the total number of .ie domains grew by 12.9% net in 2011 to 173,145.

So if you do work in ranking the web sites in the Google results, that means that there is 12.9% more competition today than a year ago. That is of course presuming that the same percentage of the domains have been displaying a web sites a year ago and today. And there is nothing suggesting otherwise.

.ie domain space is growing, regardless of the economy shrinking in the last year. That means your SEO budget will have to be bigger for the next year to achieve the same results you have done with it the last year.

November 17, 2011
by SEO Consultant (admin)
2 Comments

Social Media for Business

During November I am giving presentations in the few Dublin Libraries about the usage of Social Media in Business. The first one I gave was in the Tallaght Library earlier this week. It was an evening session. Ireland football team was playing the qualifying match for the next European championship the same evening so obviously the majority of the audience was female!

Since it was a relatively small group, I asked each person in the audience to tell us 2 sentences about:

Who they are and why are they here
What do they hope to learn and ‘take home’.

Interestingly enough every single person in the audience was either running their own business already, or planning to do so in a very near future. 100% Entrepreneurs in the audience. That completely changed the schedule. As opposed in me talking to them about LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook as social media web sites, and blogs and forums – it was them who lead the discussion based on their exact needs. My fancy slides,,, left unseen!

I realised then that it should be expected from a Social Media presentation – to turn 100% social, and as opposed to a presenter talking to the audience, it was them who took it on. I become just another person in their conversation. One that you can bounce ideas off and see if it would stick in real life.

I was hoping to promote a long list of fantastic books available in the Library on various relevant topics. In case you didn’t know the Dublin Library has books on all latest social media, so you will find a book just about twitter, or a list of those that cover all modern social media sites. 30 Minute Social Media Marketing – is just one example. There are also books on running the Internet Business, Online Sales and all what one needs to succeed in business online today. I took first 10 that I liked the titles of, some time ago, and read most of them by now. I can tell you one thing – if you are wondering how to start using the Social Media for your business, before doing anything else – get into the Library. Get a book that covers exactly what you need to learn about. Social media web sites can have a slow learning curve. With a book or two about it read before – you will march on in the Social Media, and get far more benefit of it far quicker. It is there for you, and it is free…

June 30, 2011
by SEO Consultant (admin)
1 Comment

On site SEO vs off site SEO

SEO people divide the work that needs to be done on the web site into the Off Site SEO and On Site SEO. The on Site SEO is usually linked to the improvements of your web site itself. Leaning the code of the site so that Google can index it easy, and publishing content that is relevant to your products or services your site is representing. What SEO professionals call Off Site SEO is actually mostly link building; placing links on other sites towards your site. Google ranks higher the sites with more of those inbound links. That is what SEO gurus call On Site SEO and Off Site SEO.

In recruitment those two phrases mean something completely different. When recruiting a SEO person, an activity I am getting more and more involved in employers are looking for either an employee or a contractor who will work on their web site SEO. The other main difference besides of the employment type is the place where will this person be located. If it is only a single person that is hired to do SEO, in most cases companies look for a person who will work on their premises. Companies with large SEO tasks and higher ambitions hire agencies who usually work in their own offices. So contractors usually work on site where agencies work off site and just do presentations in the clients premises. And that is from a recruitment perspective an On Site SEO and Off Site SEO, since it relates to the place of employment.
Do I need to tell you that when a recruiter is advertising for a Link Ninja or what is essentially an Off Site SEO position, they advertise it as Work From Home SEO position available, simply thinking that Off Site SEO refers to their perspective of the work type performed off the premises of the employer. You cannot even imagine the way the communication goes when a recruiter is headhunting a Link Ninja not realising that he is looking for a person who will work on the SEO of a web site by building links to it, and he thinks he is recruiting for a person who will work from home – doing the SEO for a web site of a client.
Funnily enough I myself actually prefer working from home. It is not easy since it requires a lot of discipline. What I found the most important factor when working from home is to have a space and time allocated to work. Time management was easy for me. I just worked the same hours I would work in the office. The space was, since I took one room that had its own purpose before in my house. Well that did not work that well. A year later I decided I have to do something about it and got the purposely built house extension to be as office only. This changed my life. No commuting time, and a perfect office space that you can walk into in your slippers!

I still do some SEO on site – mostly to meet with clients in the early and final stages on the project, but the rest of my SEO work is – yep from home!

June 30, 2011
by SEO Consultant (admin)
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SEO Training

SEO training is one of the part of my job that I enjoy the most lately. Why? I am a naturally shy person really. I think I actually started doing SEO because I had problems cold calling. My name and my accent over the phone really do not work well. So I started doing SEO, made myself easy to find – so people called me instead. Then when I was asked to do SEO training, it was a challenge for me since it is unnatural for me. Shy person talking to a large groups of people? You see where the problem is?

I like the SEO training because I get out of my office, and I meet people. I get asked all the funny questions like: Should I use ‘I’ and ‘Me’ on my blog? Should I ask a lot of questions? And of course I do not have answers to none of those. I usually try to fund some funny way out of the situation. I usually tell them that I can bring the horse to the water… but they will need to sell their products online.

SEO Training is fun! If you are looking for a SEO Trainer – call today!

May 17, 2011
by SEO Consultant (admin)
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Computers for Sale

In today’s papers I saw an advertisement saying “Computers for Sale”. The title still resonates in my head, and here is why:

When Google started acknowledging lately they are taking the page speed load into the account to determine how high to rank it in the search engine results listings we all started looking into the performance of our sites. Google Webmaster Console shows a lovely graphs showing the average page speed load of your site. In there they also show the differentiation of the FAST – page that loads in less than 1.5 seconds and SLOW – the pages that load slower than this magic number.

In all fairness, not a large percentage of the whole we loads faster than 1.5 seconds. So what Google did there really did upset quite a lot of people. Most of the web sites are hosted today on some shared hosting with thousands of others on the same server. Almost none of those will get to the FAST load bracket. Especially is those are database driven web sites, as most of the sites are today really.

There are two contributors to the web site speed:
Coding of your web site
Hardware your site is running on

Also if you are on some shared host – the fact what other sites are on the server make a difference, since each site takes a bit of the resources your site has available.

When I saw my blog www.seoconsultant.ie in the Google Webmaster Console’s Site Performance chart:

Performance overview

On average, pages in your site take 2.3 seconds to load (updated on May 10, 2011). This is faster than 62% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site’s average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

I got scared really. 2.3 seconds to load on average, and Google shows 1.5 seconds as a fast. What it tells me in between the lines, as Google always tells us things in between the lines is – your page is slow. Hence we do not rank it high in hte results pages. Get the load speed under 1.5 seconds, and we will rank you higher.

Isn’t that a fair reading of their message? I’ll let you be the judge of that!

My site is a on a WordPress blog platform. I do not influence the speed of it much. What I control that contributes to the page load speed is the WordPress Theme, and WordPress pluggins I use, and the content I put on the site. I do not have any large images, or many of small ones that I could remove to speed the load time up. So the only thing I could change is to put it on the faster server, or the server that has less load.

And here is that newspaper advertising Computers for Sale, that still resonates in my mind. To get my web site to load faster, I will need to put it on the faster server. Or in other words, to get higher in Google search results, I will need to go to Computers for Sale or something similar and get a new high spec serer to run my site on.

Then again considering that my site is faster than 62% of the sites, do I really have to? Or is it important at all that there are sites slower than mine at all? Or is it only relevant only that 38% are faster than mine, and since according to Google themselves, appearing higher in the Google search results pages?

I am not too sure to be honest. Jet that flashy advertisement Computers for Sale is still echoing in the back of my head.

March 24, 2011
by SEO Consultant (admin)
4 Comments

SEO Job: PaddyPower is looking for a SEO Manager

SEO Manager

Are you an SEO guru? Do your friends make fun of you for working on the Internet? Do phrases like “Link Building” & “Optimisation” turn you on? Paddy Power has the answer for you. Well, the answer to some of your problems. Clearly you have issues.

We’re looking to hire a SEO expert to join the growing Paddy Power Marketing Operations Team. Based in Dublin the Marketing Operations Team is responsible for PPC Advertising, SEO, Display and Affiliate Networks.

Role & Responsibilities:

We are looking to recruit an ambitious, driven and talented SEO manager. Your main duties will include:

Planning, developing and implementing Link Building strategies for a number of our websites. (Obviously this doesn’t include buying links. That’s very bold.)
Integrating the Link Building process with the other SEO activities undertaken by Paddy Power.
Developing innovative ethical link building initiatives. (See, we have ethical tactics)
Producing regular audits of the performance of our websites making recommendations using your SEO skills / knowledge.
Managing a team of Content Writers to help increase the relevancy and quantity of content on our websites.
Working closely with developers on various projects to make sure their delivery is “SEO friendly”. (They’re not going to do it until you tell them to do it three times)
Producing detailed SEO reports on a monthly basis detailing the impacts made by your work. (Make us all look good)
Producing ideas for new SEO initiatives with an estimation of the likely impact to enable prioritisation of the work.
You will be expected to stay up to date in new developments in SEO and actively research, test and propose new approaches to improving search engine rankings. (Browse the web, check in on Facebook, send some mails and maybe a bit of research)

Essential Experience:

Experience in a dedicated Search Engine Marketing role.
Marketing qualification or related field desired.
Excellent knowledge of the search engine industry, search engine algorithms and ranking strategies. (Kind of goes without saying but just in case it wasn’t clear)
Understanding of web analytics.
The ability to create reports; understands ROI; and select relevant data for analysing future actions.
Highly numerate with good attention to detail. (Did you stay within the lines as a kid?)
Excellent communication skills and team player.

To apply visit: http://www.workwithpaddy.com/

March 16, 2011
by SEO Consultant (admin)
3 Comments

3 things you need to do to be 1st in Google

The following three part article describes the three components you need to look at to get your site on top of the Google search results. There are three major components:

SEO Friendly CMS is about the first most important element that is the foundation of everything else you do afterwards. If you get hat one bad, you are far, far less likely to succeed in your online marketing efforts later on. Spend some time on deciding your future CMS. It is your first but crucial decision.

Content is King is about your text copy. Web searching is text searching. Make sure you have text for the phrases you want to be found for. And make sure it is interesting since it will not do much for you on the long run.

Links are currency of the web is about this last crucial ingredient of the success online. Usually the most tricky part as well, the links back to your site will differentiate the level of success.

Probably the most important point you should take away is that you do have to have to invest money and/or time into all the tree above for your site to reach those so sought for top places in Google rankings. Remember there is only one site that can be first. Is it going to be yours?

March 16, 2011
by SEO Consultant (admin)
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SEO friendly CMS

Most of the software publishers who did not think of search engine optimisation (SEO) while developing their content management systems (CMS) do not do really well today. On the other hand the open source CMS’es actually drove the SEO enhancements development. Open source code contributors, the users of those CMS’es understood that with no SEO they will not have traffic from Google, and that is something one finds hard to live with when marketing any web site!

WordPress is probably the best example with its core code so easy to grasp, and by being a platform where extensions can be created easiest. To change the functionality you just make a piece of code called a plugin that you just attach to WordPress core functionality by placing your plugin files in the Plugins directory in WordPress. The look and feel you change with the same ease by just applying the new WordPress Theme. No wonder it is today the most popular blogging software used. It also got converted by the plugins to the corporate web sites, but also very highly interactive sites, web shops, travel sites, and pretty much anything one can imagine.

So what differentiates a good CMS from a bed one from the SEO perspective?
How your content, your text copy is served to the search engines is what makes all the difference. Any standalone chunk of text that is published on your page ends up on what we call a page (static or dynamic), blog post, or anything else is a unit of content. On a job site it is a job description, on eBay it is the info about the product being auctioned. Each of those units have its page, it’s distinct web address. Where good CMSes go further then just having that unit of content displayed on its own page is that they can make additional pages that use parts of those original units of different pages. This results in more pages then units of texts. This results in more possible search results with your site ranked for more keywords. The end result is that the SEO that has good SEO drives more traffic from Google. If you put the same content in the two different CMSes and one has 100 times more pages, and it manages to saturate Google search results pages with all its various pages, you get a far more traffic from a good CMS with exactly the same content (investment!) supplied.

The amount of pages that are either created by some auto tagging feature or by manual categorisation is just defining just one aspect of the SEO friendly CMS. The other features are page loading speed, navigation and internal links in general, the way your HTML response adheres to the W3C standards, your XML sitemap configuration, the RSS feed, ease of social bookmarking and social networking sites integration and so on. The list is actually getting longer each year. It is quite likely that the best CMS today will be quite mediocre in 2 years. The same is true if you look two years in the past and compare what was best then to what we use today. A big, big difference from the SEO perspective.